ORAL HISTORY of BRUCE JOHN GRAHAM Interviewed by Betty J. Blum Compiled Under the Auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral Histor

ORAL HISTORY OF BRUCE JOHN GRAHAM

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1998 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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Appendix I: Postscript 313

Appendix II: Curriculum Vitae 315

Selected References 317

Index of Names and Buildings 323

iii

PREFACE

"We judge not a building but, rather, let an architectural vocabulary illuminate an age. We are, at this particular time, in an age of discovery of a new civilization. We have the technical tools as well as the crude consciousness of a new age. I feel very much that this time is a beginning; and this being the case, our buildings must be clear, free of fashion, and simple statements of the truth."

In his own words Bruce Graham describes the cultural framework and personal driving force by which his design production has been guided, "clear, free of fashion, and simple statements of the truth." Graham, of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, has been one of the leading exponents of high-rise structures embodying this approach during the postwar period.

In Chicago, Graham-designed buildings are numerous and prominent. Several have become icons of the city, familiar to Chicagoans as well as others worldwide. Can you picture North Michigan Avenue without the distinctive Hancock Center and One Magnificent Mile, or the city skyline without the commanding Sears Tower? Graham's contribution has profoundly shaped and irrevocably changed the character of the city. Set squarely in the Chicago tradition of structural innovation, Bruce sees his work as a straight-line development that pushes the existing boundaries and clarifies and refines the structural components of architecture. His extended vision has often included an improved urban plan.

Graham joined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in 1951 and critics immediately hailed his fresh and innovative design for the Inland Steel building as the first skyscraper of the "Second Chicago School." Recognition for excellence continued with the well-known Hancock Center, and the Sears Tower, at the time the tallest building in the world. Public acclaim has followed Graham throughout his career not only in Chicago but also in other American and international locations. Graham's oral history documents a forty- year career in architecture and is an important addition to The Art Institute of Chicago's collection of oral histories.

Bruce and I met in his office in Hobe Sound, Florida, on four consecutive days from May 25 through 28, 1997, to record his recollections of the experiences, events, and personalities that helped shape his career. Our sessions were recorded on eleven 90- minute cassettes that have been transcribed, minimally edited and reviewed to maintain the flow, tone and spirit of the narrative. A brief postscript written by Graham is appended, in which he mentions several buildings that were not covered in the main body of the oral history. Graham's work and personal accomplishments have been widely published. Bruce Graham of SOM (1989) highlights many of his best-known projects and includes his comments about each one. References I found helpful in preparation of this document are attached. This 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's website, www.artic.edu/aic/

Although Graham has officially retired from SOM and now lives in Florida, he continues to work on projects that interest him. I am grateful to him, as scholars will be in years to come, for his cooperation in sharing his first-hand memories with me. My appreciation goes to Bruce's wife, Jane, for her warm hospitality and welcome while I was in Florida. Thanks to the staff at SOM in the records and marketing departments for verifying information from their files and a special thank you to the SOM partnership for funding Graham's oral history. Without Annemarie van Roessel's skillful conversion of tape to type and her conscientious care in shaping this document, it would not have been brought to completion as it is, and for that we are grateful.

Betty J. Blum June 1998

OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Family and Early Background 1 Military Service 7, 11 Impressions of Chicago, 1943 8 Back To School To Study Architecture 13 At the University of Pennsylvania 14 Back to Chicago and Work at Holabird, Root and Burgee 27 From Holabird, Root and Burgee to SOM 32 First Jobs at SOM 41 SOM in the South Pacific 44 Prefabrication 48 Kimberly-Clark, Neenah, Wisconsin 54 The Technical Man 56 About Sears Tower 59 Warren Petroleum Building, Tulsa, Oklahoma 81 Mies and Students at IIT 85 Brunswick Building, Chicago 89 Miró and Picasso Sculptures 94 Architecture and Sculpture 97 Project for Herb Greenwald 98 Inland Steel Building, Chicago 100 Upjohn, Kalamazoo, Michigan 109 Equitable Building, Chicago 116-20, 122-25 At and About SOM 121, 126 Fazlur Khan 140 One Shell Plaza, Houston, Texas 148 John Hancock Center, Chicago 152 Commissions in England 160 AIA: Awards and Memberships 170 Insurance 182 Dearborn Park, Chicago 187 Structural Aspects in Various Projects 190

Art and Architecture 194 Projects Worldwide: New York, Hong Kong, Mexico, Spain, Egypt 207 Plans for Chicago 217 Memberships 226 This and That 228 Banco de Occidente, Guatemala City, and Other Projects 231 About Architectural Education 240 The Press and Photographers 245 SOM From the Inside 246 Holy Angels Church, Chicago 254 SOM Foundation 258 Commissions in England 264 Urban Planning 292 Women at SOM 295 Project for the Olympics in Barcelona, 1992 300 Reflections 307

vii

Bruce John Graham

Blum: Today is May 25, 1997, and I'm with Bruce Graham in his office in Hobe Sound, Florida. Bruce is now retired from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, where he had worked for almost forty years in the Chicago office. Although he no longer lives or works there, he's left an indelible imprint on the city. Bruce's presence is recalled in the many Graham-designed buildings, some of which have become icons of the city. They dominate and they have shaped our city's skyline. Bruce's reputation is not limited to Chicago, his work is well known worldwide. He has been called the most powerful architect in the world and is said to have defined and dominated a whole architectural era, no little accomplishment. Bruce, your career, your work, your ideas and opinions have been the subject for many writers who have written an endless amount of material about you and your career. You have said, "I contend that building is the intellectual experience of architecture. Talking about it is not." In spite of that statement, I hope you will share your story with us. May we begin at the beginning in 1925 in Columbia? Were you born in Bogota?

Graham: No, I was born in La Cumbre. It's a small town outside of Cali.

Blum: You have said that your family is Peruvian. How did you come to be born in Columbia?

Graham: Well, my mother was Peruvian. She came from Arequipa, Peru, where my father met her father and eventually they got married. My father was a banker and traveled a lot. I was born in Columbia, but we didn't stay there much longer than about three months.

Blum: Then it would be hard for you to remember what Columbia was like during those first three months. When did your family move back to Peru?

Graham: My family then moved back to Peru, where another brother was born. We were seven brothers and two sisters. After that we moved to Puerto Rico, where my father actually came from. His father was a colonel in the United States Army. Then he started in the bank and worked very hard during the depression and eventually was made general manager of the federal land bank in Puerto Rico—it was a program to help the farmers.

Blum: When did you move to Puerto Rico?

Graham: I was about five.

Blum: So your childhood really was spent in Puerto Rico?

Graham: That's correct.

Blum: No wonder you can roll your "R's" and speak Spanish so easily. Is that your first language?

Graham: Actually, yes. I didn't speak any English until I was about seven or eight. I used to make believe I was speaking English by imitating my father's accent, but I was speaking Spanish.

Blum: Your father spoke English?

Graham: And very bad Spanish.

Blum: What was his first language?

Graham: My father wasn't born in Puerto Rico. He was born in Canada. So he spoke fluent English. My mother's English was weak, but she could get along very well.

Blum: Did your mother work?

Graham: With nine kids?

Blum: She was a stay-at-home mom. During your childhood, did you show any tendencies toward building, drawing, even playing with blocks?

Graham: My father was a master at spotting talent. Some of us took music lessons.

Blum: Your brothers and sisters?

Graham: Yes. Some of them were interested in music, and he really promoted that for them. I was interested in drawing, so I had drawing lessons. I used to draw all the time.

Blum: As a very young child?

Graham: I can't remember when I started, it's been so long.

Blum: What were you drawing? People, landscapes, buildings?

Graham: Almost anything you could think about. I used to draw cartoons for my younger brothers and flip them for them. I used to draw people, trees. And I took drawing lessons. I was also interested in the city of San Juan.

Blum: What was it like?

Graham: It was lovely. At that time there was only one hotel, called the Condado Beach Hotel, on Condado Beach. That whole area is now all hotels. I haven't been back there for years. But I used to plot the slums of Puerto Rico.

Blum: What do you mean?

Graham: I made maps of them. I loved it. There was one slum that I'd walk through to go from our house to the beach. It was a shortcut. The people there were just wonderful. They were fantastic dancers. Sometimes I think I should have taken music lessons, too. I'd be pretty good at it. In another slum called El Fanguito, which means "the mud," I'd walk on planks to go from house to house. They were all built on this big mud sluice. Then I got interested and worked—before I came to the United States when was a high school student—for engineers in the summer in Puerto Rico.

Blum: When you say you plotted the slums, did you rearrange them?

Graham: I mapped them.

Blum: What was the housing like?

Graham: It was jerry-built. It was out of sheet metal and found wood. But the climate was so nice that you didn't need much. But that's true of most of Latin America. The slums of Caracas or Lima or Bogotá are all sort of built the same way.

Blum: When you were in school, did you pursue drawing?

Graham: I was much liked by the teachers because I used to make all their fancy drawings for Christmas or Easter and the blackboard.

Blum: And they encouraged you?

Graham: Yes. They liked their blackboards looking good.

Blum: Did your father give you any vocation goals related to drawing? Or was it just that you showed a liking and talent for it?

Graham: He supported it. For Christmas, I always got gifts of that kind. It was the depression and we didn't get that many gifts. My mother also could draw very well. She painted very well.

Blum: Is that where your talent came from?

Graham: I think so. My father couldn't draw.

Blum: But it seems that he had a talent, like Nat Owings, of spotting people who had talent, even though he may not have had much himself in that way.

Graham: That's right.

Blum: When you were in high school, you were still in Puerto Rico?

Graham: Yes.

Blum: Did they offer mechanical drawing, as schools did in the United States?

Graham: Some. Not that much. But I went very fast through high school. I finished in three years and then came up to the United States to go to college.

Blum: You went to college at the University of Dayton, in Ohio? Why from Puerto Rico to Dayton?

Graham: Well, you have to remember that I really had only heard of two or three universities: Notre Dame, because it was Catholic, the University of Pennsylvania, because my brother George went there, the University of

Virginia, because my brother Charles went there, and Harvard. I originally didn't know any others. But I got a scholarship to Dayton, that's why I went there. I came there after my father died.

Blum: What did you study at the University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio?

Graham: I studied engineering. I didn't know the difference between engineering and architecture. I was very young, I was only fifteen when I graduated. But that's nothing, because my brother was thirteen.

Blum: A family of genius children.

Graham: We just worked hard.

Blum: You mentioned your family a couple of times. Did any of your brothers or sisters become architects or engineers?

Graham: Not even close.

Blum: Were they close to the careers that the talent your father spotted in them might have led them to?

Graham: It wasn't so much the careers that my father spotted. He sponsored the talent, like music. None of them went into music. but they were very musical. My brother George was musical, but he studied medicine. My father did support him going into medical school.

Blum: For you there seems to be a direct line from talent into a career.

Graham: It's easier to spot that one.

Blum: You were fifteen when you went to school at the University of Dayton. You stayed there for three years?

Graham: No. I only stayed there for about a year and a half. Then I joined the navy when I became seventeen. From the navy, I went to Case School of Applied Science.

Blum: Did you enlist in the navy?

Graham: Yes. And at Case School of Applied Science, the navy had a school there. I took engineering, civil engineering. But I wanted to get into the war, so I switched from Case to the Naval Air Force. So I never did finish college before I got into the war.

Blum: Were you getting college credit for what you studied at Case?

Graham: Yes. It was like a pre-officer training program. The navy didn't make you an officer in three months and send you off to war, like the army did.

Blum: How did they spot you as officer material?

Graham: I took a test.

Blum: Was that standard procedure?

Graham: I don't know enough about the navy. But that's what I did, I took a test. An “intelligence test” was what they called it.

Blum: After you trained and switched to the Naval Air Force, where did that take you?

Graham: I didn't make it to the Naval Air Force, because I really was not very good at flying. I had never driven a car before. I got into an accident with an airplane and then went back to Great Lakes Naval Training Station where I trained for radar. From there I was in Chicago for a while, where they had a radar training school, then to Mississippi, and then overseas.

Blum: Were you looking at architecture in Chicago when you were at stationed at Great Lakes?

Graham: I was at Navy Pier. Navy Pier was a naval training center during the war. So obviously I was there in the city and got to see Chicago.

Blum: What was Chicago like at that time?

Graham: That was early 1943, during the war. Chicago was a very welcoming city to the military. There was no way you couldn't go out to dinner at somebody's house almost any night that you were out. It was very close-knit, much more like a small town, even though it was big. There were neighborhoods around the Loop, which were very near to the Loop. Let me tell you, when I first came to the United States and landed in Florida at one of those water-landing airplanes, the United States had a certain kind of naïveté, like young children, but they were very sweet. Everywhere you went was like that. Coral Gables was beautiful, I thought I had landed in heaven. Now Coral Gables is something else. The naïveté spread everywhere, in Dayton, Ohio, in Cleveland, in Chicago. I remember my classmates criticizing me about Puerto Rico because of the lottery. They used to tell me that was the way to tax the poor. I happen to agree it's a way to tax the poor, but now all American states are that way.

Blum: Because the poor are the people who gamble the most?

Graham: Absolutely. You go anywhere in Florida and see people buying lottery tickets. They're all the elderly and the poor. It is a way of taxing the poor. You don't see David Rockefeller buying lottery tickets. You don't see people that are well-to-do buying lottery tickets. It's an awful gamble. But Chicago was even the most naïve, in a way, it was so wonderful a city. There was an Irish neighborhood, near the Loop, which was a fantastic little neighborhood. And there was a German neighborhood, and a Polish neighborhood, and the Czech neighborhood, but all that's disappeared.

Blum: Was that appealing to you?

Graham: Absolutely. It's appealing to anybody who travels the rest of the world to find cities that have not been destroyed like Chicago, like New York, and Philadelphia have been.

Blum: Chicago has the reputation of being the most ethnic city in the world. Do you agree with that?

Graham: But it's not the same any more. Once you built the expressway, the wealthy left downtown for the suburbs after the war. That was the biggest curse on urban planning in Chicago, but not only Chicago, in the entire United States. These expressways were funded in a terrible way by a gas tax that can only be used for building roads. So the more you drive, the more roads they build and the "highway road gang" loved it. Even though you don't need the roads, and we proved that a number of times, they built it anyway. Let's look at Florida now—Florida is one city from Miami all the way to Jacksonville. It's all paved roads. In Europe, the cities are still cohesive. The highway goes from a town to another town, but it doesn't stretch all over the place, it doesn't expand the town. They don't allow roads to go out into the forest.

Blum: But we have vast stretches of space to link together that Europe doesn't have.

Graham: Vast stretches of space that are now totally destroyed. Look at Florida.

Blum: Do you think that the difference in space might dictate the way it is treated?

Graham: It destroys the way people live. In the town before, you had the neighborhood. In the neighborhood was the school, the town hall, the church. It was where you went shopping. You didn't go to a mall to shop. The elderly didn't have to be separated and driven by taxis. They could walk to work. They can't anymore. They can't walk to shop, they can't walk to their church. That we've destroyed totally, one hundred percent destroyed.

Blum: In Chicago, or in the United States?

Graham: In the United States, with a few exceptions. There are still some small towns, for example, the Four Corners area out west have done a terrific job of strengthening their downtowns. The elderly live downtown, they go shopping downtown, they walk to the town square, they can see city hall, they can see their church, they can see their library. Oregon, Portland particularly, is working very hard. They've passed a law that taxes any property that doesn't have mass transit, that doesn't have water or sewers, or schools. They tax the devil out of the developers. So the people are developing boom-towns. There are less than three million people in Chicago now. At one time there were four million. And that four million lived in these neighborhoods that I'm talking about. They had their own shops, their own clothing stores, restaurants, churches. You talk about family values, but family values doesn't mean anything without the neighborhood. The neighborhoods have real support. And Chicago was a multi-city city. It isn't anymore. It had a very midwestern village climate. It was very powerful and it still is in certain cities, in smaller cities. But not in the big cities. Not in Cleveland, not in Chicago. Some of the smaller cities still preserve that.

Blum: Did any of the buildings particularly impress you in 1943?

Graham: Yes, of course they did. I never saw a building over ten stories high before I came to the United States.

Blum: Can you recall some of them, in Chicago, especially?

Graham: I was very fond of the Loop.

Blum: Why?

Graham: Carson Pirie Scott, I really liked that. The Loop was very strong. It was the center. Everybody went to the Loop. They took the elevated train and State Street was a real State Street. It isn't anymore. That's where you went to the theater and to the opera. Chicago had a very solid center that then fed the neighborhoods. People took the El to go to the neighborhoods. It was alive at night. I listened to jazz at the Bismarck Hotel, great bands were playing there—Jimmy Dorsey was playing there and quite a few others. And Orchestra Hall was there and the Art Institute was there, right downtown. That's the strength of the Art Institute, that it's right downtown. In Philadelphia, it's way up away from everything.

Blum: And this is the memory of Chicago that you have carried with you all these years?

Graham: I have a lot of memories of Chicago. Those were from that early time.

Blum: That was your first impression of Chicago. Getting back to Chicago during your years in the navy. You came to Chicago because you were stationed at Great Lakes?

Graham: No, we were stationed at Great Lakes, but then we moved to Navy Pier in Chicago.

Blum: Then what?

Graham: Then I went through the training program, and I went overseas.

Blum: Where?

Graham: To the Pacific. By this time I was interested in architecture, and I was hoping to see some permanent-looking buildings. But I didn't see any. I saw a lot of grass huts.

Blum: Where were you?

Graham: In the South Pacific. Mannis Island and the Philippines during the invasion of the Philippines.

Blum: I know that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had a job after the war to do some work on Okinawa.

Graham: Yes, a number of them. This was a program the United States instituted, again in this really good country.

Blum: Are you talking about the United States?

Graham: Yes. About rebuilding Japan and rebuilding Germany. They understood the program, where you would build libraries or towns over again. The architects got in the trenches with the local architects. SOM was involved in North Africa, building an airport, then there were libraries built in Germany. There were all kinds of make-up projects, just to get the architects and the society functioning again.

Blum: We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but did you participate in any of these programs? Especially in Japan? Because you had had a previous experience there.

Graham: I don't know that that was why Nat sent me to Japan, because I didn't speak any Japanese. I had not been in Japan during the war. I never made it to Japan. The war was over before any Americans got there.

Blum: What did you do in the Naval Air Force when you were there?

Graham: I was repairing ships, the radar and the electronics of the ships, or installing them, installing new ones on ships. Then we'd go out to sea and test them.

Then when we went to the Philippines that was to prepare for an invasion of Japan from the Philippines. Then the war was over.

Blum: And then you left the Naval Air Force?

Graham: I wasn't in the Air Force anymore. I was in the radar side. The navy didn't separate one from the other.

Blum: And when you left the military?

Graham: I was a petty officer and came back to the United States, to San Francisco, and from there I went to Case to finish up some courses that I hadn't finished before I left. And then I went to the University of Pennsylvania to study architecture.

Blum: How close were you to getting your bachelor's when you came back after the war? What did you have left to finish?

Graham: At that time I still had three years. I could have stayed at Case, but by that time I had developed a real feel for architecture. My brother George went to Penn and I knew that they had a very good architecture school in the history of architecture at that time

Blum: Was this your brother who's in medicine?

Graham: Yes.

Blum: So you applied to Penn.

Graham: And I was accepted. Then I finished in architecture in three years. Well, because I had already had a lot of it.

Blum: You received your degree in...?

Graham: Architecture.

Blum: And your undergraduate degree, was it in architecture or engineering?

Graham: In architecture. They didn't have master's degrees at that time. I never got a degree in engineering. I just finished some courses that I had actually let go. I had to finish them before I was done with the degree at Penn. At Case I had no architecture. It was all engineering. Case School of Applied Sciences was only an engineering school. I never got a degree at Case. I couldn't have in two years.

Blum: I'm glad you've cleared up my confusion. From everything I've read I thought your undergraduate degree was from Case and your graduate degree was from Penn.

Graham: I had two years of civil engineering, so when I went to Penn, I didn't have to go through five years of school because I already had two in civil engineering, so I didn't have to take as many of the courses. I had taken the English courses and all the other courses you need for a degree. Then I graduated from Penn in three years with my bachelor's in architecture.

Blum: What kind of an architecture school was Penn? This was in 1946, after the war. Was it still a Beaux-Arts school or did they have some modern leanings?

Graham: It was officially a Beaux-Arts school. They still had the Beaux-Arts. And not just Penn, many of the Eastern universities were still under the Beaux-Arts system. But they were teaching modern architecture also, not only classical architecture.

Blum: Was that true at Penn?

Graham: Yes, although you'd have to do classical drawings. That was more of your course to teach you both about art history and drawing. So we made classical drawings, you know, with ink washes of Doric columns and temples and domes.

Blum: So the process was Beaux-Arts.

Graham: In the first courses. But after that we went into studying serious architecture, modern architecture. Although it wasn't that good a school then in modern architecture.

Blum: From where did this influence of the modern come into Penn?

Graham: It really didn't. By the time I went there, there were a lot of veterans in the school. These guys were not kids anymore, and they had read, and they had looked, and they had seen. And we had a terrific history professor, Dr. David Robb, who had a tremendous influence on the class. His class was just jammed with other students who were not in architecture. We knew, for example, about the rise of modernism in Europe and the reasons for it, as opposed to modernism in America, which didn't grow out of the same reasons.

Blum: What was the difference?

Graham: It was the same as the dada movement in painting and poetry. It actually started with poets and painters in Switzerland. It was a movement against imperialism. Europeans had battled imperialism, and had been destroyed by imperialism, and they continued with Stalin, with Mussolini, with Hitler and Franco. And the artists revolted against it. In France it was mainly the countryside artists, it wasn't the Parisians. And architects, like Corbusier, Mies, and the Bauhaus. Again, they call it the international movement, not, as it has been interpreted by some Americans, as a language to be international, but as a movement to be international. That was the European origin, which

then influenced the United States, because before the war, the Second World War, a lot of those people were kicked out of Germany and came to the United States, architects—artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, came to America. Gropius went to Harvard, Mies to IIT. You just name them, one after the other, there was a big migration. The movement against imperialism began after the First World War, not after the Second World War, but after the First World War. Then, of course, Hitler came along...

Blum: So are you saying that the Bauhaus movement was a social movement against imperialism?

Graham: All art is. People write in languages, right? The artist writes in his language. The architect writes in his language. The poet in his language. That's why universities have a tough time admitting that art is a classical study. They don't recognize the artist on the campus. No campus does. They feel they have to have them, but they don't like them because they don't write. Now there was a movement in architecture to study the theory of architecture. And you've got a lot of people teaching architecture that are theorists, but not architects. They can't talk in the language of architecture.

Blum: In your opinion, does it enrich the profession to have these others around the practitioners in the field of architecture?

Graham: Those that build are the only architects. The theorists are not.

Blum: But in your opinion, does it give depth to architecture to be surrounded by critics and theorists and historians?

Graham: They need the job. You know, you can't teach music if you're not a musician. You can't teach painting if you're not a painter. You can't teach architecture if you're not an architect. And you can't teach medicine if you're not a doctor.

Blum: At Penn, did they use Giedion's text [Space, Time and Architecture]? It was fairly new then.

Graham: Yes. But more important was Dr. Robb's own text on the history of architecture.

Blum: He had written his own?

Graham: Oh yes. It was a wonderful book on the history of art and architecture.

Blum: You were at Penn in 1946, and it had already been published, until what year did he go with the text?

Graham: But he used to give papers on the modern movement. We also had the Giedion book, so we had both.

Blum: Had you read Corbusier's book, Towards a New Architecture, which was then almost twenty years old?

Graham: Yes. We knew all about Corbusier and about Gropius. Some of us used to sneak out and come to Chicago to visit Mies at IIT. And we'd go up to Harvard to hunt around there. We were fairly senior, we weren't like the kids that go to school now. We were five years older and had had a lot of experience with people.

Blum: I had heard, mostly from IIT people, that on campus after the war, there was a fervor, an intensity, about building modern because modern represented hope for a new world. It was a cause, a mission, a banner that people carried. And Mies was one of the figureheads. Did you share that fervor?

Graham: Yes. I think most people did. This was true in international architecture, not just at IIT. In fact, IIT, if anything, was the most naïve of all the schools. They

were so staggered by the presence of Mies, that the students deified him. This is not right, it is not a good thing to do.

Blum: But it certainly is understandable.

Graham: But Mies didn't like it, at all. I'll tell you a true story. When I first came to Chicago to stay, then, I went to visit Mies and I asked him where he thought I should work. And he told me, "Holabird and Root." And I said, why? "Because they're the only ones who remember how to build permanent buildings." Which was true.

Blum: Mies said that?

Graham: Yes. There hadn't been any permanent buildings built in the United States since 1932. They were all temporary during the depression, during the war. He was embarrassed because of his English, I think.

Blum: Did you speak German?

Graham: No. But I've seen occasions where he'd make all his speeches very short, which is good, to do that. I feel everybody should speak with his buildings, and his buildings spoke well enough. But I saw him speak once when it was in German, and he was a blabbermouth then.

Blum: It was his language.

Graham: Sure, He felt very safe. He was looking for perfection, and he was very embarrassed because of his English.

Blum: Did you know Paul Schweikher?

Graham: Yes, I've met him.

Blum: Well, Paul spoke German very well. And I think that was one of the reasons why he and Mies were so strongly connected, because, as you say, they had language in common.

Graham: He and Hilberseimer and Peterhans used to jabber a lot. I've been in Mies's apartment when they used to jabber a lot, the three of them.

Blum: How did you meet Mies?

Graham: I came from Philadelphia just to see him.

Blum: This was while you were still attending school?

Graham: Yes. I met him and then the next time I wanted to see him, I went to his office and I asked him about where I should begin to work.

Blum: So you just walked in and introduced yourself?

Graham: Yes. And he received me. He was a very nice man, a very simple man. You know the story of why he never moved into the top of 860 Lake Shore Drive?

Blum: Well, I've heard several stories, please tell yours.

Graham: I heard him say in his old apartment, he had an easy chair, with a table and his cigars and his martini, and all the furniture against the wall. Somebody asked him—I forget who asked him—why he didn't move into that building, and he said, "There's no place to put the furniture. I was born in a little village of Germany. I can dream and imagine this new world, but I can't live in it."

Blum: That's beautiful. I've never heard that story before.

Graham: It was beautiful and it's true. Most people wouldn't understand.

Blum: It tells you something about Mies. When you were studying in Pennsylvania, did you meet Gropius was well?

Graham: No, he was not as nice. We went to Harvard—it wasn't just me, there were three of us that went—and he wouldn't receive us, but we didn't care, we went up to see what they were doing.

Blum: You have been quoted to say that when you were in school you went around to look at things, to look at buildings. What did you seek out?

Graham: We were looking for the modern buildings, particularly the ones that were done by the architects that came from Europe. And of course, in Philadelphia at that time there was a very good firm, George Howe and William Lescaze. George Howe had done the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, which is a landmark of modern architecture. He was actually the better designer of the two. Although most people think it was Lescaze, it's the other way around. He gave lectures at Penn and I went out to his office. Then there was Louis Kahn, who had an office in Philadelphia.

Blum: With Oskar Stonorov?

Graham: With Stonorov. In fact I worked there for about three weeks, helping with some drawings, for nothing. In those days students did that. Mies used to pay a dollar an hour. He was generous.

Blum: But did you worked in Kahn's office?

Graham: Just to help with drawings when I was still in school. Mainly because Stonorov asked me, not Kahn. Kahn was busy working on a project in Israel. I don't know if you remember it.

Blum: I don't know it.

Graham: It's too bad. I don't know why the project isn't published, because it's quite beautiful. It was very simple. But anyway, the students were very disgusted with our teachers at Penn. Some of them were old-fashioned, who talked to us like we were children.

Blum: And you were returning G.I.s with a lot of world experience, and you resented that.

Graham: Some of the G.I.s were not so young. Some of them were thirty. I became an assistant teacher, because I had a lot of time and because I had all of the side courses before I got to Penn. There were one or two teachers who the students admired, and I won't tell you who, because I don't like to hurt people. But they didn't understand modern architecture. They taught it more as design, rather than as a statement. And not a search for a language, which is what I think most of the great architects did. They were searching for a language. Not so much an international language. I mean Corbusier overdid that statement. His language never really changed from being French-Swiss. His buildings are all French-Swiss. They don't work in the United States, they don't work in India, because they're not related to the culture, to the history. Man has a history and he's at a certain point in that development.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Graham: Some of the students at Penn went to the president of the university, including me there were about ten of us, and asked that they have a review of the School of Architecture, which they did. I don't remember the names exactly of who they brought in—it wasn't Charlie Eames, but it was that level of guy that they brought in—that's when they brought in Holmes Perkins. But by then I had graduated.

Blum: So this was as a result of students being dissatisfied.

Graham: Very dissatisfied.

Blum: Were you part of that group?

Graham: Yes. But we weren't the only ones. There were a lot of us. We were the ones that went up...

Blum: You mean it was broader than the architecture school?

Graham: No it was the architecture school. But I say it wasn't just a few, ten, guys. It was the whole school that was dissatisfied with the exception of one or two.

Blum: So the administration did a review and changed some faculty?

Graham: Right.

Blum: Well that was pretty strong.

Graham: It changed the school. When Perkins came that's when Kahn really got involved with the university.

Blum: Had you met Kahn before?

Graham: I had met Kahn before.

Blum: What was he like? How do you remember him?

Graham: As a very gentle man, and, I thought, a fantastic architect. But I also thought Stonorov was a very good architect.

Graham: What especially impressed you about them?

Graham: The work that I saw was the one that they were doing in Israel. But also, they had a lot of work in Philadelphia. They had regular houses and office

buildings and things of that sort. And then, of course, Kahn got very much busier after that.

Blum: Did he ever lecture at the school while you were there?

Graham: No. Only Stonorov. Kahn was too busy working on a project in Israel.

Blum: You said you had a lot of leisure time because you already had had some of the classes. Did you have any hobbies?

Graham: Architecture. And I did a lot of stuff, painting and drawing, a lot. But I did not really have a hobby other than painting. And then I finally had to decide whether to quit painting... I was pretty good. They used to publish my stuff in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Fine Arts annual book.

Blum: As an aside, it's my observation in doing these oral histories that many architects are also accomplished in another of the arts, either as a musician or as an artist, a painter. Do you think the same sensibilities cross all these fields?

Graham: More so with music. Much more so with music. Because painting is two- dimensional. And sculpture is three-dimensional. But music is four- dimensional. There's an element of time. And that's architecture. When you design a building, that's a shape, a sculpture. It has to have a sense of space, it has to have a sense of... What's the beauty of Chartres Cathedral? Not standing outside and looking at it. It's going into that space. The first time I walked in there, they were playing Mozart's Unfinished Requiem, there was a funeral. I had to cry. It was unbelievable, the movement through that space, with this music going on. The same thing happened at Karnak. I had a feeling for the whole time, not just for the epoch, when I walked in there. That's not true in painting and sculpture. There isn't a sense of movement, of going through. A building can tell you, give you a hint, of what's going to come, but more important, where you were. Ballet is the same way. Ballet is

movement in which you remember where you were, and you get a sense of where you're going. That's architecture. That's why a city, a building, is not by itself architecture. It has to be in a locale, in a place, be it in a jungle or be it in a city. The sense of movement through it and to it... We were watching a ballet in New York—it was by Beethoven—and I turned to my wife who speaks fluent German and knows Germany very well, and I said "Jane, I feel like I'm in Thuringia." And she said, "You are. That's where Beethoven comes from." You can see the music and the spaces we went through.

Blum: That's an interesting explanation of the differences and connections between the disciplines.

Graham: Well, it explains why some architects are architects and why some are not. I'm thinking of Carson Pirie Scott. What's the beauty of that building? The sense that you feel all of the spaces that you're going to come into. You're going to go through the door, and that something is going to happen inside. That's why it's such great architecture. When you walk through Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, you feel the sense of movement. I saw the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo; it was unbelievable. It was the best work that I had ever seen. Because when you came in you had a sense, and then you were taken through a low space and then all of a sudden there was a hall which looked like an explosion. So you were going through a ballet. That's architecture. The placement of the pyramids... the pyramid itself is not architecture alone. It's the placement in the Valley of the Kings. It's the same thing.

Blum: How do you feel about the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre?

Graham: At first, I was a little shocked. But, now I love it. Because it says "Imperialism go to hell!"

Blum: Does it?

Graham: Sure it does. That was the great hallelujah. The Emperor wants it so he tore up Paris to build it. Coming out of the palace, through the Arc de Triomphe, and the people be dammed. And Pei's pyramid goes, "Bong!". I'm sorry, but it does that.

Blum: Do you think any attractive structure placed there would have done the same thing?

Graham: It's an entry. The space now, as an entry, is phenomenal. Pei did a fantastic job in that whole building. And now it's really the people's palace.

Blum: So, in your opinion, it was sort of a protest structure?

Graham: No, a conversion. A conversion from a king's power in residence to the people's museum.

Blum: Can we go back to what you were saying about the progression of the pyramids in Egypt.

Graham: Well, again, it's spatially located, right?

Blum: Did you have a senior class project at Penn?

Graham: They didn't quite teach the way they do now. I entered a Beaux-Arts competition in which you had to do a little town along the Alleghenies. And I just designed little houses for it. And the chairman of architecture, Arthur Deam, gave me a bad mark because I was one of the rebels. But unfortunately for him, that was a competition for the Stewartson Prize from the State of Pennsylvania. I got second prize, an automatic "A" according to the Beaux- Arts. That's the only drawing I used when I went to get a job, with his bad mark on it. Because that one was pretty good.

Blum: Might that have been equivalent to what would be now a senior thesis?

Graham: It was a project. It was quite different. The Beaux-Arts system didn't have that. You did more than one each year.

Blum: Do you have colleagues today that went to school with you at Penn?

Graham: One, Lewis Davis. He's on the Board of Overseers at Penn.

Blum: As you are, too.

Graham: I'm a trustee and on the Board of Overseers.

Blum: When you finished your degree, and were ready, I'm sure very anxious, to step out into the world to try your hand at making a better world, what was your vision of your role before your career all began?

Graham: I'm not sure that anybody looks—maybe businessmen do, and doctors—at the career path. But I don't think that poets and musicians and architects do.

Blum: I wasn't thinking so much of the rise or fall of the financial situation. I was thinking more of what you really hoped to do, and how did you hope to accomplish that?

Graham: Designing buildings, urban buildings. I was not interested in redesigning the Pennsylvania Dutch farm, it's too beautiful as it is, it doesn't need copying. I was not particularly interested in doing residential work out in the suburbs. I was interested in the center city and the urban design process, as well. Unfortunately, they've made it a separate course now.

Blum: When did your love for the city begin?

Graham: Remember I lived my childhood in the beautiful city of San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was plotting it then. I liked the tight city. One time I went with my brother to Cleveland and out to see this lady—she was a Taft, related to Senator

Taft—she lived in this fantastic palace. It was just huge. She was thinking of designing a new house. She said, "I'd like to build a new house. What would you do for me?" I was sitting on the terrace, having a martini, and I turned to her, "Nothing. This is perfect where you're at now." I was not that interested in doing it.

Blum: Is it because you weren't interested, or because you just truly thought it was perfect?

Graham: I don't think it's a problem. I don't think that designing houses for wealthy people is a problem. It's a non-problem. The problem is to make the city beautiful.

Blum: It was not a challenge for you?

Graham: No, not at all.

Blum: So you graduated, got your diploma, and how was it you came to Chicago? Why didn't you just stay in Philadelphia? You had already had some work experience there.

Graham: By that time I was married, to a Chicago girl. We've since been divorced, obviously. So we went back to Chicago and started up. Number one, I liked Chicago, to start with. I liked the Middle West. I'm sure that America, the power of America and the character of America, is strongest from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. You take that part of America out and it's just another European nation. It's the power of the water, and the land, and the steel mills that makes the United States. One time my wife Jane and I were in North Dakota in a huge flood like the one they're having this year, and North Dakota is a powerful farming state. It was just flattened, the highway was covered, and they said all crops were finished for the year. And I found out later that in North Dakota they produce the equivalent protein as France, Germany, and England put together.

Blum: What do you mean they produce the equivalent protein?

Graham: Food. Protein. Then we found out later that year that it was the top production of that protein in the United States. If you drive from Chicago to Denver you will never see anything like it in the rest of the world.

Blum: Have you done that?

Graham: Yes, we loved it. My wife too, she's Austrian, and she'd never seen anything like that.

Blum: The Midwest, as I know it, just seems so flat and so vast, so almost boring in some stretches. It just goes on and on.

Graham: That's why Nat Owings suggested to President Johnson that they move all the farmers who live east of the Alleghenies and west of the Rockies to the Midwest. And stop farming in these fields in the East and in the West and just keep the farmers and the industry in the middle. That's exactly the way I feel and I felt that way before he said that. Maine is beautiful, but farming there stinks, it's awful. All the Maine farmers who were really good farmers moved to Illinois or to Minnesota.

Blum: Because they needed larger tracts of land?

Graham: The Pennsylvania land is no good. It's all too hilly, you can't really farm it. The water is not like the water and the rivers in the Middle West. The Platte River, the Missouri River, the Ohio River, you name it. From the top of the Standard Oil building I showed some Arabs the lake and they wondered what sea it was. I said, "That's not a sea, it's a lake." They said, "We'll trade you all our oil." That's the power of America. Without that, and the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Chicago, we would never have won the war. What were we going to do? Throw rocks from California at the Japanese? Or from

Oregon? It's the Middle West that makes us wealthy. And now, where are the pharmaceuticals coming from? The Middle West.

Blum: So why are you living in Florida, if you're so proud of the Midwest?

Graham: Because I'm not working anymore. Mostly we want to travel more, and we thought California was too far from Europe, and we've been to the Orient. We travel often.

Blum: Back to the days when you were ready to work, after graduating, you came to Chicago. Did you know then, about Frank Lloyd Wright, the Chicago School, and Louis Sullivan? Was that part of your studies? Or was it just something you discovered on your own?

Graham: Oh yes, Dr. Robb gave lecture after lecture on Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan, and on Neutra. And the Chicago School as well, not just individual architects.

Blum: And the reasons and ideas behind the Chicago School?

Graham: We knew about Daniel Burnham's master plan for Chicago and Holabird and Root, we knew all about that.

Blum: And when you went to Mies and asked, "Where shall I work?" he steered you to Holabird and Root.

Graham: And they gave me a job.

Blum: So you went and knocked on Holabird and Root's door. Wasn't it Holabird, Root, and Burgee at the time? What was the firm like as you entered it?

Graham: They had two design groups. One was headed by Dave Carlson and the other one was the one I worked in with Helmuth Bartsch. The Helmuth Bartsch

group was isolated from the rest of it. We did all the working drawings within the group. Carlson was doing all kinds of projects with hotel companies and things like that. He had a much bigger office, much more work on his side. But they were the old-line workers, not the new crowd that went in with Helmuth.

Blum: Helmuth had been there for quite a while by that time.

Graham: Yes, but Joe Passonneau was there when I was there. Do you know who he is?

Blum: I don't know him, but I do know who he is and I have heard about him.

Graham: And Bob Diamant, who later became a partner at SOM, was there. Gyo Obata had been there, but he by then had moved to Skidmore. And a Chicago architect who teaches at Circle [UIC], a Hungarian, John Macsai. See Macsai and Diamant were both Hungarians and they were in the same prison camp during the war. I don't know if you knew that. Bob Diamant was a little healthier, because he was the cook, but he carried Macsai out of the camp, and walked all of the way out. So that was the group. There were a couple of others whose names I can't remember. But that was a special group of sort of modern designers.

Blum: How did you all fare under Bartsch? He seems so imperial to me, so elegant.

Graham: He wasn't really an architect. He never graduated from architectural school. He was a designer that John Holabird brought over for interior design. He then stretched out into architecture. He was not a very good architect. He treated us all right, but he was very German.

Blum: Austrian, wasn't he?

Graham: Austrian, in his demeanor. But it was the only hope. You see we had thought that John Holabird, Jr., was going to come and join the firm.

Blum: He did for some of those years.

Graham: He joined and quit.

Blum: And went into the theater, or to teach.

Graham: He went to Bennington College with his first wife to teach theater, so he abandoned the firm. But I got along very well with Root. John Root was a wonderful man, but he wasn't very tough.

Blum: Was he very active at that time?

Graham: He was active, but he wasn't tough enough to handle Burgee. Burgee was really a tough architect and a technical man.

Blum: I thought Burgee was a business manager.

Graham: He was technical and he ran the firm. He just sort of took it over. He was good at it.

Blum: John Holabird describes Helmuth as a man with a very arrogant attitude, very difficult to work with and for, and as someone who was there really because he was a friend of his father's and Root's. He was sort of a leftover from an earlier generation.

Graham: That's right. More from Holabird, though than from Root. He and Root didn't get along that well. Root was too much of a gentleman.

Blum: I think John did not find Bartsch very easy to work with.

Graham: Anyway, after a year, we got a lot of practical experience doing working drawings.

Blum: What were the projects that you worked on?

Graham: Well, Joe Passonneau and I did all the working drawings for Ravinia.

Blum: For the stage?

Graham: For the whole thing. I had a different scheme, which was better than Bartsch's.

Blum: What prevailed, your scheme or Bartsch's?

Graham: Bartsch's. But Joe Passonneau kind of took over and then he and I did the working drawings. We met Leonid Stokowsky, by the way, in that process. That was quite a wonderful experience for a young architect. We also did a shopping center, the working drawings, not the design. It's on the southwest side, Evergreen Park. It's not a big shopping center. But I wasn't the designer. And then we decided to move to a little firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Blum: Who do you mean by "we"? You and Joe Passonneau?

Graham: Joe Passonneau and everybody moved. Bob Diamant and I went to Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. One at a time, not all together.

Blum: That sounds like when many people left Holabird and Root at one time time and formed PACE. All of you left and went to SOM.

Graham: Yes, but not all at the same time.

Blum: Who was the pioneer? Who was the first one who left?

Graham: The first one was Gyo Obata. And then John Macsai. And then, I don't remember the order, Bob Diamant left after that. And I think Joe and I left at about the same time to go to Skidmore.

Blum: What was the cause of your leaving?

Graham: I could see there was no future for me there.

Blum: Were you disappointed that Mies...? Did you feel that he had misled you?

Graham: No, no. I did learn how to make working drawings. That was what he told me. He didn't tell me to go there to learn design.

Blum: I thought you said that he told you that at Holabird and Root they were making permanent buildings.

Graham: Right. Permanent buildings, meaning "solid". All the other firms were building Quonset huts during the war, temporary buildings.

Blum: So you learned how to make working drawings.

Graham: And they knew that they were very good at it, Holabird and Root. They had job captains that were really experienced. In fact we stole one of them later for SOM.

Blum: You left Holabird and Root, closed the door behind you, and knocked on SOM's door. How did you get that job?

Graham: There was a fellow by the name of Ambrose Richardson. They were beginning to get a lot of work—it was a small firm with a little office then— and the reputation of Holabird and Root in technical areas was very good.

Blum: Meaning your experience was good?

Graham: Yes. And then the fact that Joe was from Harvard and I was from Penn, and not from the University of Illinois. That school [U of I] wasn't that good at that time. I think we were more senior than the students that were out there.

Blum: That was why you appealed to SOM. Why did you like them?

Graham: Because they were a modern firm. I knew about Gordon Bunshaft in New York. That wasn't a very well-kept secret.

Blum: What had SOM built by the time you started in 1951?

Graham: They had built Lever House in New York.

Blum: And in the Midwest? What was happening at SOM then?

Graham: They had finished a big project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the nuclear town. They had quite a reputation for that. A lot of architects worked for SOM at that time. Walter Netsch worked on that and so did Harry Weese. I don't remember all their names. There were all kind of young architects who were at SOM. They had all come from very good schools and were not kids. Most of them had been veterans. They were doing a master plan for Ford, in Dearborn, Michigan. Then they eventually built the Ford headquarters—not the Chicago office—the Chicago office did the plan, but Bunshaft did the building. They really didn't have a senior designer except for Bill Priestley, who was connected to IIT. He was actually one of the first teachers on Mies's staff. Mies came over and he had both Bill Priestley and John Barney (Jack) Rodgers on his staff. Nat Owings stole both of them. Jack Rodgers was sent to the West Coast, where he became the senior partner.

Blum: Were you aware that in 1950 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art devoted solely to their work?

Graham: Yes, I was aware of that. I had seen it. But the SOM office split, you know. Owings stayed in Chicago and Skidmore went to New York. And Owings was promoting all over the world, more so than Skidmore. Skidmore had enough in his hands with just New York. Skidmore got a lot of work, important work, in New York. He got to know people in New York very well. He was very well accepted. Owings, I don't think, would have been as acceptable in New York. Skidmore looked like a banker. More so that he knew talent. He had very good talent under him.

Blum: This is just the quality that has been attributed to Owings, in spotting and giving young designers free rein.

Graham: Owings also got rid of a lot of talent.

Blum: Well, that was a different part of his personality. But I understand that he had a talent for spotting young, talented designers, and giving them a real chance to develop themselves and the firm in the process. Do you think that's an accurate statement?

Graham: No. I think that Owings was probably the best job-getter in the world in the history of architecture, practically. But I think that there were other people who spotted talent. I think Bill Hartmann did much more for Chicago as far as talent goes.

Blum: I'm talking about as the firm began.

Graham: I'm talking about as they began too.

Blum: Bill came to SOM after the war.

Graham: Yes. That's who Skidmore, Owings and Merrill courted. They got the big job in Tennessee. Owings applied to the Atomic Energy Commission for it and they wanted to come over and see his office. The call came on something like

Wednesday and they asked to come next Monday. Would that be OK? Next Monday would be fine. So when they came here was this huge office full of people drawing. He'd arranged it all over the damn weekend. They'd hired all these people. They didn't have anyone before. That was Owings. That's why I tell you that Owings was fantastic at getting work. He got to know President Johnson and President Nixon, he was unbelievable in getting work.

Blum: Making contacts like that was terrific for the office.

Graham: Sure. But knowing talent to do the job was not his strength.

Blum: Was Bill Hartmann running the Chicago office when you came?

Graham: Bill Hartmann was top dog at the time. I was interviewed by Richardson, and he also hired the others. But Bill preferred me, so he was obviously a good judge of talent.

Blum: This was the time of Lake Meadows. Did you work on that project?

Graham: No. Joe Passonneau worked on that with Ambrose Richardson. Owings got that job. I'm sure he did.

Blum: That was financed by New York Life?

Graham: New York Life. People didn't think too kindly of Owings at the time, because he was chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission at the time.

Blum: Didn't he get in trouble because of a conflict of interest, he wanted to close Cottage Grove Avenue?

Graham: Yes. I really don't know too much about that. All I know is that he got into trouble, and socially as well. That's when he moved to the West Coast.

Blum: Conflict of interest and his personal life have always been cited as reasons why he left Chicago.

Graham: But he didn't lose any friends. It was amazing. That guy, he knew everybody. I don't know how he did it. He knew absolutely everybody, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Portland, Oregon. People in the government. He could be very attractive.

Blum: Did you find him so?

Graham: He scared me most of the time. He went around firing people like they were going out of style. He fired Harry Weese. And Harry said, "You can't fire me. I quit."

Blum: Well, Harry was very independent.

Graham: That isn't recognizing talent, to fire somebody because he's independent. I don't know why he fired Harry, but a lot of very good people have worked for Owings over the years.

Blum: They've passed through.

Graham: I think Hartmann protected them.

Blum: Did you know then that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had the reputation for being a pressure-cooker? That everyone was very competitive with one another? Did you know that before you came there? Did you feel up to the challenge?

Graham: I never even thought about it. I went to work there, and the first person I went to work with was Bill Hartmann, on some little projects. We were trying to get a job out in Iowa for a hotel. Then they got the navy job and I worked with Bill Priestley on it. Bill was a strict IIT character. And, I might add, a

very great musician. He played the lead with some of the top bands, they used to meet at night at his house. Owings couldn't stand him.

Blum: Priestley is such a gentle man.

Graham: But Owings couldn't stand him. It didn't matter. Eventually he left and went with PACE. But not for very long, because he wasn't well. I had nothing to do with Owings, except that we got the Kimberly-Clark job. He knew Jack Kimberly very well, and so we got that job. Then I designed that with two other guys. We weren't competitive at all. I was doing my thing, and Richardson was doing his thing with Lake Meadows, and John Weese was in a management kind of role, and there was Chuck Wiley, who was a very good designer and who really did most of Lake Meadows. He was a Corbusier type.

Blum: When you came into SOM, or even before, were you aware that Owings wanted the firm to be known, and not each designer, for their work? It was an anonymous kind of role for these talented young designers. And you were an ambitious young man.

Graham: I liked that, absolutely. I regretted that it changed.

Blum: Wasn't it an impossible goal to maintain?

Graham: With the egocentricity of people, probably.

Blum: It wasn't even because of peoples' egos.

Graham: Well, the Jesuits do it pretty well.

Blum: They're not building things that prompt people to ask, "Who did this?"

Graham: The Jesuits have built a few things.

Blum: There was an article in the New York Times and Aline Louchheim, Eero Saarinen's wife-to-be, wrote it. She raised this issue of SOM's wish to be anonymous. She said that it's very clear that Bunshaft did this building and that Richardson did that one, so what's the big secret all about?

Graham: Well, it's not really that clear, in this sense: that historically, in architecture, we know a lot of buildings but we don't know who the architect was. And historically in architecture, an architect without craftsmen doesn't exist. He's nobody. This is true today that architecture is not a personal art. It's an art that, number one, involves a community to start with.

Blum: A community of workers?

Graham: No, of people. The people that live there. You have to know them. You have to know what their wills and aspirations and dreams are. It's more than that, you have to know their culture. You have to mix with all these people and be a part of them. The same way that the people you work with, the engineers, for instance. The structural engineer does not always have the dream but he has the technology of how to do things. And sometimes the mechanical engineer is the dreamer. I learned a lot from mechanical engineers, people that employers have probably never heard of, and therefore they build bad buildings. I made friends with Gerry Griffith. Why do you think you're sitting there in that chair? Because the craftsman who did it was a friend of mine and my wife's. Without Gerry Griffith, there are a lot of things that we couldn't have done at all. The same thing was with contractors. I had more lunches with contractors than I did with clients.

Blum: Did Gerry Griffith build these chairs?

Graham: Yes, from the Mies's drawings.

Blum: Was he at Skidmore?

Graham: No, he's a steelworker in Chicago. He was a craftsman in steel. He did all of Mies's furniture. The furniture that Mies had was done by Gerry, not by Knoll. All the Mies chairs that Mies had were done by Gerry Griffith. Gerry did this table. You see that shape? If this were done by Knoll, it would shake with a marble top on it like that. But this one doesn't shake. He could put two pieces of steel together without welding them and you could never find the joint. And it would never come apart. One was negative and one was positive, that was the idea. You could freeze one and heat the other and when you put them together at the same temperature, there was no way they would separate.

Blum: Did you meet him through Mies?

Graham: Yes. Well, not so much from Mies, we heard of him from some other people, especially Ed Duckett who gave some Griffith-built furniture to the Art Institute.

Graham: Duckett had worked in Mies's office, and then he worked in Skidmore's offices. I told you that I was not interested in building residential stuff. The purpose at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was to build cities, not buildings.

Blum: Did anyone ever tell you that, or was that just your idea?

Graham: I told Owings that and he got mad at me. I had just been made a partner. My speech was that it was great to be a partner of a firm that was designing cities and not building buildings, and boy, he got mad.

Blum: He was already building cities, Oak Ridge and Lake Meadows. The concepts had to be very big for those projects.

Graham: We all felt that way.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Blum: Your idea, as you came into the firm, was to build buildings, was it not?

Graham: I told you, when I was a child my dream was to build cities.

Blum: Was that real or was that a child's fantasy?

Graham: It grew into less than a fantasy.

Blum: What was your first job after you got to SOM?

Graham: The first one was working on Great Lakes with Bill Priestley. Although we did a little remodeling with Bill Hartmann in Ohio, I can't remember the name of it, but I wasn't in charge. I'm not naming projects that I worked on that I wasn't in charge of. The first real job where I was in charge was Kimberly-Clark.

Blum: And the Great Lakes Naval Training Center Gunners Mates School?

Graham: Actually, Bill Priestley was in charge of the whole thing, but then I took over that building and the dormitory.

Blum: I read that there was an effort to present the project to the people who were going to use it. They were interviewed and then shown what the project would be. Were you involved when they interviewed?

Graham: The seamen?

Blum: Yes.

Graham: No. Maybe the navy higher-ups. They never interviewed me when I was a lowly enlisted man for anything.

Blum: Was there an effort to find out what the users wanted instead of imposing SOM's idea about what they wanted?

Graham: Sure, there was a program, but we do that on every project. You write a program for what your building is going to be used for, whether it's a hospital or a house. The navy issued a program, and we were very good at writing programs.

Blum: So they said, "We need this, this, and this," and then SOM writes a program around those needs?

Graham: And we may have to travel around to see examples of what they were talking about. But the main thing of that building was flexibility, because what they were teaching changes so much. They needed flexibility.

Blum: Who else was on the team besides you and Priestley?

Graham: There was one guy who went to Japan, but there were others who were technical.

Blum: Well, it's a very sleek-looking building.

Graham: I liked it.

Blum: It's something I suppose, personally, I wouldn't expect for the military, but why not?

Graham: That's not true. I don't know if you saw Walter Netsch's Naval Postgraduate Academy, but it's quite beautiful. I don't agree with you. I think the army is much more difficult. I had trouble with the army when we were in Japan, to work with them was almost impossible.

Blum: What was the government like as a client?

Graham: In those days I don't think we had any problem with the navy on programming.

Blum: But it wasn't a one-to-one thing. It was you against the navy.

Graham: Well, there was an officer in charge for them. It's just like if you work for a corporation, there's an officer in charge. In some cases, it's probably the chairman himself, in other cases, it may be somebody else, like at Sears Roebuck it's probably not the chairman—not for the tower, but for the department store—it's probably another man entirely.

Blum: So you dealt with him, but then he needed approval from everyone else before he could give you approval.

Graham: That's right. The navy's pretty well organized. The army is not. The Coast Guard is even better, even though I never worked for the Coast Guard.

Blum: I think, in a superficial way perhaps, of the military as one big collective organization and don't really differentiate between its branches.

Graham: The Marine Corps is very different from the navy. Also in the navy, you actually live together more than in the army. You're in a ship, maybe for six months, so you learn to get along, otherwise you get dumped over the sides. That actually happened during the war. We had a ship come in and all the officers were gone. So we asked about them and they said they all fell overboard.

Blum: Are you suggesting that they were they thrown overboard?

Graham: I'm sure they were thrown overboard, but they could never prove it. So in the navy, the officers have got to learn to get along.

Blum: That's shocking. To kill someone is pretty drastic.

Graham: There was a lot of killing going on at that time, if you remember. In the army there was some of that too. A sergeant would be shot in the back by some of his people. War is not pretty. It's not like Hollywood tries to make it.

Blum: When were you sent back to the Far East?

Graham: Right after I designed Kimberly-Clark and they started to build it, although they hadn't quite finished it, but just about ninety percent. SOM had this big job in the Orient and a lot of SOM people had gone to work there. The office was in Japan. The projects were in Guam, and Okinawa, and in Japan. When I went, we were mostly involved in Guam, not in Okinawa.

Blum: What were you building?

Graham: Navy things. In Okinawa it was new towns for the cities that were destroyed. The navy leveled them.

Blum: So it was residential?

Graham: Yes. Then I worked on a military project that really was not military in a sense that it was what they were going to leave, it was going to be turned over to the people in Okinawa. But I didn't last long there. Owings and Rodgers got into a big battle.

Blum: Was Rodgers there?

Graham: Rodgers was there running it. Somehow they redesigned everything with the navy, and built mock-ups, everything was done. And somehow navy didn't proceed with the projects. I don't remember the exact details because I wasn't involved, but in any case, Rodgers asked me if I wanted to go to work in Okinawa itself, and I said no. I liked it in Japan, a lot. We had about one hundred and ten Japanese architects and engineers in the office, building these projects. We were doing the designing and they were doing the

working drawings. The guy who was the chief draftsman, doing all the working drawings—he and I became very good friends—was Japanese. Anyway, he introduced me to Kobe and Ise and Nara and Kyoto. He would tell me how to go and who to meet and where to stay. I didn't realize it, but in Kyoto, I stayed at the best inn in Japan. The cook was the imperial cook. So I learned a lot about architecture, because Japanese architecture is very strongly spatial, particularly in a city like Kyoto, which the United States had spared totally. The temples there are unbelievable. But Kyoto is very small. You walk through the forest from temple to temple. But now the city has grown and absorbed all those temples. Like the United States, it has destroyed the whole environment.

Blum: But isn't their architecture wood and paper, materials that are very different from the materials that we use.

Graham: But the space is what matters, not necessarily the materials. These people came to Japan from a warmer climate originally, and that's the only architecture they knew, and they have deified it. They make an aesthetic experience out of everything, even agony. For example, their food is beautifully presented, but I think it tastes like hell. Now they've changed it because they've discovered American and European spices. It was the process of eating that made it beautiful, not the taste. That's very Japanese about everything. You sleep on the floor, and it's a ceremony. It's not just, "I’m going to bed." In that sense, it's ancient. The great Japanese architect, Tadao Ando, who just won the Pritzker Prize—I know Isozaki very well, and I know Maki very well—but Ando is the best Japanese architect in the sense that he does permanent buildings in steel and concrete but they are Japanese. I'm telling you it's the proportions, the spaces.

Blum: Paul Schweikher was very impressed with Japanese construction. Not necessarily materials, but the way things were put together.

Graham: They are very good builders. In fact, the Imperial Hotel did not stand up very well to the earthquake: unlike Frank Lloyd Wright's claims, the floor was bent. There was a building next door that was built at the same time, twelve stories high, that didn't have a crack in it.

Blum: But the Imperial Hotel wasn't twelve stories high.

Graham: I know, but I'm saying the twelve-story building didn't have a crack in it, and the Imperial Hotel did and was only three stories.

Blum: Who built the twelve-story building?

Graham: A Japanese architect. It wasn't a great building, but my point was that Frank Lloyd Wright used to brag about what a great engineer he was. He wasn't, he was a lousy engineer.

Blum: Did you know or ever meet him?

Graham: Yes, in Chicago. He was a mean old man.

Blum: I assume your exchange was not a very pleasant one.

Graham: Well, one time he came to an AIA meeting in which he was invited to give a talk. He came in with his cape and his hat and he ran up the aisle and went up and said—we were celebrating Sullivan—he said, "Oh, you killed Sullivan!" and he got up and walked out. What an animal! "Oh, you killed Sullivan!" He was meaner to Sullivan than anybody else.

Blum: Well, the story is, and maybe it's the truth, that people did desert Sullivan— clients as well as architects—except for a few who stuck by him, around the Cliff Dwellers.

Graham: I wasn't even born when that happened. He also did a few nasty things. He took credit for Charnley House. He didn't do Charnley House, that's Sullivan. Did you ever see some of the night jobs he used to do, out in the west suburbs? They were terrible. Cheap houses out on the West Side?

Blum: They were modest houses, but they were early in his career in a very different style.

Graham: They look like they were done by another architect. Then Wright asked me and an architect to come up, and he said to me, "All of these guys are evil." I think I had mentioned something about Mies and Ed Dart. I said, "Well, that may be what you think, but as a young man, I didn't think so."

Blum: How did he take that?

Graham: He walked out. He was a snob, a mean old man.

Blum: Did you ever have a more private exchange with him?

Graham: No. I sat with people who had worked with him, who were supposed to be learning architecture, but were doing farming, they weren't doing any architecture.

Blum: At Taliesin?

Graham: Yes. It was awful.

Blum: You were talking about your experience in Japan and Guam.

Graham: When I went in the war, I didn't see anything but grass huts. This was really the first chance to see.

Blum: What were the buildings that you were there to design and build, compared to the grass huts that you saw? Were they prefabricated?

Graham: The idea for the navy was prefabricated housing.

Blum: What did they look like?

Graham: They were modern, very simple, with flat roofs. They were in Okinawa and frankly, for hurricanes, which they get, flat roofs are a hell of a lot better. Concrete is also a lot better than wood for hurricanes. Wood is a disaster for hurricanes, the worst material you could build with. In Florida, they build them in wood with lousy trusses, and they're terrible trusses, all nailed together, and they wonder why their roofs blow away. First the nails rust and then the roof blows away.

Blum: What was your response to prefabrication, not only those houses in Okinawa or Guam, but anywhere considering the fast construction, not labor intensive and that it could be produced industrially?

Graham: I've used prefabricated materials before, it's not new. It can be quite beautiful. The prefabricated floors and roofs—the concrete that has joists between them, they're shaped with very long spans, like bridge structures. Bunshaft did a prefabricated building in Iowa that's unbelievably beautiful. It won a national award of architecture. So what's wrong with prefabricated buildings? I've used them before.

Blum: There was a great resistance to prefabrication, at least in the United States, I don't know if it was worldwide.

Graham: There was? Where? I never felt anything like that.

Blum: Look at examples like the Lustron House.

Graham: That's different. I'm talking about prefabricated components to make buildings—we didn't do prefabricated houses—slabs, beams that could be put together on site, instead of poured.

Blum: Couldn't you carry that idea further beyond parts?

Graham: That's pretty far beyond, because that means you could build anything with them. It doesn't have to be a repetitive-looking building. It could be a unique- looking building. There's no reason why it can't. There are quite a lot of beautiful buildings that have been done that way.

Blum: Well, what was the trouble, why didn't the Lustron House take hold?

Graham: Number one, they weren't that cheap. They thought they would be, but they forgot a number of things, like shipping. That was a big cost. Then for example, you can virtually prefabricate housing by shipping parts. By shipping the whole building, you're shipping a lot of air. But if you just ship the parts, like walls and sidings and roofs and the refrigerators, it's much more compact. That's one. And two, you have to then have a factory set up on site that can put it together, but it's local labor, not shipped-in labor. By and large, prefabricated buildings are essentially about as good as a motorhome, which are badly built, they're dangerous as hell. If you've ever heard about hurricanes in Florida, most of the things that blow away are exactly those things. People do it to avoid paying taxes. If they keep the wheels on, they avoid paying taxes, even if they never move.

Blum: Well, a lot of retired people live in mobile homes.

Graham: Right, but you can do beautiful housing for the same price.

Blum: But you can't take your home on your back and go to Montana or Arizona.

Graham: These people have no intention of going anywhere. They put porches on them and lean-to garages. It's just that they keep the wheels on so they don't pay taxes. Nixon tried to outlaw them, and he was right. I'm a democrat but he had a lot of good ideas, social and legal, about the United States. That and the "highway road gangs" were the two thing he worked on, although Kennedy started the road gangs. They are a disgusting boondoggle.

Blum: It just seemed that after the war, when there was such a need for housing, that prefabrication should have had a lot more appeal than it did.

Graham: The Levitt housing was really prefabricated, but in parts, because he wasn't stupid. He had a factory where he made the parts, and then he would ship them all together and put them together on the site. They're not bad looking. Some were built in Chicago.

Blum: But don't they create the monotony of miles and miles of sameness?

Graham: I think the problem is the American psyche. Everyone wants their own little acre. That is exactly what happens. Plus they don't have to be similar.

Blum: But that's the American dream.

Graham: It's an ugly dream, let's face it. Go through Lahti, in Finland, and walk through those streets. There's two hills, and one had a church by Alvar Aalto and the other has a city hall by Saarinen. It's tight; the houses are one next to another.

Blum: Are the houses the same, or are they all different?

Graham: Some of them are the same. The same thing is true of most of Scandinavia and Estonia, by the way, where the houses may be from different times, maybe a thousand years apart, but they fit together. One can be modern, and one can be of an earlier time, but they fit together, they look beautiful

together. In fact it's beautiful to walk down these streets and to see how history formed. They take up very little land, because they can't throw away farmland the way we do. They can't throw away the Everglades like we do, or plant sugar cane where sugar cane should never be grown—I know a lot about sugar cane, coming from Puerto Rico—sugar cane doesn't belong in Florida at all, it's sand. They pour millions of tons of fertilizer on them and it all goes into the Everglades and kills all the fish. You can't fish off Key West anymore because the fish are all dead. That's America. Can you imagine that pollution? It's huge. And supported by a senator? Why do you think we don't recognize Cuba? Because this guy pays them off not to recognize Cuba. The head of the sugar cane farms here; they're making billions. We pay ten times as much for sugar as in any place in the world. They get two billion dollars of help from the United States government to ruin the state of Florida because they claim that the sugar growers are like the beet growers in the Middle West who can't compete with Cuban sugar or African sugar. The minute we recognize Castro, they're finished.

Blum: You understand this so well, you live here and you have a stake here, you should be carrying the first banner to make this known.

Graham: I don't have the money to fight him. The people who are against them have done a very good job of publishing the truth but this guy had propaganda on television every day, at least five or six times a day, defending them. He could afford it. Other people couldn't afford to fight it.

Blum: But don't you believe in the power of democracy, of people rising up and saying that they won't put up with this any longer?

Graham: I believe in that, but I don't think that people have a chance now. It all started with Vietnam. For example, the people who want to find all the POWs. Why don't the Germans send us the Americans that were buried in Germany, that were dead and disappeared, unknown? Why don't we force the Germans to do it like we do with Vietnam?

Blum: Why?

Graham: Because in those days, we were stupid. In the Vietnam War we were wrong, one hundred percent wrong. So now these people are all claiming these things and the country has changed, the morality of the country is different. We went in World War II to win the war and our sons died for winning that great war. Americans won that war and got rid of Hitler and Mussolini, but not quite Stalin.

Blum: From what you've just said it seems different from the feeling of optimism you say you had when you entered architecture. Do you now have any of that hope left?

Graham: Remember that Mies said, "Architecture is not of your time. It is of an epoch." I feel the same way. I think that architecture is just beginning to develop, in this century, and not just in the United States. But it's not developed yet. There are good sides to it, there are some areas in the United States that are responsive, that are fighting successfully against these huge department stores that come into their towns. Also in the world, there is an understanding that it is not of our time to reproduce Corbusier or Mies everywhere. Unfortunately, IIT thinks that the only architecture you can do there has to be a copy of Mies. That's baloney and Mies never felt that way. So you are beginning to see very good architects from elsewhere. In Europe and the world as well. American architects have declined in world reputation a lot because Postmodernism is one hundred percent an American idea, not accepted in Europe at all. To rebuild imperial buildings in Europe? Forget it, you can't do it. Try to build one in Spain, you can't do it. That architect who did that building in Chicago? The Spanish architect...

Blum: Ricardo Bofill?

Graham: Yes. Go see what he did in Barcelona. It's none of that imperial stuff, it's a modern glass building. He was not going to do anything in Barcelona unless

he left that garbage in the United States. I'm serious. It's true in England, even the Prince of Wales can't do anything. He was flunked out by his uncle, around St. Paul's. Tom Beeby came to design a postmodern town for the prince, remember that? There was a competition for developers and the prince claimed that all the developers had all exceeded the amount of allowable buildings. I know it wasn't true, because I did one of the entries and it was one third less than the actual program area of the development. So the whole thing was canceled and the prince hired Tom Beeby to do a fitting building next to St. Paul's. But anyway, he went to present it to the Royal Fine Arts Commission and the first thing, his uncle leaned over the desk and asked the prince, "Sir, do you own this land?" And the prince said, "No." "Then you can't present." End of story.

Blum: Didn't his uncle like Tom's design?

Graham: No. His uncle was a very good architect. He was a modernist. Stalin killed the modernists, the modern architect in Russia. I went to see some beautiful buildings that were done by Russian architects that are still in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The same in Germany. There's no way you're going to build one of the houses like they have here in Florida, with the Greek columns, for retired American new rich who are all imperialists. We've never been through the horror of imperialism. It's never happened in the United States and we've never experienced it. But we're going through a kind of an economic imperialism.

Blum: Maybe we have to go through it before we understand the problems with it.

Graham: Well, I'm an optimist. The sad thing is that depressions usually hurt the poor more than the rich. The rich just jump out of buildings, but the poor have families.

Blum: May we go back to Kimberly-Clark?

Graham: What I'm saying is that this will affect all my work, what's happening.

Blum: But you didn't know that in 1956. Today you have the benefit of looking back on years of experience.

Graham: But as we talk about individual buildings, you will see that they change.

Blum: Your buildings?

Graham: The clients change. Not just my clients, but everybody's clients. Pretty much like CBS is going down the tubes now because William Paley, who supported CBS and made it great and used Saarinen as an architect, was a great lover of the arts. Now CBS is a disaster. They don't even know how to do the news. I'm just saying that it's a different kind of ownership. It's very impersonal. Ford? A great man who wanted his workers to be able to afford a car. Do you think Ford gives a damn now if their workers own a car or not? I don't think they do, there's nobody in a position to care. Or General Motors pays huge bonuses to executives now when they lose money. I love it, you get paid a bonus to lose money.

Blum: It's a different world. I suppose architects, as a profession, have to somehow find their way in today's world without compromising themselves.

Graham: In one sense, what I'm saying is that the work we did was when the optimists, people like Franklin Roosevelt or Dewey, were in both in the business world and in the government. Those people have changed.

Blum: But they're replaced by today's versions.

Graham: Which is different. That makes it very difficult for architects. I've become like Zola, I've become a critic. He was a critic of imperialism.

Blum: Kimberly-Clark was a campus-style headquarters.

Graham: It was three buildings. The big building was an office building with two courtyards—then the other was a two-story building where Jack Kimberly and the top international officers of the company met, that was their office building. Then the third building was a dining hall where they all ate, including Jack Kimberly.

Blum: There's one building that almost looks like Crown Hall, the way the steel beams come up on the sides.

Graham: That's the dining hall. It's a steel structure. I'd say it is Miesian, except that I was more specific about expressing structure. The only building where Mies really expresses structure is Crown Hall. I'm putting the beam above, and I'm sure I cribbed it from Crown Hall.

Blum: Was Bunshaft's Connecticut General in your mind as you designed Kimberly- Clark?

Graham: Not that much. I was already interested, at this point, in exposed structures. If you look at all my work at that time you'll see it unfolding. I was greatly influenced by Mies. I thought he was a great and gentle man. I was later influenced more by Corbusier. Bunshaft came to see Kimberly-Clark because Hartmann asked him to come and check it out. I had never seen Connecticut General at that time.

Blum: You hadn't seen photographs?

Graham: Photographs don't tell you about a building. Photographs are two- dimensional. You can take pictures of buildings and a lot of times architects get awards and they don't deserve it. On the other hand, they skip ones because they didn't go visit it. They go by the form, rather than the architecture. I respected Bunshaft already. He did a little wood building, the hostess center, at Great Lakes that I liked. That was very structural. Then he did Lever House. Obviously he influenced me a lot.

Blum: In your book, Bruce Graham of SOM, you say the architectural revolution in Chicago was not expressed, or related socially, as it was in Europe. But you say you saw your search here in the United States—and yours personally, I would assume—rather as a search for architecture that would express the "technical man." Who's the "technical man"?

Graham: Americans. America is the most technological nation in the world. I meant that in the broad sense.

Blum: Is that what we were becoming, or is that what we were, in 1956?

Graham: We were becoming that, but I don't mean that badly. During the war we built these ships in thirty days, it was unbelievable. The Germans couldn't even sail them in thirty days, they weren't technical. Take Ford, it was already a miracle—much better than Mercedes—Ford was made for the people. The Americans all can drive, that's not true of the rest of the world. You'd be surprised. You just go south of the border and you can see what I mean with the rest of the world. And go to Guatemala, and El Salvador, it gets worse. The people down there have no understanding of technology. We overdo it a lot. We drive too much. When I did a building in England later someone asked me to bring them a Sears Roebuck ice maker. In England everyone always said they didn't like ice in their drink, but he became the most popular guy in the village. They kept coming over to get some ice.

Blum: Isn't that's what Europe's afraid of, that we're going to colonize the world commercially?

Graham: I doubt it very much. I think that Americans would like to dominate the world. The leaders of America think of themselves as imperialists. We're trying to call the shots in every nation. Why are we fooling around in Yugoslavia? It's a German problem. Why are we fooling around in Israel? It's not our problem. Why don't we take care of Latin America? That's our problem, the corruption in Mexico. Those are the problems we should worry

about. We should worry about the safety and security of all of North America. Adlai Stevenson said that the Europeans should worry about Africa, the Russians and Chinese should worry about Southeast Asia, and certainly the Germans should worry about the war right next to them in Bosnia. Why are all the Americans there? Why are there any Americans in Germany? I don't understand why we're there at all. It costs billions per year. What happens if the Russians attack. Say the Russians start a nuclear war. The Americans aren't there to stop a war.

Blum: Do you think being there will help open the way for our commercial products and services?

Graham: No, we're sending armaments as well. We're the biggest arms dealers in the world, by far. We've even sold arms to Iran. Remember Iran-Contra? Reagan? Who obviously totally lost his memory and can't remember anything. He can't remember anything a year before Contra, right?

Blum: Another thing you said in your book about Kimberly-Clark was that at that time you thought that we, American architects, were learning how to build buildings to define what kind of democracy we were becoming. Is that the way you felt in your personal search at that time?

Graham: Yes. The Japanese built buildings with materials that they understood in their culture. We had to now continue our ongoing search for a vocabulary in architecture that reflects our technology, our means, the things that support us. We have our expression of the workers that we have, like the French had workers of Chartres Cathedral, the stone mason. Our work is to not do that. We can't build Chartres Cathedral. We don't know how.

Blum: Do you think that French workers today could build it?

Graham: Not as well as the American worker.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Blum: But you said we couldn't build it today. I was wondering if you meant that the problem was that today we all lack the skills, the French and American worker alike.

Graham: The French could not build Chartres Cathedral either, today, because the craftsmanship is gone. Most of Europe is now a technological world. People live in technology. The kitchens and apartment buildings that are built today are all technological. You can't build a Gothic apartment building. You'd go broke. Modern is the language that we all understand. If you think of the everyday life of an American—I don't mean the chairman of the board of a company—their whole day is like that. Where they work, that matters more than ever. The way they communicate, communication systems cover the United States and the world now though computers. This is a highly technological world. So if it is, then you celebrate it, just like a farm town celebrates farming. We have to celebrate our life and the way we live and make it beautiful. That's not easy because we have an influx of people that come from all over the world all the time. You have the problem of the black community just now slowly getting into the mainstream of America, although they're way ahead of any Latin American nation, no question. That's happened already in other countries but they're all one race and one culture. So it's fairly easy for them to find the key that makes their modern architecture beautiful and local. When you're in Finland, they're Finnish buildings, they're not Scandinavian buildings.

Blum: What is the difference to you?

Graham: They're quite different. They're totally influenced by Alvar Aalto. He made such an impact on the towns and the villages and the apartment buildings. Apartment buildings in Finland are all very similar, but the settings are different, the shadows are different, and the way they protect the landscape is different. They all have a sense of community and the buildings give them

that sense. We don't have that yet here, because we try to make it American. That's a mistake. You can't build the same thing in Florida that you can in Alaska. You can't build the same thing in Florida that you can in California. Maine is different, Chicago is different. We have to stop thinking about all this one... This country is too big to think about a single architecture that covers everything. You have to have one in Florida that comes out of the sun and the land and the heat. And one in Maine that comes out of the snow and the rocks. That's what architects have to search for locally. Chicago in a way has done that, that's what is called the Chicago School of Architecture. Because it's easier, we're isolated and we're not so close to New York. New York critics hate Chicago architecture. Have you noticed that?

Blum: I know there's competition, but hate is a very strong word.

Graham: Goldberger despises Chicago. I've talked to him. It's true. He and Philip Johnson have insulted Chicago over and over again. The postmodern idea, which is antisocial, is imperialistic. Look at the shapes of the buildings. They're exactly like what Hitler loved. Look at the University of Moscow, by Stalin, and then look at some of the buildings that we're doing in America or exporting to the rest of the world. It's exactly the same thing. Massive sculptural buildings, not spatial, not for human habitation. It's expressive and powerful.

Blum: Hasn't that always been one of the intentions, to express something? Power?

Graham: Not power.

Blum: Well, what about corporations when they build their buildings?

Graham: Now you're catching on. That's who these architects appeal to. That's who Philip Johnson appeals to.

Blum: But you designed Sears Tower and that's a corporate symbol.

Graham: Let me just say this about the Sears Tower. Ada Louise Huxtable came to visit it before they made the changes on it—because the remodeling that has been done is anti my ideas—she said it was the only democratic highrise building she ever saw. And it was. It was very simple, there were no big stainless steel interiors. There were white plastic elevators. And the building was very simple. And who was the sculptor? Sandy Calder. What have they done now? They've changed the lobby and made the ceiling higher and they changed the proportions of the Calder. They're animals.

Blum: But I was talking about the building itself as an image for the corporation that built it. They capitalized on it. They used it.

Graham: Originally there were more tubes, it wasn't just nine. The original design had six more tubes, so it was fifteen, a series of tubes going up and down. Harry Weese cried one night and said "Bruce, I wish I had thought of that." It was the best compliment I ever got from Harry Weese. We were in a bar under Wacker Drive. When the chairman—at that time Sears was different than it is now, it was strictly a marketing department and it did not have all the corporate things that it does now—the chairman wanted to build downtown. He first wanted to move out, those were the two choices, move out or build downtown. Mayor Daley and he made a deal, so he decided that he would move downtown. It was not so much to occupy a monument—in fact the building that they had in mind was only sixty stories high, but with a massive floor. I told the chairman that if you ever move out of this building, nobody else is going to be able to occupy it and it will be a black cow in the middle of the city of Chicago. So he agreed. And I made the tube thing so that the top floors would accommodate smaller floors and I made the other floors smaller too so that they could be used by other users than Sears Roebuck. Then, of course, Sears went into all kinds of other businesses. I don't know much about it, but I know they don't do it very well. Certainly Wal-Mart passed them, and so now Sears decided, against the original chairman, to move their headquarters out of town. And they have moved their headquarters out of town.

Blum: They did in 1992.

Graham: That's what I mean, so now they are no longer a citizen. The old guys felt a responsibility to the city and the business community. They always were part of the Commercial Club, and they supported the Burnham Plan of Chicago, and all the way to the Central Area Committee. The chairman did not want a monument. He said it may celebrate my employees and the city, but he was very clear, very emphatic about that. So it was not a solid monument. You feel the sense of space when you look at the Sears Tower, you feel that the structure is defining the floors and what have you.

Blum: Wouldn't the floors have even been larger, and certainly at the lower levels, had you done the intended six more towers?

Graham: No, because it would have been a link to a hotel.

Blum: They were going to build a hotel?

Graham: Yes, that's why the building's on the side, they canceled it after we had already sited it. Then we had a link from which there would have been shops and then three more towers, but not that high, for the hotel.

Blum: So what exists now is on what part of the land?

Graham: This is the tower, and this was to be the hotel. It was also to have had the penthouse, so this would not have been the same tower. The idea of reducing the floor, first, is that now it was usable by the smaller tenant than the big floors that Sears had. Then to reduce it, a lot of lawyers love it and they rented it all. Finally, the last piece went like this—the lower floors were designed so that you could take out a bay and the structure still goes through. You can take that out and take this out and have a U-shaped office floor with an atrium here and an atrium there. It's designed that way.

Blum: But the hotel was never built. And it would have been on the south side of the site?

Graham: Yes, it would have been south. That's why the building is oriented to the north.

Blum: Why wasn't the hotel built?

Graham: I don't know. I almost cried because...

Blum: Was construction already underway?

Graham: Yes.

Blum: Had you known before construction started, would you have redesigned the building?

Graham: We would have sited it differently, but the building would have been the same. I don't really know what I would have done. I might have left the design so that you could add another office building to the south, but I'm not sure. But Sears Tower had the volume, the permissible volume to do it. They still do. They haven't used all the FAR, the floor to area ratio.

Blum: How did the design that was built come about?

Graham: One of the things—the chairman's name, by the way, was Gordon Metcalf, and he was brilliant—Gordon said that he didn't want any of those damn diagonal things like the Hancock building. So by this time, I was working with Fazlur Khan on a lot of tube buildings, like the Shell Plaza building. It's very efficient, and costs a lot less than any of the New York skyscrapers, and you can build taller. We had built so many single tubes that I took out my cigarettes and I said to Faz, "Why don't we build a whole bunch of little tubes that stop at different heights?" This was at the Chicago Club.

Blum: Were you being facetious?

Graham: No, I had been thinking about it. And Faz said, "That's a great idea!" So I built my cigarette structure and it worked. And it doesn't need diagonals because the structures go through.

Blum: What is the biggest problem in designing tall, tall buildings, as you have built in Chicago?

Graham: The Chicago workers were terrific.

Blum: I was asking about your concerns, as you design.

Graham: Chicago is a city of skyscrapers. New York is not. New York is a city that's a huge rock that has been carved out to make streets. Bunshaft was always jealous when he came to Chicago because he could stand and see the buildings. In New York, you can't do that. You have to be miles away to see the buildings. I was actually standing in front of the Empire State building with Roy Allen and a couple asked me where the Empire State building was. I said, "You're standing right in front of it." They didn't have any idea. You have no sense of the buildings. Rockefeller Center was the first one that you could see, and after that there were really none. Even Mies tried to do that by setting the Seagram back and then the architect next door took his building back, so it takes away from what Mies was trying to do which was to salvage a little plaza that was surrounded by buildings so that you could see the Seagram. So in Chicago, most buildings you can see. People love living in apartment buildings. They move there deliberately. In New York you can't help it. My son lives in New York and he can't help it, he's got to live in an apartment building. But in Chicago, people actually fight to see who's going to be over the twenty-first floor. You never build an apartment building less than twenty-one stories in Chicago, forget it. You can see the lake and the city and the airport.

Blum: Chicago is also a city with only three sides. We have the lake on the east side.

Graham: But that's not the favorite view. The corner is, but not straight east, because it is a dark hole at night. But north or south is nice.

Blum: Maybe I asked my question in a peculiar way. Let me rephrase it. Is wind the biggest consideration in building a very tall building in Chicago?

Graham: I don't think it was more so than anything else. Tall buildings react to wind.

Blum: But we're an especially windy city.

Graham: That only refers to politicians. It's not the highest by any means. Any city in the Midwest has a lot of wind. The winds from the sea are a lot higher than the winds in Chicago. The storms that went though here [Florida] don't compare to the winds that went through Maine and Boston, those were really destructive. Chicago has had a one hundred and ten mile an hour wind at the Sears Tower, but that was way up on top. That wasn't really a problem. Stability is a concern. The fact that the Hancock and the Sears have a bigger base makes for stability. If you do the reverse, it's just the opposite of gravity. After a certain height, you have to start with a larger base, like the Eiffel Tower, with a narrow top and a large base.

Blum: But that's also open and the wind can just whistle through it. Wind can't do that if you're living above the twenty-first floor.

Graham: We designed one where it could, but we never built it. By doing that, it counters what we call the vibration effect. You remember the bridge that fell down in Washington State? It starts to vibrate and then it picks up the rhythm and it just exaggerates, so the bridge fell down. If you put holes through a building, then it tends to dampen that.

Blum: I read an interview with Ray Worley, vice-president of Morse Diesel, who worked to construct Sears. He said there were three hundred tradesmen and they worked around the clock for three years.

Graham: Less.

Blum: Less than three years? He said that it was his impression that they had fun working on that building. It was a challenge and a project that they were inspired by. He said there was just a wonderful spirit among the tradesmen. That's very unusual to hear anything good about tradesmen in Chicago. How did this happen?

Graham: I don't agree with you. I think by and large the buildings I worked on in Chicago the workmen have loved. But Sears was a new experience and it was more for steelworkers and glaziers. It was, I believe, the tallest steel structure in the world.

Blum: Was that part of their excitement?

Graham: Yes. Steelworkers are wonderful. They have to start from the ground, because if you start them on the tenth floor, they'll fall off. I'll never forget the great topping-off ceremony when the last piece of steel went in. Mayor Richard J. Daley was there and the police came and said to us, "The steelworkers are out there making a riot. What should we do, Mayor?" And he said, "Leave them alone!" I agreed with him. Steelworkers are just unbelievable workers. Believe it or not, they're gentle.

Blum: Did you share their excitement as the building was rising?

Graham: Not as much as they did, it was impossible to. They were applauding as it went up each step of the way.

Blum: Did you ever go up on all the scaffolds?

Graham: Yes, but not on all of them. The funniest thing about that was that we have photographs of the plumbing being set in place ahead of the steel. It was under construction as we kept going. They were prefabricating it and as soon as they could get the steel up there, it went right in. The workers were wonderful. I can't tell you how much I admired Chicago construction workers. Here in Florida, they're a disaster.

Blum: You're talking about steelworkers, do you have the same opinion about all tradesmen? I thought that unions were such a problem in Chicago.

Graham: It's the other way around. Without the unions, those workers wouldn't be any good. They wouldn't make any money. It's a problem for the chairman of General Motors, but it's not a problem for the worker who gets paid to risk his life by walking on a steel structure.

Blum: What about the plasterers' union?

Graham: The best plasterer in the world, Monroe McNulty, worked in Chicago.

Blum: But doesn't the union force you to do things that are not really necessary?

Graham: As an architect? No, it's the other way around. I'd go to ask the plasterers how to do it. Come on, they know better. They'd have it all done in plaster, no drywall, in Chicago, by McNulty. You can't believe how accurate it was. We had some furniture made in New York by another craftsman for our living room in our home and they just set it in. The dimensions that McNulty put in the plaster were right on the button.

Blum: Well, the union's reputation is not known as you describe it.

Graham: That's because you're not talking to the families of the construction workers. Who are you talking to that says that?

Blum: I'm not talking to anyone. I'm reading about it.

Graham: I don't agree with you at all. My personal experience with Chicago construction workers was terrific in every sense. The union trained them. Here in Florida they're totally untrained and they're animals.

Blum: We're talking about a different time in history, too. Sears was done from 1969 to 1974.

Graham: The unions were very strong in Chicago at that time.

Blum: Do you think that the fine workmanship was because the unions were so strong?

Graham: Of course, the unions were able to train them. Who else trains them? If you think the schools on the South Side train them, they don't. They're trained by the union. Apprenticeship. That's the way architects used to be trained. How do you think Sullivan was trained? He was an apprentice. How do you think Frank Lloyd Wright was trained? He was an apprentice. Now they have all these rules. I have to take a test to keep my license. You should see the people. I don't have to take a test, but I have to take these courses, and I take them from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Blum: How did you handle that?

Graham: I don't. One of them, a woman, was teaching me about handicap access and half the time she was talking about other things. And I finally started correcting her, one after the other corrections, and she was saying, Well you have to think about the building commissioners and authorities and they're terrible to deal with. And I said, "Lady, how do you deal with them if you don't have lunch with them sometimes? Then you get to know them and you get to know what they're trying to do. And when you have your sketches, before you do the final drawings, review the design sketches with them."

Blum: Are they available for that?

Graham: They'll all do that. For any architect.

Blum: I suppose speaking up in class like you did helps everyone there because they hear a more experienced other opinion. Did she give you a good grade?

Graham: She didn't have to give me a grade. All I had to do was listen to her, which I didn't do very much. I had one other in history, and he didn't know what he was talking about. He was telling us all about France. His only qualification was that he'd taken a trip to France. I learned architecture by working at Holabird and Root as an apprentice and at Skidmore as an apprentice.

Blum: You must be impatient with situations like that.

Graham: Well, I look at the kind of students that go to Skidmore and look for a job. They're locked up nine months of the year, and they're too young to be locked up. They should go out and get a job on a construction site. Number one, it's healthier. Number two, they learn what the craft is all about. Number three, they see how buildings are put together. They'd learn something they'd never learn in college.

Blum: Did you do that?

Graham: Sure, I did it in the navy.

Blum: You said you were building radar equipment.

Graham: Yeah, but I was on a ship. I learned a lot about that. I built the towers. Where do you think I had to climb? Up to the top of the masts! I installed the equipment.

Blum: Do you think students listen to that?

Graham: Now they do. There's a whole crop of very good young architects, coming up in America, who despise Mr. Goldberger's proof. They're from the East and very idealistic. And, by the way, about sixty percent of them are women. There are more women going into architecture than men.

Blum: I've heard that according to the schools, but I don't know what happens once they get out? They may go into related professions.

Graham: No, they're going into the firms. The last one who won the big prize was a woman architect. Young women, they've been winning prizes in America.

Blum: Does that please you?

Graham: Yes. My wife is a hell of an architect and she's my number one critic. Whenever I was doing something wrong, she was right.

Blum: Take Sears. Was she the first one to see it as the design unfolded?

Graham: She liked Sears a lot. She ended up doing a lot of the interiors at Sears. She did all the interiors for the Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal law offices.

Blum: So Sears went up, and it caused big, big excitement. And, of course, Chicago cashed in on the fact that it had the tallest building in the world, and Sears cashed in, and you cashed in, and everyone got applause for it. But very soon after that, I think you were called back to do revisions: a new front and a new back.

Graham: I did the first addition and the first change, but it was very simple. The reason for the change was that the building was more popular than we thought. So the people going to the observation deck were bustling through the office users, so the change was made to make it easier to separate that traffic.

Blum: Did you do the barrel vault entrance that faces Wacker?

Graham: Yes, I did that. That's the beginning of the separation. And also the front was slightly changed so we could make that separation from the front. We were trying to get most of the people who go to the building for office work to come in on Jackson.

Blum: But that was changed a little, too.

Graham: Yes, it's changed since I did it.

Blum: But you also did an alteration.

Graham: You know, an office building—any urban building, especially hospitals, by the way—should be like a loft building, because the changes in society change the use. So Sears is an ideal example because I could take the floors out, I could make it higher or lower, that is important when you're building in the city, because it's not so easily taken down. It's an investment, not only of Sears, but of the city of Chicago. It's an investment of the city itself to allow this building to be built, so that it could be used for anything. I could have put apartments in the Sears Tower, it would have taken less elevators, by the way. I could have put a factory in it, because office buildings are really factories. I'm convinced now that we don't need to have dropped ceilings in an office building. Every office building and technical building should have a raised floor, not a false ceiling.

Blum: Why?

Graham: Because with computers and computer technology, you don't want the light coming from there. You can't read them. You want the light to be very low from the ceiling and all power and light to be around the equipment. Think of it as a factory. I can make the Sears Tower into a commercial and industrial factory, no problem. That is important, as opposed to the sadness of the old

Sears building on State Street that can't support the weight of a library. They are loft buildings, but they can't support any other use, and that is very sad. They could have kept the Fair Store that is across from the Palmer House. But really, the building was not built to take any real load. You look at the buildings that are under conversion in the East, the old mill buildings. They are now apartment buildings and they are terrific. The Carson Pirie Scott building could be anything. You could make it into a hotel, or anything. That building will last forever. You have to think of things that way. That's exactly how the old cities in Europe think and that's why they don't tear any of their old buildings down. They reuse them, but they change their use. It doesn't have to be the same use. We build hospital rooms with nine-foot ceilings. Fortunately at Penn we got a written agreement that the hospital building would have a minimal floor-to-ceiling height of thirteen feet in any room, whether it's a bedroom or an X-ray room, or whatever, because you don't want to necessarily put all the beds together for only today's technology. You want to put the beds near the sciences where they will be at in the future. More importantly, you're going to have fewer people staying in hospitals. A cancer patient should not be in the hospital for six months. He should be in for treatment and then go home. That's true of almost any medicine. Women giving birth don't stay there the way they used to, it's not good for the mother. Now they've got all these nurseries and beds for women and you don't need them. I swore I would never do any hospitals. Dealing with doctors is ridiculous, they know everything about everything. More than the government, at least the government admits they're stupid, they're just in power.

Blum: So about this alteration and addition that you did for Sears, one article raised the question if that was an admission of a difficult or a faulty design to begin with.

Graham: No. It was an admission of a huge success that we never thought would happen. The fact that there was the Hancock made it even more so, not less so. The kids go up at the same time and watch one another and talk to one

another. They'd go up there when there was lightning and it was packed. It's a great show. You'd see the antennae lightning up and go "Crash!"

Blum: In spite of what you say, and in spite of what was said at the time and all the acclaim that the building got—Faz Khan made statements over and over that this was a humane building—I don't know whether people really accepted that.

Graham: It depends what people. I'm going to say it again and again. The first ones to recognize the Hancock building were the cab drivers, not the press.

Blum: Because they had to take people there?

Graham: No, you didn't take very many people to the Hancock building because it was not a very successful office building and the rest was apartments. You asked the taxi driver to take you to the best building in town, and that's exactly where they took you. They understood it. Now, of course, the anti- establishment that true modern architecture causes makes the people you talk to say that. I'm talking about the elite of Chicago who don't like it.

Blum: The elite don't write comments in papers and journals.

Graham: Who owns the papers?

Blum: I didn't speak to owners of papers.

Graham: Is there any architectural critic in Chicago left? You don't have any newspapers anymore, they're gone. Ask European critics, architectural critics, about those buildings. Ask them.

Blum: So are you saying that it's not a fair comment? Are you saying that Sears is a humane building?

Graham: The French hated the Eiffel Tower, the elite hated it, and the press hated it. What's the Eiffel Tower now?

Blum: It's the symbol of Paris. It's true.

Graham: What's the Hancock Tower now? Believe me, I can see the press and the papers, and when they talk about Chicago they talk about Hancock first and the Sears second. Sears because it's taller, but Hancock because it's more Chicago. I can't imagine the Hancock building in New York. It wouldn't fit, but it does in Chicago.

Blum: Why not in New York?

Graham: It's not part of the rock.

Blum: It's too structural?

Graham: Yes. Listen to the conversation in the New York subway sometime. They really think that apples came out of the factory. They're totally unrelated to the land or to anything. They're one hundred percent abstract people. The businessmen are abstract and you should just talk to any of the insurance people there. They're totally abstract. They have no visual capabilities whatsoever. Zero. That's New York, and New York is always going to be New York, because that's the rule of people. Those people are mathematically oriented, they're not visual people. There are exceptions like the Rockefeller family, which had the vision to do modern architecture. But if you think the locals like the building, they don't.

Blum: Do you think that in Chicago, the people who think that Sears is not a humane building...

Graham: People are going to say that. I don't care whether people say that or not, it doesn't matter. The insults that all the big buildings have had to endure in the

past makes me feel good. Do you realize that Brunelleschi went through hell for his Duomo?

Blum: I don't want to put you in the position of defending it.

Graham: I'm not. I'm just telling you the building is a Chicago building and it's not the only one. There are lots of Chicago buildings. I think Helmut Jahn is probably the one architect now who understands what I'm talking about.

Blum: Jim De Stefano, who, I think, was not with SOM at the time, remodeled the lobby, and he has said that his remodeling simply enhances the original structure.

Graham: I don't agree. He was decorating. It changed the whole idea that the black columns inside reminded you of the black columns outside, right? I wanted to give the sense of time, to recognize that this black column is like that black column and that you're moving through a space between them.

Blum: He covered those with shiny silvery material.

Graham: It was terrible. He did the elevators, too.

Blum: Did he consult with you at all?

Graham: No, he would have known better. Besides, John Buck was the one who hired him at the time and I can't stand John Buck.

Blum: Was John Buck managing the building at the time?

Graham: He was representing them, I don't know exactly what his role was. I think he wanted me to defend him on the Arts Club deal. I said to him, "John, I wouldn't do you a favor for anything in the world." He's very pigheaded. The interior of the old Arts Club was a terrible building. Mies did that interior,

but he did a lot of other interiors. If they really wanted that interior, they could have reproduced the space in the new building, exactly the same. John Buck never offered to do that, I don't think. Nevertheless, it's part of history. I like the Arts Club a lot, and New Yorkers are jealous of it.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Blum: You have said that Sears was never one of your favorites. Why?

Graham: That was taken out of context.

Blum: Can you put it in context?

Graham: I never thought of one building as a piece of work. I thought of a sequence of buildings as my work. So there isn't a favorite at all. I think that's where the quote comes in. I felt that they were all related to one another, that they're all a continuous idea. From time to time, there was one where, in my mind, I didn't succeed. That it didn't fit into what I was doing. Some of that was because I tried to develop other designers.

Blum: In your team?

Graham: Within the firm. To give them a chance to do more than I would normally allow them to do, different than I would do. In those cases, those buildings really don't fit.

Blum: Your sequence of development?

Graham: My sequence. Certainly Sears would not be one of them.

Blum: When Sears moved out in 1992, a study came out that said that many of the workers who worked in the building didn't like working there at all. They

didn't like coming downtown, they didn't like what they had to do to get there.

Graham: That is probably true. I don't think it has much to do with the building. Sears tried to recruit a lot of suburban people, particularly women, who couldn't work full-time, but could work part-time. They didn't fit into the idea that Gordon Metcalf had, which was to be able to draw talent for leadership of the company from the whole city, rather than just the West Side. So there were quite a few that quit when the building was built, because they didn't want to work downtown. I don't think that got better. With time it got worse. The traffic got worse because they didn't build the Crosstown Expressway and the trucking got worse. I think that's why a lot of people didn't like it. But the people like the lawyers, like Sonnenschein up on the top floors, they loved it. People who live on the Near North Side—the top secretaries in Chicago live on the Near North Side—they love it. Number one, they get paid a lot, number two, they're city dwellers and they're close to work. I really think that from a planning point of view the canceling of the Crosstown Expressway was an economic disaster for Chicago.

Blum: But that would have brought more people into the city by car.

Graham: No, the Crosstown went around the city. The idea was, number one, to save all the jobs along that plan that Burnham did with all the railroad tracks. But now those industries don't use the railroads, they use trucks. So we predicted that if they didn't build the Crosstown Expressway, the industries would leave, and they left. We lost fifty thousand jobs with Western Electric alone, and the idea was also to get the trucks to go around the city, rather than to drive through the city, which is what they do now. It's a reverse of what you're saying. It would have made it a lot easier to put more mass transit into the city and to keep the jobs in the western neighborhoods. All those jobs were lost.

Blum: The objection, as I remember it, was that so many homeowners would be displaced.

Graham: That was garbage.

Blum: That was the position that the American Institute of Architects took.

Graham: I don't know about the AIA, but if they did, they were stupid. It was contrary to that. The total number of homes ... You can get this report, it's in the records. The director was Joe Passonneau and we got him from Washington University in St. Louis, and we had the top highway planner from MIT, and the best political planner from the Kennedy administration.

Blum: Was this a study that SOM undertook?

Graham: Yes, it was not just us, we had a whole team. The plan was brilliant. It was to have the two roads parallel around the industrial corridor, where all the plants were. You would drive on the left side lane, rather than the right side lane.

Blum: Like in England?

Graham: It has nothing to do with England. It has to do with turning. The highway was split and in the center was an industrial corridor. When a truck comes, it turns in to the industrial corridor to get to the industry. You drive on the right side, but you're going to turn in. You're never interfering with the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods supported it one hundred percent. It wasn't voted down by Chicago, it was voted down by the state. Everybody downstate hates Chicago, it's typical. Dan Walker became governor—Richard Ogilvie and Mayor Daley both supported it—but Walker ran against Ogilvie and won. This was one of the issues that helped Walker win. He ended up in jail because he was a crook.

Blum: Paul McCurry was president of the AIA and he spoke out against the Crosstown as head of the AIA. He objected to the Crosstown as it was first proposed, elevated on stilts. It was because of his fight against that design that SOM and C. F. Murphy were asked to be consultants and came up with the redesigned plan that you describe.

Graham: Paul McCurry didn't object to our plan. What I describe is the truth, you can look it up. The total number of homes that we were going to displace was something like one hundred and fifty. One hundred and fifty! We debated how much we should pay these people for their homes and the loss of their neighborhood. We had these scientists and economists from MIT figure it out. They couldn't come up with a number. So finally they went to a meeting with Mayor Daley and told him this was the plan. Mayor Daley thought it was good that there were only that few neighborhoods effected and he said that he would talk to them. And they said, "But Mayor Daley, we don't know how much we should pay these people for dislocating them." Mayor Daley said, "How about $60,000 per house?" That was about three times what they were worth.

Blum: He wanted to make it attractive.

Graham: Mayor Daley knew these people. He didn't want them to be penalized for relocating. He was trying to make it work. That's not the way the government works, because it usually has a valuation of the land and then expropriates it for highways for that valuation, for what it's worth.

Blum: So do you think that if that road had been built that the Sears building would not have suffered the fate that it did? It was quite vacant when Sears moved out.

Graham: I know Sears moved out, but they moved out for the reason I told you. There really is no question that none of the people on the upper floors have moved out of the Sears Tower. Certainly a lot of the floors below them have been

rented, but we're talking about two million square feet in a kind of recession period, where you don't really need as much office space as you did. And a lot of the buildings in New York that are virtually empty aren't counted as being vacant, because the banks now don't need all these people doing things by hand. The computer does it and the computer has put a lot of office workers out of work. Chicago has actually done fairly well, but there is still a lot of banking space that is empty. They don't tell anyone because the bank is in it and it's one hundred percent leased, it's not a rental building. In Sears Tower, if John Buck had listened to me, I wouldn't have done what he did. I wouldn't have spent all this money on doing the elevators and doing all that. What I would have done is start leasing the atrium-type space for smaller tenants, with elevator stops where you could come out into an atrium with a reception area. Then you'd get lawyers. There's no way you're going to get lawyers to move out of the top floors.

Blum: But you think the smaller spaces would have rented?

Graham: Yes. It's a huge floor. It's fifty thousand square feet and not many people can use that.

Blum: It's hard to conceive that kind of space.

Graham: Only the government, or Sears... We said that at the time. But Sears wanted sixty thousand square feet and every floor would have been worse. When they'd move out, nobody would be able to rent the space.

Blum: Did they miscalculate? They had an established hometown image. They had a mail-order business and then they built this big, important building that attracted so much attention. And not even twenty years later...

Graham: But that's not all it is. They made a pile of money. Do you know what the building cost? Three hundred million. They sold it for a billion one.

Blum: Is that why they sold it? I thought there were internal problems.

Graham: I'm sure that was the main reason they sold it. They actually had an offer for a billion five from a Canadian developer, Olympia and York. That's in the book about the history of Olympia and York that was just published a couple of months ago.

Blum: I thought that Sears's problems were mostly internal. They weren't as successful there, their people didn't like it, their image was changing...

Graham: Not at all.

Blum: But they did move to a very different facility. It was suburban and small.

Graham: Cheaper to build. They sold the Sears Tower for a huge profit. They made more money selling the building that year, I think, than they made in their whole darn chain of stores. You think they lost money in that building? You've got to be kidding. They made so much money they probably didn't have to pay capital gains taxes, since they were losing a lot in other places.

Blum: You've been quoted to say that Sears was not one of your favorites. But you dispute that and say that it follows in your developmental sequence.

Graham: It is in that chain. Sure. A structure of nine bundled tubes, each seventy-five feet square, a very tall building where you can read the spaces in it. There's no reason why it doesn't fit with the others.

Blum: Does it fit into the city, as such? In the city where it is?

Graham: Let me ask, was Chartres the same without Chartres Cathedral? I'm not comparing Sears Tower to Chartres, but it made a change. Was Chicago the same before the Palmolive building? A lot of buildings can shape the city.

They change it. The facility which we have now to build tall buildings, which we didn't have before, makes it possible to build these buildings economically and therefore not have to use the car so much.

Blum: You mean if you live there?

Graham: Sure. I build the cities for the people who live there. They can take the El, they can take the buses, they can take the train to the train station. That's what you build them for. The high-density, small city. The Loop is relatively high-density. The densities in some of the areas of Chicago exceed those of New York. There is no area in New York that has the density of apartment buildings that Chicago has around the Hancock building.

Blum: Because many of them are highrise?

Graham: That's right. And everybody likes living there.

Blum: But that's a pretty glamorous section of town to live in, and it's pretty expensive.

Graham: Sure, if it's more attractive, it's more expensive.

Blum: We jumped ahead by talking about Sears, but it just happened that way. Can we go back to some of your earlier years?

Graham: Sure.

Blum: The same year that you were building Kimberly-Clark, there was another building that you built in Tulsa, the Warren Petroleum building.

Graham: It was slightly after.

Blum: It was a twelve-story building. It certainly was a highrise, but would it qualify, according to your definition, as a skyscraper? I don't know where a highrise stops and a skyscraper begins.

Graham: I don't either. I had that argument once with Michael Graves. Helmut wasn't there in New York when we were all supposed to be interviewed by Harry Cobb about our submissions for Columbus Circle—this was the first submission. Michael sat next to Cobb and started asking questions of Helmut's representative, saying, "Why such a tall building?" Helmut had, I don't know how many, maybe sixty or seventy stories. "Why do you have to build this tall a building?" Michael said it was a kind of evil. I interrupted him and I said, "When you were building one- and two-story houses, you thought that a ten-story building was evil. Then you did a ten-story building and you thought a twenty-story building was evil. Then you did one in Oregon, if I remember, that was twenty stories. And now you're proposing a fifty-story building for this site. Is that not a skyscraper? I give up."

Blum: Perspectives change.

Graham: Sure, depending on the town. A very tall building, surrounded by tall buildings doesn't look as tall as one tall building in a little town that has only four-story buildings.

Blum: Was this a skyscraper, in Tulsa, at that time?

Graham: No. There were other tall buildings at that time. It was a very gentle and soft building, with a wonderful owner.

Blum: As I look at pictures, one shot from one angle...

Graham: It's not in the center of town.

Blum: That isn't clear from the photograph. As I look I see references to a bit of Corbusier and a little of Mies.

Graham: Corbusier? I don't see anything about Corbusier.

Blum: Well, it has pilotis and it's raised from the ground.

Graham: Remember, Mies did that too.

Blum: Well, do you think it's more Miesian?

Graham: I would think it's more Mies. The structure is the black part. This is a cantilever, it's not structure. It's protected on the two ends, for this balcony, for the wind. The structure is black, like a Miesian structure. Except that Mies never thought of a cantilever. It's a theme in that building of a thirty-by- thirty-foot bay with a ten-foot cantilever. The whole structure is like that, that building and the other are repetitive. We called it a grid structure at that time. We had a Chinese structural engineer, very nice, who went on to teach at the University of Illinois.

Blum: What was your vocabulary for Warren Petroleum?

Graham: It's still the same. It's continuing. It's a very simple structure for a tower, with regularly spaced columns. The climate was quite different so instead of using tinted glass to protect against the sun, I cantilevered the floor and then put a sunshade of glass outside the real glass.

Blum: Sunglasses for the building.

Graham: Exactly, and that worked very well. The chairman of the board had an apartment on the top floor. It was very private, with his own little elevator.

Blum: Did Bill Hartmann work on this one with you?

Graham: Yes. My wife worked on it, too. She did the interiors.

Blum: Was Jane your wife at the time?

Graham: No.

Blum: Did Fazlur Khan work on this project? He joined SOM in 1955.

Graham: I am not sure, but under Ken Naslund, the engineer for the project. After that Faz went back to school to get his doctorate. Ken Naslund later quit because he wasn't made a partner, which is too bad. In those days it was very difficult to convince the senior partnership of the necessity, or the desirability, of having engineering partnerships.

Blum: Had that been done before?

Graham: John Merrill, but then Merrill was kind of an exception. He was Owings's idea. The real, practicing engineers were not partners. That changed later.

Blum: Was there something special, some way you grew, from the experience with Warren Petroleum?

Graham: It was another step to a more sophisticated building from Kimberly-Clark. Jack Kimberly was a very wonderful client, and very simple. He was easy to work with, the same with Mr. Warren. Tulsa is a different town. It's like night and day.

Blum: For this project, did you go to Tulsa to become acquainted with what might be suitable in Tulsa?

Graham: We traveled a lot in Tulsa. We always did that. Before we start design, we do programming. Programming includes that, those things you don't even put

down on paper. Architects are trained to perceive that. You get a feel for that faster than most people. Jane, for example, has a real sense of space and color. So did Dave Allen. They don't need to travel as much as other people because they don't waste time on what's ugly. They skip all of that and make believe it isn't there.

Blum: In the late 1950s, you had a project going with Herb Greenwald for a hotel on Michigan Avenue. He went to New York to get financing and he never returned because his plane crashed. So it was not built.

Graham: Did you know he had a multi-million dollar life insurance policy that he took on sort of as propaganda? It was in the papers. Then a week later he died. Herb was a wonderful guy.

Blum: I thought Mies owned him, how did you get a commission from him?.

Graham: It was the other way around. He made Mies. Nobody hired Mies, only Herb Greenwald.

Blum: Why did he switch to SOM and to you?

Graham: Because this was a kind of problem that Mies wasn't terribly interested in.

Blum: The hotel?

Graham: A hotel or a hospital. Mies was not interested in those kinds of buildings because they were too specific, too programmatic. Mies's interest in architecture was not of the area that Corbu's was, or, for that matter, Hilberseimer's was. That's why he had Hilberseimer. Mies was more interested in developing a vocabulary, just a vocabulary. I asked him about public housing. He said, "Bruce, you should remember that poor families need a lot of space and rich families need only a little space." I said, "How do you finance that?" He said, "You figure it out." He was right. He was

interested in developing the language. I saw Hilberseimer just give him hell for having buildings with glass on four sides, no matter where the sun was. Then Mies would say, "Jah Hilbs, you're right!"

Blum: But energy wasn't a big consideration back then. Was that where Hilberseimer was coming from?

Graham: No, he was a master planner. He was an urban designer. He was thinking that these houses are public and they must face the right way and the sun must be... Mies was not interested at all in that. Like building apartment buildings, refining each piece of it... When Mies put mullions in front of the columns at 860 Lake Shore Drive, I thought all the students would revolt. I thought he had just gone over the top because why would you put a mullion on top of what was already a big steel column. Simply because it keeps the rhythm. He called it structure, but he meant aesthetic structure, not Bruce Graham or Faz Khan structure. He meant the aesthetic structure.

Blum: Do you think you really understood him?

Graham: Sure. It was difficult for students within IIT, and still is today, to understand.

Blum: Why?

Graham: They were in such awe. He was a god. There wasn't another intellect in the city, in any field. There just wasn't! Think about it.

Blum: Are you suggesting that his loyal following was a handicap?

Graham: Yes, for Mies it was.

Blum: No, I mean for the students, do you think they were they blind to truly understand and appreciate?

Graham: He used them to develop the language. He made them go through just thousands of drawings. I don't think it was a handicap for the students, because if you were very bright, you would get it, like Myron Goldsmith did. The problem is that the recruitment of kids at IIT came from Chicago. It wasn't international. If German kids are going to chose to come to Harvard with Gropius or Mies at IIT, where do you think they're going to go? Harvard with Gropius.

Blum: But there were students who chose to go to IIT to study with Mies when they could have gone to another school.

Graham: But there were only a few. As I knew them, they were not the top intellects of architecture except for a few like Takeuchi, Bronson and Jim Speyer.

Blum: I don't know what kind of school the University of Pennsylvania was, but IIT was a hands-on kind of experience, and Harvard and Yale and Princeton were intellectual or more abstract.

Graham: Not while Gropius was there.

Blum: Was that a hands-on experience?

Graham: Oh, sure. Any school of architecture is handicapped by the teachers not building. Very handicapped. I don't just mean a little bit. I fought the battle at Penn for years and I finally won. Jane and I gave them a professorship, but it must go to a practicing architect. I'm not going to give it to a theorist. This started at the University of California at Berkeley. Then the dean moved to Harvard. He did the same thing to Harvard. He started saying that you don't have to draw, just talk about it. It's awful. It was during Vietnam that there was a period of weakness in American architecture schools. The graduates that came out of that group were awful. I'll tell you they were subpar students. We, unfortunately, ended up with a lot of them at SOM who didn't understand architecture, in my mind. Hands-on means building buildings.

The only ones at IIT who ever tried to build their own homes were Jim Speyer and Jacques Brownson.

Blum: Yes, Jack Brownson built his own home in Geneva.

Graham: But Jack was not teaching at the time, he was a student. I'm talking about people who were teaching at the school. When Mies first came there, they had faculty who were architects, like Bill Priestley. But they were not that experienced. They had gone to the Bauhaus, but they were not that experienced. They were building nothing at that time because it was the depression. The students left, most of those guys left and went to other firms or started their own businesses. That crop of guys left. The next crop became idolaters. If it didn't look like Mies, it was bad. That's baloney. In the first place, none of them had the sense of beauty that Mies had, except maybe for Art Takeuchi.

Blum: He worked at SOM afterwards, didn't he?

Graham: Yes, he worked with me. And then Myron also, but in a different way. Myron is a very misunderstood person, in that he wasn't really an engineer. The real engineer was Faz. To compare the two—Myron studied architecture. It's quite a different thing to visualize the structure in mathematical terms in your head, which Faz could do. And he could explain it to architects. That's why people loved him. He was the only engineer I ever met who could explain structures to architects in a poetic way. He had a very gentle way. Myron worked with Nervi, that was an apprenticeship that was very important to his aesthetic understanding, but he was not Nervi. He was actually an architect, and a good one.

Blum: Do you mean like the gymnasium, the building that Myron did on campus?

Graham: No. They give him credit for United Airlines in Elk Grove [Illinois}. But he didn't do United Airlines, I did United Airlines. I was doing those kind of buildings before Myron came to the office. Period.

Blum: Now that you bring it up, there were other projects, like the Brunswick building...

Graham: Bill Hartmann had the idea of doing a tube building, because Pei had done one in New York. Then he asked me to do it. That's when Myron came from San Francisco.

Blum: For Brunswick?

Graham: No, not for Brunswick. I guess Chuck Bassett didn't want him there anymore and he brought with him Jim Ferris . The way Brunswick started, I had designed a steel building first, in Cor-ten. Then we got the Civic Center [renamed the Richard J. Daley Center], with the plaza in front. It was C.F. Murphy, SOM, and Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett. Dick Bennett and Jack Brownson and myself were representatives on the design team. Art Takeuchi represented me in the design team. Each office had a representative. Jack had a scheme which was very nice, but was almost exactly like the Federal Center. The idea was for more than one building—to have it at the north end, between the Federal Center and the Civic Center, these two buildings represented the Loop. It was a very pretty idea. But he had exactly the same bay and exactly the same exterior as the Federal Center building.

Blum: Was the Federal Center building already being built at the time? I thought that followed the Civic Center.

Graham: It was already designed. It was before the Civic Center. I developed a scheme, with Art, of very long spans because this was going to be a courthouse. We felt that we could have these big floors, we could have big floating court spaces, not big corridors, or whatever. Art maybe has drawings

of it, by the way. We talked about Cor-ten, because I had fallen in love with the Saarinen building in Cor-ten—the John Deere building in Moline. That was a beautiful one. Then Jack didn't want me to do it, so we had a meeting. We asked Myron to come over and say which scheme he liked better. Typical of Myron, he sat there and looked and looked and after what seemed like hours, he said, "You should build the biggest spans you can." So Jack caved in and we did it. Of course, he should have known ahead of time that Myron liked big spans after working with Nervi. Then Jack did a fantastic job of getting it built. I never saw an architect who worked so hard. But Art was very upset because Jack would not build a free floating courtroom, which was too bad. But as I told you before, maybe fifty years from now, somebody will think of it. Then the question was, when I was already working on the Brunswick, I had this Cor-ten building across the street. I decided that it wouldn't look good, that it would take away from the Civic Center to do another in the same material. This was all verified by Carter Manny recently in a talk he gave in Chicago.

Blum: But you had the plaza and street between the two buildings.

Graham: But still the uniqueness of the court building would be lost. So then Hartmann came up with the idea of building a tube building for Brunswick. We started working on it, and Myron started working on Brunswick by that time with me. I had one problem with it, which was how to enter it. The idea of lifting it off the ground was from Gordon Bunshaft. I had seen Gordon in New York, he had asked me to come, because he was doing Chase bank, I think. All this was after the Inland Steel building. These things are not unrelated. That's a different story, the way that building for Herb Greenwald was done, the one that was never built. I got the Brunswick job, but the guy who gave me the job was Perry Hurst, who worked for Rubloff. It was not built for the Brunswick Corporation. They were just a tenant. The owner was actually Rubloff. Brunswick may have had a small piece of it. Then the idea developed of lifting the building up in this great big beam and then being able to walk under it and enter it, which was the problem I had. I later solved

the problem differently, and maybe better. But nevertheless, it fit with the scale of the Civic Center.

Blum: What about the larger area on the bottom, the transfer ring?

Graham: That's where all the mechanical equipment is. It's inside that great big beam that goes all the way around it, it picks up that whole tube and transfers it to these great big columns. Inside that beam is the boiler plant. I wasn't losing any space. The basement was very useful for the underground connection to the city of Chicago, because they have shops down there.

Blum: I am a little confused because Brunswick has been called a tube in a tube, meaning there's an outer and an inner. But it's also been called a bearing wall building. My understanding of that is that the outer shell holds up that building and holds its own weight.

Graham: No, all the tube buildings have an outer tube and an inner tube. What you have then is a big span to the outer tube. In other words, the inner tube is holding very little load because it's very small. So from that inner tube you span to the outer tube and you're putting most of the weight on the outside wall. That's what makes it stable. That's true of the Hancock building and all tube structures.

Blum: How would you describe Brunswick?

Graham: It's a tube structure, but there are different kinds of tube structures. Some of them are clustered tubes like the Sears Tower. Some of them are single tubes with columns inside. Some of them are tubes within a tube. It all depends on the materials and the height. The taller the building the more you have to adjust the kind of structure. If you do a two-hundred-story building, then you'd have to have a bigger base, still a tube, probably, but you'd have to transfer the load to the outside as you go up, instead of bringing the inside core, like a tube.

Blum: Was it necessary or was it just a stylistic device to have the larger second floor with the transfer?

Graham: That's what's doing the transferring, all the little columns all the way around the building to the big columns on the ground floor. I have to transfer all these little bitty columns that form the tube on the outside to a big column. So I need a big beam, because that's a big load, so that's why I put the mechanical inside it. The beam is shaped like that and inside is the little core. It's simple, there's nothing to it.

Blum: It's said that the profile of the Brunswick building references the Monadnock building a few blocks down Dearborn. Is that just an afterthought that critics have given it?

Graham: Yes. It's an afterthought. Its shape has to do also with transferring the load to a wider beam. The beam is wider, so you have to make it come to the center of the beam.

Blum: So it had nothing to do with tying the Dearborn Street corridor together.

Graham: No. But in a way it's for the same reason. The Monadnock building gets fatter and fatter as it goes down because the load is getting bigger and you're picking up more floors.

Blum: But that's only sixteen stories, or something like that.

Graham: I know, but it's brick, not concrete and steel. It's a very tall heavy brick building.

Blum: So for Brunswick you worked on it with Myron. Did Faz?

Graham: Myron worked under me. I guess Faz did too, but he wasn't a partner yet. The idea of the tube was not ours. It was taken from a building by Pei in New York. I'm taking away credit from Skidmore, but that's the truth.

Blum: You're setting the record straight.

Graham: But as I said, the Monadnock building could be called a tube too. Certainly silos are tubes, all silo structures are tubes.

Blum: For a building that's concrete, why were the piers on the ground floor covered in travertine? Was it necessary?

Graham: No. We were going to cover the whole thing in travertine. But we ran out of money.

Blum: The whole building? Why would you have wanted to do that?

Graham: Because travertine would last forever, and concrete won't.

Blum: So it was a protective covering.

Graham: Yes. Concrete has to be painted. If you go to Rome now, and wet your finger and run it over the travertine at St. Peter's, it will clean right off. It's as strong as granite. It's not a marble.

Blum: Travertine is not a type of marble?

Graham: No, it's a separate kind of stone. There's granite, and travertine, and marble. Marble is the softest, as the builders in Chicago found out.

Blum: How do you think the Brunswick and the Civic Center relate to one another now?

Graham: I think they relate well. We had four corners held together, with the Picasso. It was very easy for me to talk to Miró and say, "You know, Picasso is doing one across the street for nothing."

Blum: How did you think to do that?

Graham: Yo hablo Español. Mas que uno poquito. It was a slam dunk.

Blum: Did you know him before this?

Graham: No, I met him for this. I met him in France at the Maeght Galleries. I knew the history that everything that Picasso did, Miró always tried to do something better. One time we went to Miró Foundation in southern France. There was a big birthday party, a huge birthday party, for Miró. They had a ballet that was written just for Miró and he did all the costumes. But where did he get that? From the ballet that was done before with Picasso and Serge Diaghliev. Artists are very child-like, very bright but very child-like.

Blum: I didn't know that there was a competition between Picasso and Miró. They were both Spanish, it's true.

Graham: Miró was Catalán.

Blum: What does that mean, he was stronger, more competitive?

Graham: Cataláns are much more competitive. But they got along very well. It was kind of like, "I can do one, you can do one."

Blum: Did you suggest to Miró what you wanted?

Graham: No. I told him where we wanted to put it. In fact, we told Picasso when his first maquette came back that I was very upset that it was so small. So they

made a big maquette and that put the right size on it. And Picasso was delighted. Sculptors don't generally have a sense of urban scale. Very few do.

Blum: Did Picasso ever see the place where it was going to be?

Graham: No but we built a model for him, and we had photographs of everything else.

Blum: Are you talking about for the maquette?

Graham: I'm talking about a model in which you could put objects, buildings, in it. He saw it right away and he was delighted that we wanted it that way. He still wanted it in bronze, but again, he didn't realize that you can't make something that big in bronze. So we talked him into Cor-ten steel and he loved the idea. Bill Hartmann did that.

Blum: Did you speak with Picasso at all? I know that Bill made several trips.

Graham: No, Bill did all the talking. He was very good. Do you want to know how we selected Picasso?

Blum: I thought it was an election by committee?

Graham: Yes, and we all put in names, and the first ones said "Henry Moore!"

Blum: And then?

Graham: "What about Picasso?"

Blum: Henry Moore's work was very popular for outdoor civic projects.

Graham: Yes, and we got him to give one free to Chicago.

Blum: Did you know Henry Moore?

Graham: Yes, he did the piece inside Three First National.

Blum: But that was later.

Graham: Yes. But then I told him that Picasso and Miró had given a piece, so why didn't he? Then he said, I always wanted to see the baby inside the mother, so we got it for the Art Institute.

Blum: In the north garden. He was a popular choice for outdoor sculpture.

Graham: But not the greatest. I think the other two, Picasso and Miró, were much better.

Blum: Do you know the name of the Miró sculpture?

Graham: If somebody named it, he didn't.

Blum: There are little insets of colored ceramic or glass, did Miró do those?

Graham: Yes. But they were executed by Joan Artigas.

Blum: He was your friend.

Graham: When I first saw Miró it was years before the sculpture was done. It was during the early planning for the Brunswick building, which didn't get built for a long time. We later raised the money for it, but Leigh Block talked Brunswick into not doing the Miró. I guess Leigh Block didn't like Miró. But we kept the scheme and later, between Stanley Freehling and a few others and myself, we raised the money for it. And we got McNulty to do the plaster casting for nothing. But then the question of paying Miró was a snap, because we had agreed that if we got a Picasso for nothing, then Miró was going to do it for nothing. But Miró came to Chicago very early—he, and

Joan Artigas and, his son, Joanet Gardy Artigas. I took them to jazz places at night and they just loved it. They would get up and shout "Olé!"

Blum: That was about the time when people who wrote about architecture began to notice that SOM was single-handedly dotting the city with little—they didn't call them parks, because they were plazas—parkettes, little places of repose often with sculpture. Was that something that was deliberate? Or did it just sort of happen?

Graham: We weren't the only ones to have sculpture. Saarinen also did it in New York. But actually that idea started with Lever House in New York, and then we did Inland Steel in Chicago. Then the Crown Zellerbach building in San Francisco. Then we did it in a lot of places, like the Chase bank in New York. We had wonderful sculptures there by...

Blum: Isamu Noguchi?

Graham: No, the Noguchi is in front of the Marine Midland bank. The other one was by Dubuffet. Bunshaft actually wanted Giacometti, but that's another story. I met Giacometti with Bunshaft in Paris. He was a wonderful man.

Blum: But we don't have one of his works here.

Graham: He wouldn't travel.

Blum: And he wouldn't do it without coming to see it?

Graham: Rockefeller didn't want it done unless Giacometti would come to the United States.

Blum: That's a pity.

Graham: He did some schemes, which were beautiful, but he never came.

Blum: May we go back to an earlier time in your career to the story of Herb Greenwald and the hotel?

Graham: Herb wanted me to do a hotel next to the Stevens Hotel (now the Chicago Hilton and Towers) on Michigan Avenue. Next to it there's a hotel that was done by another architect. When Weissbourd took over from Herb Greenwald, he hired another architect.

Blum: There's the Blackstone Hotel, and then across the street going south on Michigan is the Stevens.

Graham: What is right next to it?

Blum: There's the Ascot Hotel.

Graham: Yes, something like that. It's a terrible building. I worked with Herb and at that time Bunshaft had done a building that I thought was quite beautiful. That was the Banque Lambert in Brussels. Not a bad art collection there either, by the way. But I thought that kind of structure was interesting. It was a precast, prefabricated structure, with joints and stuff that goes into that, so I thought I would try it. But unlike the bank, the structure would be all exposed. At that time, I don't think that Faz was involved.

Blum: This was in the late 1950s.

Graham: We spent a good deal of time studying it. Then Myron came, and this was when he really had nothing to do, so we put him to work on that project. He got a big kick out of it. It turned out that Bunshaft loved it. The top of the building had a rounded penthouse and the reason I rounded it was that these precast pieces, these sort of rectilinear arches, came together like this and anything rectangular seemed to hurt it. Jim Ferris talked Myron into getting Peterhans to come over and look at it. Peterhans came over and said, "Of

course this is right. It's the only way you can relate it to the rest of the building." That was the end of that argument. Nobody argued with Jesus Christ when God was busy. Peterhans was a wonderful man, a great teacher. It's too bad he died so early. I met him early, and then casually, and then he got a divorce from his wife and married Brigitte. She was one of my wife's best friends.

Blum: So you saw him socially, as well as professionally?

Graham: Not that much. Then he went to Germany and died. A lot of his collections were lost, stolen from Brigitte's car. They had collected a lot of photographs and Brigitte was going to show them to somebody and somebody broke into the car. They probably threw them away when they found out they were just photographs.

Blum: He's the least known of the three—Mies, Hilbs, and Peterhans.

Graham: Which, in a way, is understandable because he wasn't so much into architecture as he was into aesthetics. He was the Moholy-Nagy of IIT. Incidentally, Moholy and Mies didn't get along.

Blum: How do you know that?

Graham: Everybody knew that they didn't get along.

Blum: You also made a statement, and I'm not sure if it's while you were working on the Warren Petroleum building, or whether it's Kimberly-Clark. The statement is: "That was the job that Hartmann saved me from Owings on."

Graham: That was by sending me to Japan. At that time Owings was firing everybody. He was firing Joe Passonneau. Hartmann thought it was a good thing for me to go to Japan. When I came back, then Owings would be over his firing

spree. Then I came back and finished the job up. Then I did the dormitory for Great Lakes. Jane was involved.

Blum: Was that the first job she was involved in?

Graham: No, she was involved in some of the interiors for Kimberly-Clark. She was much involved in Upjohn and also in Warren Petroleum. Jim Hammond was actually the partner in charge of Warren Petroleum. He used to fly a two- engine airplane from Chicago and I don't know how people could fly a hundred feet off the ground. We carried the model inside this little airplane.

Blum: In 1956, Inland Steel came your way. It had been Walter's job but he left to work on the Air Force Academy. Inland Steel was to be the first modern office building in the Loop after the war.

Graham: Since 1933, I think.

Blum: It was nineteen stories.

Graham: I hope it still is.

Blum: As you may know, it's a dearly loved building by Chicagoans. It's really quite a success story. At the time of that project you were given a promotion from supervising architect to design partner. You inherited the footprint from Walter. He's described his vision of it as Chicago's version of the Pompidou Center. That was what he envisioned, although he may not have fully developed it yet.

Graham: He may have said that, but it's nothing like that. It's more Lever House. It always was in his scheme.

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Blum: He described two panes of glass, an inner and an outer, and all the duct work running in different colors between the two glasses. It would have been a kind of pre-Pompidou Center

Graham: That was the skin. But that design wasn't built. The Pompidou Center has been kind of a failure. It's a blight.

Blum: Walter had worked on this type of footprint, an office building with an attached windowless service tower. He was in San Francisco and, as I understand it, he designed this footprint for Crown Zellerbach. That too has a windowless tower that Chuck inherited from Walter.

Graham: I don't think Chuck would say that. You'd better talk with Chuck.

Blum: I have. He describes it a little differently but what seems to follow are the dates. Crown Zellerbach was 1955. Bunshaft also used a variant of this arrangement in Hanover Manufacturers Trust.

Graham: That doesn't have anything like that. It's not like that at all. Bunshaft didn't imitate anybody. Manufacturers Trust is in the corner and what he did was to build the whole building like this and then it's not a tower. He set back a piece, but it actually goes all the way to the back. There's no glass on this side, there are only two walls of glass, but it's not a tower. It's a short, small building. It's only about seven stories at the most. He exposed the bank vault so you can see it from the street, that's what attracted everybody. The second floor has a wonderful sculpture by Bertoia. I wanted Bertoia to do the sculpture at Inland Steel. I have a Bertoia in my bedroom. Bertoia was a wonderful sculptor. Instead, Mary Block insisted on getting Richard Lippold for Inland Steel. Lippold doesn't fit there because when the sun comes into the building the Lippold wires disappear. The footprint for Manufacturers Hanover is nothing, zero, like the footprint for Inland Steel or Crown Zellerbach. The building was attached all the way, like most of New York, along Fifth Avenue.

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Blum: So you don't see any connection?

Graham: No. Bunshaft was doing glass walls before Walter was born, or anybody.

Blum: I'm not suggesting that Walter invented it. I'm saying he was working on this idea in California and then came to Chicago and continued the idea and that's the footprint that you inherited.

Graham: The footprint of Walter's was like this. The reason that I couldn't do that was that I had a clear span, that went all the way across. Walter's didn't. So the columns on Inland are out here. For me, if I wanted to keep going, they would have to be out here. So then I attached the core to the columns. It was totally separated from the building. This was where Faz first worked with me. He was a young engineer, still working only in the summer. Nobody in the office could figure out how to make the joints in the steel beams and the columns. In other words, if you have a steel beam and a steel column, how do you take the moment connection? Faz figured it out, he was the only one who had enough mathematics. He had a doctorate, you know. No engineers in Chicago had doctorate degrees. None. Faz figured it out. Andy Brown, who was then chief engineer, approved it. That was the first time I worked with Faz, but it wasn't that close, because he had to go back to finish his degree. He already was a computer genius.

Blum: He served as a consultant?

Graham: He was employed part-time. And then he had to go back to the University of Illinois for a while to finish his doctorate. I don't remember the exact amount of time that he was gone. Dave Allen did the interiors, he was the Chicago designer in charge of interiors. He later went to New York. He had been in New York, came to Chicago to work on the Inland Steel building, and went back to New York. He had done the interiors for the Istanbul Hilton, a beautiful hotel. It was the first foreign Hilton. Bunshaft designed it and Dave

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did the interiors, which were beautiful. Dave had a knack. He could see something beautiful that was fifty cents in the bazaar and you'd pay $10,000 for it. He was unbelievable.

Blum: You have said, "Walter and I could never work together."

Graham: I think he would say that too.

Blum: You went on to say, "His scheme, which was not approved by Inland, was as similar to mine as an Emery Roth building is to Seagram."

Graham: I don't think I ever said that.

Blum: I didn't bring the letter with me, but you said that in a letter to John Zukowsky. We have it in our file in our department at the Art Institute. You wrote because you were very angry about something related to an exhibition and how you were or were not credited. Perhaps you've forgotten.

Graham: Yes. But Emery Roth, at that time, had all glass, no structure expressed. And so did Walter's scheme for Inland Steel, there was no structure expressed.

Blum: The meaning I got from what you wrote was that one was so qualitatively different from the other that it could never have been the same.

Graham: It was, because the curtain wall is a sheer glass wall. You can't tell how many floors there are. That's true of Lever House, it's also more similar to an Emery Roth building than Inland Steel is.

Blum: Are Emery Roth buildings nice buildings? Or are they just production buildings?

Graham: There are some that are nice, but he did a lot of very cheap buildings. I worked my head off on the Hartford Insurance building to keep Emery Roth

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out of Chicago. Morse Diesel was going to bring him to Chicago. But he finally interviewed us with Draper and Kramer and I proved to Carl Morse that I could build it for less than Emery Roth and it would be a better building. He asked me during the meeting—it goes all to the point—he asked me about setback glass buildings and I said, number one, you don't have to have a window-washing machine because you just walk around the building and wash the windows. Two, it protects from the sun. Three, each wall on each floor has a one-story wall, not like a multi-story wall, so it's got to cost less. The last question he asked me—I think he wanted everything really cheap—I told him that all our fire stairs were concrete block. "Concrete block?" he said, "You can't do that. You have to put plaster in!" "In New York you do," I said, "but that's because you don't have guys who know how to lay block. In Chicago we can." It's true. Then finally he asked me what the elevator finishes were. I said that they would be concrete block. I got the job. And we kept Emery Roth out of Chicago, because he would have come here big-time. Most Chicago architects had not built developer buildings. Here was this powerful New York developer, Carl Morse, coming to Chicago. We kept them out, that was very important to me.

Blum: Did you want to protect all the jobs for SOM, or did other architects get work too?

Graham: Other architects got in, too, in the development field.

Blum: How did you get along with the owners of Inland Steel? Was it Leigh Block?

Graham: It was Inland Steel Company. The chairman when Walter started was Clarence Randall. Then Joe Block took over from Clarence Randall. My scheme was approved by Clarence Randall, he did not like Walter's scheme because it was all glass. Then later, at the opening, I'll never forget, he made a speech about SOM that was something else. He said, "They showed me an all-glass building and I didn't like it. Then they showed me another building

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and they called it a stainless steel building and I loved it. It's an all-glass building in disguise."

Blum: He liked what he got, even though it was something he said he didn't want.

Graham: Actually, Leigh Block was in charge of the project. And to put it indirectly, Mary Block had more to say about it than Leigh Block.

Blum: He had a reputation of being somewhat difficult.

Graham: Hartmann dealt with him very well. And I did too. We got to be very good friends with Mary and Leigh Block. At the Art Institute, he didn't get along with the wonderful director Charles Cunningham. They gave a big party out in Lake Forest when he was leaving. I'll never forget at the good-bye dinner for him with all these Boston folks and only myself and Arthur Wood, the chairman of the board of the Art Institute, were the only ones there from Chicago. They had gone to Princeton together, that's why Arthur Wood was there. I'll never forget Arthur extemporaneously getting up and making the most fantastic speech I ever heard. He had been in the Princeton Players.

Blum: You have said that in the process of getting Inland underway there were three schemes.

Graham: There were three schemes, but not as far different as you might think they were. One was with all the steel in black instead of stainless steel. Another was black, with stainless steel mullions. The other one was all stainless steel. Hartmann liked the all stainless steel one. I liked the combination because of the distinction of structures and changes in proportion. Hartmann got Giedion to come over one time and asked him which one we should build. Giedion said the stainless steel one. I had a feeling that Hartmann had preloaded it, but I don't think he did. So we did the stainless steel.

Blum: So Giedion made the choice for the project?

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Graham: Yes. There were three schemes, all of which I think were good, but I preferred the other one, which was a little more subtle. Besides, black columns in Chicago had been done before.

Blum: This was after 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, but before Hancock.

Graham: Before Hancock and before the Federal Center.

Blum: When SOM did a building for a corporate client, before the developers...

Graham: Fortunately, most of the work of SOM at that time was for corporate clients. In effect, the first developer building that we did was the Hartford building.

Blum: That was pretty early then. I had a sense that the developers came in a little later when the economy turned down.

Graham: I mean SOM was really known for its corporate work.

Blum: By that, does that mean that SOM did the building and the furnishings down to the ashtrays, what was on the walls and the sculpture? Was that true for Inland?

Graham: For the Inland floors, not for those they rented out.

Blum: SOM did their interiors?

Graham: Dave Allen did them. Jane worked on them. Jane also worked on the Harris bank. Walter designed the east tower addition first and I did the west tower second.

Blum: You say you don't like the Lippold where it is.

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Graham: The famous Lippold that Mary saw was at the National Gallery, in a dark attic, with light shining on it, and it looked fantastic. But when you put it in the lobby, you can't see it, you can't see the wire. The beauty of it was the wire. So I preferred by far the Bertoia. Maybe later, as I matured, and Bill too, we would have gotten even a better artist. We did, later, in Picasso and Miró.

Blum: But a Picasso in the lobby of Inland Steel?

Graham: You don't like Picasso? It would have looked fantastic there. It looks fantastic in Mary Block's toilet in her apartment. Another French artist, Soulages, came around one time and Mary asked us to go up to her apartment for a small party. He walked around and after a while he asked if we could go outside for a while, and I said sure. He said, "I don't feel well." I asked why, and he said, "Well she's got all these paintings and she's got a Monet and then I go to the bathroom and there's a Picasso!"

Blum: Apparently some people thought the Lippold was pretty good where it is. At night, when it is lit, and you do see the wires. Even during the day the wires reflects in a little pool of water that's beneath it.

Graham: It doesn't look as good as other Lippolds in dark spaces or spaces without the sunlight. That doesn't mean that it's bad. Hell, that's where I met Edison Price who began to light it. He's most phenomenal lighting character in the world.

Blum: It's beautifully lit at night. During the day, perhaps the lights are somewhat lost.

Graham: The lights are done by Edison, who did most of the lighting in the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, you name it.

Blum: In 1958 Inland took an AIA award and in 1960 Lippold received a Medal of Honor from the Architectural League of New York. And Seymour Lipton, the

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sculptor, got honorable mention for sculpture he did on one of the upper floors. Then, of course, Inland received the AIA Twenty-Five Year Award. Further, it's a Chicago landmark. In the Landmark Commission Report, they said the building contributes to the city in a significant way: at the time it showed confidence in new life for the downtown. This apparently was the struggle at the time for all-American cities.

Graham: It was a significant step that Inland took by putting a building downtown.

Blum: How do you feel when you see that building today?

Graham: I love it.

Blum: It must make you feel very proud.

Graham: Oh, sure. But pride is not the word. You're satisfied to see a work well done. But I feel that way about a lot of buildings.

Blum: It has worn very well, as you probably know after giving a tour there a few years ago.

Graham: I don't know if it still has all the art that was in the upper floors. I doubt it.

Blum: SOM took offices there for a while?

Graham: Yes, for quite a while. But then we needed more space, so we moved. I loved working in that building. It was a very pleasant building to work in. It was small and intimate. We had our model shop next door. But our space was too small. I tried to buy the building, personally. I'll tell you why. First, Inland was talking about moving out and selling the building, and they eventually did sell the building. But they had no idea what to sell it for. So they had a price that they were debating, for twenty-three million dollars. I knew that it

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was worth fifty, but I wasn't going to let them know. The board looked at it and they finally decided to get someone else to evaluate the building.

Blum: Did that put you out of the running?

Graham: Sure. I wasn't going to buy it at the going rate, but if they were going to sell it for twenty-five...

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Blum: In 1958 you began work on Upjohn. You said in Bruce Graham of SOM that Upjohn follows in Bunshaft's footsteps in the design of the total environment. What did you mean?

Graham: I meant that it was an isolated building with a whole landscaped area all around it and lifted up off the ground. That's essentially what I meant. And also the idea of the different courtyards inside of it, like Connecticut General, although Connecticut General's courtyards were much bigger.

Blum: Someone, it must have been you, said that the layout, the progression of the spaces, was influenced by your Peruvian background. Would you explain?

Graham: It was mainly on the exterior, with the rough stone. The rough stone walls outside were like what you might find in the mountains of Peru, in Cuzco, but much less precise.

Blum: Why were they appropriate for a place like Kalamazoo?

Graham: Because I'm Peruvian.

Blum: You're Peruvian, but Upjohn isn't.

Graham: That's true.

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Blum: Was it local stone?

Graham: Yes.

Blum: I had the impression when I read about it that perhaps there was a special progression of courtyards to space to courtyards to space.

Graham: That's not Inca, Incas didn't do that. All houses in Peru have courtyards. It's a civilized way to build residences. I was really referring more to the landscape and how it progressed from the rough stone to the smooth stone to the building.

Blum: Meaning the rough stone related to the ground?

Graham: Yes, like the walls on the potato terraces in Peru are rough. As you go over them, you have the palaces that are more serious buildings that are smooth and they are polished and the joints are unbelievably tight. Americans can't do that, but the Incas did.

Blum: Are you aware that your early years in Peru and your Peruvian background exert an influence in the work that you do?

Graham: Yes. I've gone back to Peru many times. My mother was Peruvian, to start with. She was very Peruvian, from Arequipa, not from Lima—she was from the real Peru.

Blum: Was that in the mountains?

Graham: Yes, it's in the southern mountains of Peru. It sits inside three volcanoes and then drops right down to the sea.

Blum: That sounds very dramatic.

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Graham: It's a very beautiful city. It's the most beautiful colonial city in Latin America.

Blum: How did the commission for Upjohn take hold?

Graham: I think Upjohn knew the people at Kimberly-Clark. They also knew that the New York office of SOM had done some work for Geigy Pharmaceutical Company. So they had heard of SOM. That's why they called us. We had never had any connections with them before.

Blum: They just walked in cold and hired you?

Graham: Well, most people who are around architects find out about you before they hire you.

Blum: Was Bill Hartmann on Upjohn with you?

Graham: Bill Hartmann was head of the office, and as such he actually went to get the job. After the beginning, he then turned it over to Bill Dunlap, who became the project manager.

Blum: When you go into a job like this, a big job, did you hand pick your team, or did you already have your team in place?

Graham: It changed during the years that I was there. I had a lot to do with changing it. At first, the office had a design group and a production group of technical people. In fact, the two groups were on different floors. The New York and the San Francisco offices worked that way, too. Then slowly I changed it to having studios. I didn't believe in architects designing who didn't know how to do construction documents or working drawings. They should know how a building is put together before they become design architects. That was changed and Upjohn was the first building in which we had a team for which the whole team was together.

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Blum: Who was on your team?

Graham: One of them was Jane, my wife. She did all the interiors.

Blum: The interiors must have been done after the building was built?

Graham: No, we don't do it that way. We think of the interiors at the same time that we're doing the building. Then things like built-ins, textures, and materials are integrated from the beginning, not something that comes after when someone else with different taste starts to add things and change things. It was all done together. When we built the full-scale mock-up for Upjohn it included the interiors, including the lighting, the partitions, and the furniture.

Blum: You were the partner-in-charge?

Graham: I wasn't quite a partner, because at that time there were no design partners in the Chicago office. There were associate partners.

Blum: What about Ambrose Richardson?

Graham: He never was a partner. Neither was Bill Priestley. They were associate partners.

Blum: Walter Netsch?

Graham: Walter was not yet a partner. He was made a partner after the Air Force Academy, but not before. The New York office was the same way. They had other designers who were associate partners, but who were not partners. Then that changed. For example, I was made a partner at the same time as Chuck Basset was made one in San Francisco, a year after Walter. Roy Allen was made a partner the same time as me in New York. Then began the new epoch at SOM when we were made partners.

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Blum: And then the studio concept began? Up until the time that the studio concept took hold, it had been my impression that regardless of which office an architect worked for, Gordon Bunshaft was somehow the head of design.

Graham: No, the firm was never structured in that way.

Blum: Was it out of respect that people asked him for his opinion?

Graham: Absolutely. We used to have design meetings that Bunshaft would attend and Walter and I and Roy Allen would attend.

Blum: Before you made partner?

Graham: No, after. Each office was totally independent. Hartmann, from time to time, would get Bunshaft to come in and look at something, because he didn't feel quite secure with us young kids yet.

Blum: Gordon was the elder statesman, I suppose.

Graham: By and large, he did not tell us how to do anything. We were totally independent. That's the strength of SOM. Each partner had a relationship with his client that was intimate. We would never have somebody making decisions for a building who wasn't even in town. Forget it. But we respected him. I respected Bunshaft a lot. I liked him a lot.

Blum: As you proceeded with Upjohn you had Bill Dunlap, and Jane—Jane Johnson, at the time—who headed the interiors department. Who else?

Graham: We had a job captain. Botho Schneider. He came to us from Holabird and Root. Then there were a bunch of complainers, but don't ask me their names. I can only tell you about the key people in the team.

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Blum: One group that did not come from SOM, but that has received quite a bit of attention because of their work at Upjohn is Sasaki and Walker. That is supposed to have been their first major corporate commission.

Graham: That's right. It was Pete Walker that did it, not Sasaki. Walker later left Sasaki and Walker and he opened an office in California.

Blum: It strikes me that the courtyards at Upjohn have a distinct Japanese flair.

Graham: I don't think it was Japanese. Sasaki had nothing to do with it. Sasaki was a very American architect, believe me.

Blum: In something I read that also had photographs, it was said that there were stones and pools and plants reflecting in the water giving it had a very Japanese feel.

Graham: Courtyards in Latin America looked like that, too. The thing is that in America courtyards are a rarity, but not in Latin America. My house had a courtyard. In our house in Chicago I built a house with three courtyards.

Blum: With a reflecting pool and fountains and all that?

Graham: Yes, I built them with no grass. They had gravel and one tree with a sculpture and a fountain.

Blum: Was this the first time you worked with Peter Walker? Why were they chosen?

Graham: Yes, it was the first time. They were chosen because we had a partner at that time, Fred Kraft, who was a landscape architect and planner and he had worked in Tennessee on the Ford project. He and Sasaki were close friends. He recommended Sasaki. He didn't do landscaping anymore, he was more the manager.

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Blum: Who was Gordon using for his landscaping? He seemed to favor and work with certain people.

Graham: Dan Kiley. You have to remember that at that time there weren't many projects that had a history of landscaping. These projects all started just after the war and these corporations were just building up themselves. In Connecticut General, I think Gordon used an in-house landscape architect. He worked with the sculptor, Noguchi. They worked very closely, because in many cases, Bunshaft almost designed the sculptures. I can give you an example. He wanted Tony Smith but Tony Smith wouldn't do it his way, so he got Noguchi to do it.

Blum: Theirs was a very sympathetic relationship. Gordon seemed to know what he wanted and where he wanted it and when he wanted it. Was there any experience connected to the Upjohn project that you remember that you especially learned from?

Graham: Every project we learned something from. It was one of the first projects where we really did a fantastic job of integrating the interiors and the architecture. At that time, Jane designed a lot of furniture. That was unusual because even Connecticut General didn't have a lot of SOM-designed furniture. We just bought it at Knoll or somewhere else. Jane designed an awful lot of the furniture for Upjohn for all the executive offices, including sofas and chairs and desks.

Blum: And they were custom built for SOM?

Graham: Yes. That's how we got to know Gerry Griffith so well, because he built the boardroom table and some other pieces as well.

Blum: Not having seen the interior, would you describe it? Was it steel and glass, or padded, or woody, or sculptured?

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Graham: Modern architecture includes all of those things. Jane did a sofa that's in our house now that she designed originally for Upjohn that Hollis Baker built. We got to know Hollis, which was also a great experience.

Blum: Would you speak about it?

Graham: He was, and still is, the best reproducer of antique furniture. The craftsmanship is unbelievable. Jane got to know them very well. They had a good design team, a good chairman, and a good president of the company. It was a pleasure to work with them. It was kind of our introduction to Grand Rapids, which included Steelcase.

Blum: That's where Steelcase furniture is manufactured?

Graham: Steelcase's offices are in Grand Rapids. They ended up making a lot of furniture that Jane or Dave Allen designed.

Blum: Did the Baker Furniture Company and Steelcase work together?

Graham: Baker did not make general office furniture at all. They knew each other very well, because Grand Rapids is a very small town. But they were not in competition at all. They were not even ordinary collaborators at all. The collaboration between them came from the designers, not from the companies.

Blum: Another building that deserves attention is the Equitable building. It was thirty-five stories and you have said that it continued the search that began with Inland Steel.

Graham: Yes, the idea of tall buildings, after Inland, where the structure was the major articulator is continued in Equitable. As opposed to Mies's covered mullions, which I discussed before, at the Equitable the structure is expressed through the whole building. That is, to my mind, something I owe

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more to the Chicago School of Architecture than to Mies. The Chicago School of Architecture, and Sullivan, expressed the structure. There were engineers involved and they expressed that. I was more influenced by the Chicago School than by Mies.

Blum: It's curious that you say this, because most of the commentary about the Chicago School and Mies says that Mies is the continuation of the Chicago School. Now you're separating the two.

Graham: I'm separating them totally. Mies is a continuation of the Bauhaus, not of the Chicago School of Architecture. Mies said that himself. The Bauhaus was a search for a different language, as I mentioned before. The Chicago School was more simplistic and was not a war against emperors. This is Louis Sullivan. There were no emperors in Chicago, so they were building good, simple buildings, with people like Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan interpreting it. With the new materials and new technology, it had to take a turn.

Blum: Were you aware of all this as you designed?

Graham: Yes. In fact, we had Natalie de Blois, who was a designer from the New York office who came to Chicago. We didn't know where to put her to work, so we put her to work on that building. She didn't quite understand it. The New York office was more the Bunshaft scheme, the Lever House vocabulary. If you look at Lever House, Connecticut General, and Manufacturers Trust, they're all a curtain wall. That's not what I had in mind. You can see very clearly when you look at the Equitable in Chicago that it's not like the Equitable building that the New York office did in Atlanta. It's totally different.

Blum: So what happened to Natalie if she didn't understand all the vocabulary?

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Graham: It didn't matter, she was a very experienced associate partner. She knew how to put a team together and make them work. She was a tough lady to work with. But I was in charge of design, not Natalie.

Blum: Her orientation was just a little different?

Graham: Yes. But it didn't matter. Anybody I hired off the street would have a different orientation. Myron Goldsmith and I loved each other, see, but his orientation was different than mine.

Blum: Beneath what you're saying, are you saying that Chicago architects build and conceive things differently?

Graham: Yes. Absolutely. Obviously, I'm talking about the good architects. Some of them, like in any place in the world, don't have any philosophy or direction. They're designers, rather than architects. I won't name names, but there are a lot of buildings in Chicago that are not in the tradition of Chicago buildings. Even during the time that Sullivan was around. Burnham was not a Chicagoan.

Blum: But he's come to be identified with Chicago.

Graham: In his master plan. But Sullivan, Holabird and Root, and Graham, Anderson, Probst and White—that's Chicago.

Blum: If you're saying that Chicago architects build in a way that is in the Chicago School tradition and understandable to Chicagoans because we're part and parcel of that culture, how is it that you could go to Kalamazoo, and to Tulsa, and to London and build there thinking you were sensitive to what is local?

Graham: My wife can answer that better than I can. I am more international, by nature and by birth, and I tend to, like actors do, look into the spirit of a

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place. The Middle West was easy because the Middle West is essentially the same from Pittsburgh all the way to Denver. It's easy to build in Des Moines or in Neenah, Wisconsin, or in Milwaukee. Sullivan did this, too. He built all over. When you go east, over the Allegheny Mountains, it's a different world. Structure is not of the essence to the architects of the East. It wasn't even to the old architects of the East, with the exception of H.H. Richardson. The others, if you think about it, were more form-oriented, like Harrison and Abramovitz were with Rockefeller Center. That's form-oriented. They were very sensitive to the exterior spaces, but the towers are more symbolic, rather than of the people. That's true in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Savings and Fund Society has no relationship to structure. That's true of Philip Johnson. His buildings have no relation to structure whatsoever. If you look at any one of them, they may look Miesian, but they're not. When he makes a curve with the steel, Mies would never have done that. It's decoration.

Blum: Philip Johnson is probably not a good example. He just seems to be such a chameleon.

Graham: He is, but even within the chameleon there is always this idea that is non- architectural.

Blum: Do you mean he's more decorative?

Graham: He has no conviction whatsoever. There is no sequence in his buildings that express a belief. They are a fashion. That's almost a New York thing where everything is the latest and you do it. Postmodernism is a fashion now. The architecture that I am interested in is that which searches into the soul of the place you're in. The Middle West, as I told you before, is America. That is the power of this country. The people here are so different than people in the East. You go to drive through Minnesota, and you go into any little town, there's nothing like that left on the East Coast. They all left. Where are all the Amish?

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Blum: Many are in Pennsylvania.

Graham: But they're virtually gone. Now all that remains is a fake Amish Village. I'm talking about Minnesota, where you'll see the real thing. There's the town of Amana, Iowa, where you'll see a German town. They speak English but they all speak German too. They live on this fantastic plain of agriculture where the land dips down to the river.

Blum: Why do you think that has remained so untouched?

Graham: Because they were all great farmers and the great farms still exist.

Blum: You think that the East has just moved beyond into manufacturing or service?

Graham: Farming in the East is just not an economic venture. It's a disaster, economically. Anyone who farms in Maine has a hole in his head. It's the same in Pennsylvania. Everything is driven by the economics that radiate from Boston, and New York, and Washington. Even Baltimore is not what it used to be anymore. I'm not saying that it's bad, it's just different.

Blum: You said something about fashion. Do you think that when Philip changes his style as the wind blows, he is just responding? Or is he trying to set a pace that others will follow?

Graham: I think in his own way—you know, he's very bright—he was pulling the noses of all those executives who commissioned him. Intellectually, he was pulling their noses.

Blum: He has to be pretty courageous to do something like that.

Graham: He was pretty courageous. But he was very popular. He made sure of it. That was not Bunshaft. He was unique. At one time, there was really only

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one modern architect in New York, and that was Gordon Bunshaft. You can't name another because there weren't any.

Blum: Do you mean within SOM or the city of New York?

Graham: The city of New York. Name another one from right after the war, after Lever House was done, who understood the Bauhaus, who loved Corbusier's work. There wasn't another one.

Blum: In The Spaces In Between Nat Owings wrote that SOM has five of the twelve most important designers in America: Bunshaft, Bassett, Myron, you, and who was the fifth?

Graham: He must have mentioned Walter Netsch.

Blum: Yes, of course Netsch. Gordon, in Owings's opinion, was the only one in New York.

Graham: Well, that wasn't really true. Roy Allen was a very good architect. He did some beautiful buildings. Bunshaft kind of overshadowed him in his way, but Roy has done some beautiful buildings that have been published by SOM. There was another architect, Charles Hughes, that Gordon didn't get along with. Hughes did the design for the international terminal at Kennedy in New York.

Blum: Was Charles Hughes the young man who during a weekend charrette came up with the design for the vault of one of the banks that Gordon designed?

Graham: Yes, that was the same guy. He was a very good designer. But he didn't get along with Bunshaft, so he left.

Blum: In Owings's opinion those men didn't qualify for the five most famous, who were all out of SOM.

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Graham: I hate to tell you that Bunshaft and Owings didn't agree at all on architecture. They were totally opposites.

Blum: But it seems that SOM needed both of them.

Graham: Yes, Owings was a fantastic promoter and got involved in huge, visionary things. He proposed a master plan to President Johnson, and proposed that everything east of the Alleghenies be turned into housing and beautiful vistas and that everything west of Colorado be turned into the same and that the Middle West was where everything should be made in America.

Blum: Well, it seems you agree with his vision of the Midwest.

Graham: Yes, but I didn't get to talk to President Johnson about it.

Blum: Well, Owings certainly enjoyed the reputation of being the mover-and- shaker.

Graham: That was Owings. The master plan for Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., that was Owings.

Blum: Back to the Equitable building, you said that at the time it was done, it was the most sophisticated building to date.

Graham: I don't remember that.

Blum: It was a building, as you described it, that was hung on its frame as if the frame was a scaffold. Because of its location at Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River, across the street from the Wrigley building and the Tribune Tower at the north, it was on an historic site.

Graham: It was. That was a requirement of the Tribune that it be set back. The Tribune owned the land, and before they sold it to Equitable, they required

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that the building be set back that far. Owings knew the chairman very well, that's how we got the job. He was an old Chicagoan, he was originally a Chicagoan.

Blum: That site not only has a street level, but it has a lower level, which is the river, the waterside. You built a very beautiful staircase going down. Did that site, in that it touched the water and was on a historic street site, put added responsibility on you as a designer?

Graham: I hate to say that because I think that any site puts a responsibility on the designer to respond to it.

Blum: I said an added responsibility.

Graham: In a way that was an easy one, because the rules were so severe.

Blum: What do you mean?

Graham: It had to be set back that much. Even if I had wanted to move it up a little more, I couldn't.

Blum: Was your height limited?

Graham: No. I had to build the staircase. The city required it.

Blum: That was just at the time that people in Chicago were becoming aware of what a lost opportunity the river provided. No one had looked at that seriously, not even architects. No one had. Equitable's little riverside space began to develop those possibilities.

Graham: I've always felt that way about the river. You're not aware of it. You drive around it, but you don't really know that there's a river there, because of that second deck. It was a attempt to do that. I had hoped that at least going east

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towards the lake they would make an attempt to do that, to make the river softer.

Blum: I noticed in one of the articles about the Equitable that Al Shaw was a consultant.

Graham: Was a consultant to whom? I had never even met Al Shaw at that point. He might have been a consultant to Equitable itself.

Blum: Articles I have here from Architectural Record and Architectural Forum list architects and construction firms and so on. It says here: consultant, Al Shaw.

Graham: It must have been for the owner, because I never talked to Al Shaw about the Equitable building. Maybe Bill Hartmann did, at the Chicago Club, or something. But Al Shaw knew the chairman of the Equitable very well, too. It's possible that the chairman asked him to be a consultant, rather than give him the project.

Blum: There was also a report that the soil was so unstable that the contractor had to devise a special approach to putting in the foundation. Would you talk about that?

Graham: Yes, but that's true of all of Chicago. The soil is very difficult. You don't reach rock until you get way down, one hundred and ten or one hundred and twenty feet. The caisson system that was used years ago when the buildings were smaller was quite different. I don't know how the Palmolive building foundation was done, that was by Holabird and Root. At this point, we were beginning to drill with a steel caisson and then pour concrete in it. You didn't have to go to bedrock with that. You just went up to a certain level where it expands and it's safe. The levels are harder.

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Blum: The first time I read of such a scheme was with this building and the article said they used tank cars with the ends cut off as the tube, into which they poured concrete and then stuffed the holes.

Graham: That's what I'm talking about, tank cars were used as the shell.

Blum: The sight of these two tank cars, with both ends cut off, seems rather fantastic to me.

Graham: It wasn't that big of a tank car. They were wasted cars, not new ones.

Blum: Did you think this was a good project for you?

Graham: Oh, yes. It had a system of the way that we developed a core that has influenced all the other highrise buildings that I've done since. It was the first really big center core building that I did. The Warren Petroleum was a small building and it was not the same problem at all. This had the complications of more elevators and using the core as part of the support system and spanning to the core.

Blum: Would this one, being thirty-five stories, qualify in your mind as a skyscraper?

Graham: It certainly did then. Sure. There are, however, levels of buildings that change. A twenty-story structure is good for certain things. Then you go to thirty and it changes the structure. Then when you go to fifty stories, it's even more. When you go over that, it changes even more. I think anything over fifteen stories is a skyscraper. In a lot of towns, a twenty-story structure is the tallest building in town. Everything is relative.

Blum: In 1966, the AIA thought the Equitable building was pretty good, and it received an honor award. From the time you joined SOM, if we can just take a cross-section of the decade of the 1950s—I know that it's hard to limit your

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thinking to only that decade—it has been said that that was the decade that SOM spread the Miesian gospel. Would you agree with that?

Graham: No, there was nothing Miesian about Bunshaft. Nothing. They liked each other, but Bunshaft's work was totally different. Lever House is not the kind of building that Mies would have done at all. The whole idea of the building raised off the ground like that was Corbusier's. Bunshaft loved Corbusier. The idea of lifting the building way up on stilts and then putting a low building underneath, Mies, would never have done that.

Blum: What about the facade? Do you find anything Miesian there?

Graham: If you look at the curtain walls of Lever House and the curtain walls of Mies, they're totally different. One is a glass wall with very smooth mullions—the joints were perfect in Bunshaft's buildings. Mies's have these mullions sticking out that express what he called the visual structure of the building. Bunshaft was not interested in that.

Blum: So how would you describe the decade for SOM? You're talking about Corbusier and certainly much of Walter's work during that decade doesn't fall into the Miesian category either.

Graham: No, but the Bauhaus was around, it was also involved. There were other architects around the world. There was a Brazilian architect who did very sleek buildings—Oscar Niemeyer. In fact, the scheme for the United Nations was really Niemeyer's, not Corbu's. Corbu had a scheme and when they came together in New York—Niemeyer had worked with Corbu—Corbu admired Niemeyer's scheme so much that he insisted that they do Niemeyer's scheme.

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[Tape 4: Side 2]

Blum: You seem to take issue with what has been written about SOM. Do you think there were other influences that SOM reflected than just Mies?

Graham: Yes. Some of the others, like Bassett, were not influenced by Mies at all. He had gone to Cranbrook and he was influenced by Eliel Saarinen. You can't deny the influence of Eliel Saarinen in the United States. The General Motors complex that he and his son, Eero, did was all glass and it's Saarinen. All of these works were related—they called it the "international school". But they didn't call it modern architecture like they do today. That included Mies and José Louis Sert and the Saarinens and Niemeyer. It was a whole powerful movement in Europe. Some of the Russians were part of the international school—the ones that Stalin got rid of. That was all part of that movement. It wasn't just Mies and Corbusier. There was also a Greek, Georges Candilis. He was a man who was much more interested in the design of cities and they used to meet together in Greece and other places, all those men. They had these conferences where they called themselves the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). So there was not just Mies. Chicago thinks it was only Mies.

Blum: It's our short-range vision probably because he was in Chicago.

Graham: It would have been not much of a movement if only Mies were active in it. There were others. There was the Viennese architect who was out West, Neutra. He was part of that movement. And you can't forget little figures like Charlie Eames. He was pretty influential. His house out on the West Coast was a marvel to see. He really influenced Saarinen on the Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. You should see the film he made on movement. That's how Saarinen got the job, because of Charlie Eames's film. It was a really international movement.

Blum: Do you think that SOM was reflecting that broad international flavor?

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Graham: Sure. Then you have the Italians. They were working in the 1950s. They exerted influence over everyone in the world.

Blum: Who were you picking up on, personally, in your own work? You've already mentioned the Chicago School and Mies and Sullivan.

Graham: From Bunshaft I picked things up, obviously. I was also an admirer of Corbusier—a real admirer, and I was a bit of a leftist Socialist, like he was. Everybody was.

Blum: Had you ever met him?

Graham: No, unfortunately. But I met this Polish architect, Jerzy Soltan, who had worked with him and was teaching at Harvard. There was another Polish architect, Matthew Nowicki, who had gone to the University of North Carolina because they offered him the job to do the stadium. Bunshaft liked him, too. And there was Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, in England. Yorke was a Bauhaus architect. There were a lot of influences. There were all the books, and I looked at all the pictures and whenever I traveled I looked for the architecture. As I did when I went to Spain, I did the same thing.

Blum: In that decade of the 1950s, how had the SOM office changed, other than the increase in the number of people who were employed by the end of the 1950s?

Graham: The office became a lot more cohesive. When I first got here it was more traditional in that there were the partners and then the design team.

Blum: But there weren't very many partners in 1950.

Graham: No, there was only Hartmann, Owings, Merrill, Sr., Fred Kraft, and Jim Hammond, in Chicago. But none were really designers except Hartmann.

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Blum: How had the commissions changed during that time, other than the numbers increased? You say the system changed?

Graham: Yes, the system changed and I started it in the 1950s and then made it very strong in the following years. It went to a studio system and the managers were not in the studio system. The project manager, which was a unique SOM thing at the time, took care of all the legal affairs, all the contracts, saw that the work was done on time, and negotiated the teams. That was the project manager. He worked for the partner-in-charge of the project, but not the designer. Then there was the partner-in-charge and a design partner. That's the way the firm developed: the design partner and the managing partner. The project manager worked for the managing partner. They negotiated the fees and saw to all the things that don't relate to the design or construction of the building. The project manager would make sure the contractors contracted correctly and that it was supervised properly, things like that. That was unique for SOM and extremely necessary and successful. Design partners by and large don't know a thing about managing a project. If you require them to, then it's a disaster. Some of them, and I like to think I was one of them, could manage it well, and some of them could not. But we didn't want to lose a top designer just because he was not a good manager. Bunshaft was a fantastic manager as well as a terrific designer. Vice versa, Skidmore couldn't design. Neither could Owings very much. Hartmann was unique in that he was also a very good designer, but he chose not to design. He chose to run the office, but he has designed some very nice buildings, like the Terrace Plaza in Cincinnati, which was quite a nice building and had a Miró mural behind the bar.

Blum: He was a Rotch prize winner and it was that fellowship that took him to Europe. It was always kind of a mystery to me that someone who had that design talent and ability would abandon it to run the office.

Graham: It was very good to have a guy who understood design and business to be the head of the office. That's pretty important and it's often a problem

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nowadays. The guys who head office now are not always good businessmen or good designers.

Blum: How had the commissions changed as SOM began to grow?

Graham: Most of the commissions now we did not seek. People came to us because of the reputation of the firm. It was quite different than when we first started and when Owings was out there digging in the desert. He was looking for work and he was a hell of a job-getter. Hartmann was the same way. Skidmore was phenomenal. They spent their whole lives doing that. Skidmore got to know Robert Moses, in New York, as an intimate friend. That's how you get good work, like the airport. Moses was right to admire Skidmore, he was a real gentleman, unlike the other partners in New York who were all rough-and-ready. Bunshaft got along very well in the New York community, but he was shy and he hated to talk to more than five people at a time.

Blum: With the new clients that were seeking out SOM, rather than SOM seeking them out, how does a relationship, for instance one of yours, develops with a client? How does the exchange work? Who really decides?

Graham: Every partner uses different ways of doing things. I chose to do things a little differently from the way they would. I started that instinctively, very early. Except for a building like the Equitable, which was brought in by Owings. I would take the client and travel with him to see other things, both at the beginning and throughout the job. If he was interested in some problem, we would take him to see where such a problem had been solved in a similar way.

Blum: Always SOM's solutions?

Graham: No, not at all. It didn't matter whose solutions. Most architects are very jealous about their drawings. We were the opposite. If somebody wanted the

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details of a building that I'd done, I'd send them to him. The lighting for Upjohn is an example. At an AIA meeting once, I offered to give them our automatic specification system, but they turned me down. It was free of charge. Why?

Blum: Why were you so generous?

Graham: Because it would improve the profession. To make it so that the technology that we, in turn, would get later was better. Why would you keep it a secret? Do doctors keep secrets from one another in medicine? They would be idiots if they did. Engineers exchange information. Architects still don't, even today. SOM was way ahead using the computer and we offered to share it with them, too. But they said no, they'd develop their own. It never worked.

Blum: Do you have an idea of why architects don't share?

Graham: I have no idea. They think that it's part of the art. It's silly. Think of the artists in the cathedrals of Europe. Do they keep their secrets so that the next town down didn't know? Of course not. Architects' secrets aren't that good. I must say that some of the very good architects didn't have that problem. Not just SOM. Some other architects would share, like Saarinen and I. M. Pei. Some of them were shy to ask and then made mistakes that we could have prevented for them.

Blum: The situation you're describing, being possessive of one's material, is also true in academia. Academics don't want to share their work before it's published. They want to be the first to publish.

Graham: But that's how it would be in architecture, because nobody would ask you about a detail unless it they had seen it in your building. Then I would share with them.

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Blum: You said you took your clients to see different solutions of problems they might encounter.

Graham: Not all the time, because some were obvious, but many times I did more than one scheme. I still do that, because there's more than one way to do a building, and it's good for the architect to study different alternatives. Then you bring the client into it and you present them and you discuss them. Then they give their view and you may come out and do none of the three. Then you do another one that has something of this one and something of that one. As you talk to them, you're trying to learn who they are, what are the workers like, what's the town like. What will fit best in that place? Granted, you don't always succeed. But at least you try. That's why, when I go to Egypt, my wife says I become Egyptian. When I go to China, my wife says I'm Chinese. When I go to Spain, I'm definitely Catalán. In Britain, I develop an English accent.

Blum: With all of the increase in work and people and changed systems that SOM was managing by the end of the 1950s—which was still pretty early in SOM's career—did the office, or you personally, make an effort to get some of your jobs published?

Graham: The New York office was very good at that.

Blum: Did they have a public relations person?

Graham: Yes. They had very good connections, because they were all in New York. We didn't need to take the editor to lunch.

Blum: But in Chicago there was Inland Architect.

Graham: But it was really an architectural magazine for the architect, not for a wider audience like Progressive Architecture or Architectural Record. The Chicago newspapers did very little, if anything, to publish architecture. They did

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crits, but they did not publish like the New York Times did with Ada Louise Huxtable. They really went out of their way to get photographs and things. They still do.

Blum: Later, of course, there was Paul Gapp.

Graham: But he never really used many pictures.

Blum: Did SOM's work in Chicago attract national attention in the press?

Graham: Yes, we did get a lot of exposure in the regular architectural magazines. And in international ones as well.

Blum: How did that happen?

Graham: The magazines would call.

Blum: Did you have a public relations person?

Graham: Yes, but the editor is not going to take a call from her. It's got to be Hartmann who calls.

Blum: Did you ever call?

Graham: No, I never did. They would seek it out. Most of our work had such a reputation that the magazines would call us.

Blum: I was thinking of the years as SOM's reputation was being established. How did you first get your foot in the door?

Graham: I think it was the Inland Steel building that set off the New York press for Chicago, although they had published some of our other work. They published Warren Petroleum in Progressive Architecture.

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Blum: I just showed you the bibliography section for each project featured in your book, Bruce Graham of SOM. To have a bibliography for each project, someone first had to get it published.

Graham: Yes, there was a girl in the office that had all the information. But she didn't make all the contacts with the press. In New York, SOM did because they had a terrific woman who knew all the editors.

Blum: Who were SOM's competitors during those early years? Did they have any?

Graham: I don't recall going after a project in competition with somebody.

Blum: Not even for a specific project. I'm thinking of a firm that might have been the same size with similar capabilities.

Graham: The problem is the size, because Eero Saarinen would be considered one, with Kevin Roche. They had a very good interiors department.

Blum: Were they about the same size as SOM?

Graham: No, that's the problem. There was a very large firm in Detroit, much larger than SOM. But they were never our competitors because they were not design-oriented. They did mostly industrial work. We did very little industrial work.

Blum: What about a firm like Holabird and Root?

Graham: They weren't the same size. They were much smaller. They were mainly a local firm by that time. They were not as international as they had been, because they really didn't have a top designer. They have since had a top designer. That gap period you're talking about, where SOM did so well, was partially because there wasn't another firm like us.

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Blum: What about Naess, Shaw and Murphy

Graham: They also didn't have a top designer.

Blum: Mr. Naess? Mr. Shaw?

Graham: Shaw Metz and Dolio had already separated. They did totally different work. Al Shaw was a very interesting guy and his wife was terrific, but a designer he wasn't. He wasn't a designer at Murphy or at Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. GAPW was another firm, but they were not as large as we were at that time. We had a lot of work with three offices.

Blum: So did SOM really have the field to themselves?

Graham: Not necessarily. There were smaller firms that did very good work. They were excellent firms, but they chose not to expand. Saarinen didn't want any partners, period. There were a lot of firms like that, that lived and died with the one designer.

Blum: In later years, SOM was criticized for having grown too much.

Graham: Yes, but they didn't really know the way the firm worked. It was like a lot of different architects sharing technology but going in different directions. Nobody could go further apart in architecture than Walter Netsch and I. After the Air Force Academy and the Chapel, from then on, the architecture that he was interested in was totally different from what I was interested in.

Blum: But you shared the same offices.

Graham: We shared the same offices, and secretaries, and mechanical equipment, and automatic specs, and the engineering department. That was the idea, that it was collaborative. It was not supposed to be an individual dictatorship. Bunshaft didn't dictate to me at all. He never tried. We were friends and we

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shared a kind of direction coming from the International School. Myron's style of architecture was also quite different from mine.

Blum: In 1960, you were made a partner.

Graham: That was a disastrous decision of the firm.

Blum: Why?

Graham: Because then Jane couldn't stay in the firm. I was told that the partner's wife couldn't work there.

Blum: Was that a firm policy?

Graham: I won't tell you with whom, but there had been a tragedy within the firm in which a woman was promoted and her husband committed suicide. This really hit the partners in a horrible way.

Blum: So they didn't want any husband-and-wife teams.

Graham: Yes, so Jane left and started her own practice.

Blum: Was she hired after that by SOM?

Graham: No, she had her own firm and they did houses and a lot of interiors, and she did a library. Then she got into a partnership with Bill Hartmann's wife, Benta. They did some work together. At the same time, Jane raised our three kids and she worked every day of her life.

Blum: That sounds like a woman of today. Bill Hartmann has described the Chicago office as a troika: you, Walter, and Myron. Do you agree with that?

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Graham: Myron really didn't spend that much time in the Chicago office. He spent a lot of time in California, and then he had a heart attack and had to leave. So he didn't really have as much time to do the kind of work that Walter and I did. I also think it was the way he works. One of the most beautiful jobs he did was the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope out at Kitt Peak in Arizona. He did that with Bill Dunlap. But Myron always took a lot of time to make a decision. There was no pressure for Myron to become Bruce Graham or Walter Netsch. So he had one studio, and I think I had six, and Walter had two or three. Walter's work often involved more than one building at a time, like the Air Force Academy or the University of Illinois at Chicago. So it was quite different. My idea of a studio was not only to make teams, but to find out who were the better architects for the future, to train them and to give them the experience. I think that it worked pretty well, except for Vietnam, when it was impossible to find good architects.

Blum: SOM does have, and I'm sure you're aware of this, a reputation for being the most competitive and the most difficult firm, not to enter, but to survive there. There were different personalities and different politics.

Graham: I don't know who told you that.

Blum: It's been published in so many articles about SOM.

Graham: Then they didn't understand the studio system. The advantage was that if you had a very talented architect who didn't get along within a particular studio, we had the advantage of moving him to another studio. If a person went from one studio to a second studio to a third, then after a while we'd say that they didn't fit at all. You have to work like a team. If you don't get along with a team, I can understand that, and if you don't get along with two, I can understand that. The problem is when you don't want to work in any studio. In Corbusier's studio you'd be out the first day. In Bunshaft's, too.

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Blum: That wasn't my impression, although I can understand what you're saying. And I can also understand how a comment like that could come out of what you've said.

Graham: Some of the architects used us as a postgraduate school. They came to learn. Then they left to start their own firm.

Blum: Did you resent that?

Graham: No, it was fine. I didn't mind. That says something good about us. That's not negative, that's positive.

Blum: That's what you did yourself at Holabird and Root.

Graham: Yes, I always thought that was good. A lot of good architects came out of that. Brownson came out of Mies. So that was not a bad thing at all. Sometimes there were very talented guys in the firm who were resented by the others. That has happened and we've lost some very talented people that way. The best young man worked through this while I was there, and when I left they didn't treat him right, and so he left. They should have kept him, because he was a terrific architect. He now lives in New Jersey, and has a partner in Paris and another in Chicago, and one in Spain. They make drawings together through the Internet. Harvard wanted him in the worst way but I stole him.

Blum: I though computers revolutionized architecture in their own way, but this is mind-boggling.

Graham: It's amazing.

Blum: You were made a partner in 1960. You made it up from associate partner to partner in five years. People today take from fifteen to twenty years. How did you do it so fast?

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Graham: I was pretty good. I think that Hartmann was totally responsible for that, and so was Bunshaft. Between the two of them they could call the shots. They needed a design partner. They couldn't have associate partners doing everything.

Blum: Is that how one gets to be a partner, they ask you if you want to become one? Or do they just bring you up at a partners' meeting and elect you and then inform you?

Graham: Yes, they inform you.

Blum: You said your wife left the firm, but in the ensuing years she maintained her practice and raised three children. Are any of your children in architecture or related fields?

Graham: The two girls are. Mara is an architect, she graduated from Harvard, and is now out in California. She's got two children, and is practicing architecture, although she's has not gotten her license yet. That upsets me.

Blum: Is it more difficult to get a license in California?

Graham: No, but the longer you wait, the harder it gets because you forget a lot of the stuff. Nowadays they're making it a little easier, because you can take the courses and the tests through the Internet, which makes it a lot easier for a married woman with two children.

Blum: Is she working for a firm now?

Graham: No, she worked with Frank Gehry for a few years and then she worked in Vancouver as well, with her husband. She worked for Peter Eisenman in New York. Now she's on her own and doing her first project as the lead architect. The other one, Lisa, who was extremely talented at drawing, but who chose not to go into architecture, is a consultant in real estate research.

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She got a master's degree in real estate research. She does research for Americans who are interested in projects in Europe. She has her own business.

Blum: But her work certainly is related.

Graham: Yes. She knows a lot about architecture.

Blum: And your son?

Graham: He can't draw at all. He is at Solomon Brothers and is a director there. He's quite young to be a director.

Blum: So he has a business head. It seem two out of three are in a related profession. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Graham: Mara is very talented and Lisa is very bright, deceptively bright. She acts like she really isn't.

Blum: There was one person at SOM that you have worked with a lot, and in his biographical credits, out of thirty projects, twenty of them were with you.

Graham: Who was that?

Blum: Fazlur Khan. A good portion of his career was connected to yours. Would you speak a little bit about him? Everyone had said that he was such a gentleman and such a conscientious scholar and a fine engineer, but people stop there. You could probably say much more.

Graham: He was the best architectural engineer in the United States of America, if not the world, there's no doubt in my mind about that. Not only did he understand the mathematics, but he understood the architecture. Most engineers don't.

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Blum: What do you mean by the difference between architecture and mathematics?

Graham: I mean the goal of architecture, the purpose. Therefore he was much more helpful. He could talk architecture when explaining structure, which most engineers can't do at all. There are a couple of buildings in New York that a famous engineer in New York talked Bunshaft into doing a certain way and they're wrong. They're absolutely wrong. He made them think it was a concrete building and it wasn't. It was a steel building passing as concrete. Nervi did some beautiful structures, but his son is a terrible architect. Some of his structures are hidden by some terrible coverings that his son put on them. When you see the pictures of Nervi's work you usually see the structures and you don't see all the parts of the building. Faz was totally different. He was also gentle, but stubborn, and always willing to understand. We got so close together in the way we thought that one time, when he was out of town in Saudi Arabia for quite a while, I had to design a building in Chicago and I had to work with another engineer and they started suggesting something and I suggested we do something different, structurally, and Faz came back and said that I was right.

Blum: You were beginning to absorb some of him.

Graham: Not beginning. By that time we were like one architect-engineer. We were real partners. He was a very gentle, elegant man. Socially terrific. He was a good job-getter. We really got the work from Jerry Hines together. I met Jerry on a golf course in Mobile, Alabama. Jane met his wife in the club house while we were playing golf. He came from Gary, Indiana, originally. They used to come up from Gary, Indiana, to get to know us. Jerry was doing some awful buildings, but I had told Jane at the time that that was the new Herb Greenwald.

Blum: What gave you that idea?

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Graham: After playing with him and talking with him, I realized that this guy was exactly like Herb Greenwald. Not in every respect, but he was a real developer interested in architecture. He was a mechanical engineer. Then I went to see his buildings and he was working his head off on an apartment building.

Blum: What architect, or architects, was he using?

Graham: I can't remember. It was a big firm in Houston. He would work with our New York office on some of the projects they did in Houston. Jerry was working his head off on this apartment building, night and day, and it was a terrible building. It was a bad idea, too. They were doing a highrise building in downtown Houston and in those days that was a disaster. After five o'clock in the evening that town was abandoned. And he had a structural problem, so I sent Faz down, and Faz befriended him, and Jerry practically fell in love with Faz. Then we saw them socially a lot. When he built the Shell building, we got the job.

Blum: For Faz, something struck me when I read about him. He was as much involved with experimenting, academically, as actually building. He was deeply committed to IIT and to the students he advised. They were working on projects that seemed very closely allied to the actually projects that he was working on. Was it a proving ground?

Graham: That would be very natural. What else was he going to teach them? If you're an architect, that's what you would do.

Blum: Myron was doing much the same thing at IIT.

Graham: Myron was doing more theoretical things. Faz was really doing more practical problems and concerns that we were facing in the office. If you see the buildings that Myron did, like the brick building in Philadelphia, 10

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Penn Center, or the one in Pittsburgh, the Equibank building at Two Oliver Plaza, Faz was violently opposed to the one in Pittsburgh.

Blum: Was he working with Myron at the time?

Graham: No, he didn't want to work on it. Faz didn't want to work on buildings that were a priori structurally designed. He wanted to be in on the ground floor and he should have been on every project. The purity of his structure and the purity of his thinking was what I fell in love with.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Blum: Faz wrote an article about the future of highrises in the city in which he expressed concern about the fact that buildings, using all the newest technology, should be designed in service of bettering the community. Did you and he ever discuss such ideas?

Graham: I don't think so. I don't know what he meant by that. I'm not saying that he didn't say it. There are many ways that highrise buildings help the community. Chicago originally had a very big population with a lot of jobs—there were almost four million—it was larger than Los Angeles or Detroit, only New York was bigger. The reason was that there were a lot of jobs throughout the city but the economy changed. The role of the worker in Chicago changed. Now we're into a world that's totally different.

Blum: Changed from what to what?

Graham: It changed from people that made clothing and used their hands in these large loft factories around the center of the city to a world of high technology. You could see it coming. To top that, the expressways were built, so a lot of the middle class vacated Chicago and moved to Schaumberg and the south suburbs. Wheaton, Illinois, used to be a nice little town and then they got an explosion of people that moved into these new areas. The

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jobs left and if you watched the traffic from these areas you would see all these poor people from the South Side driving towards O'Hare and all the middle class and rich driving towards downtown. So the problem was how to bring jobs downtown. This was what I think Faz was talking about. The highrise office building with apartments was a way to bring people downtown. The retired woman, for example, would rather live in an apartment in the city than in a big house in the suburbs when her husband died. That's what they did—they raced each other to see who could get into the latest tall apartment building. I know a lot of people like that. They don't want anything underneath the twenty-first floor. Any Chicago developer will tell you that. It's got to be higher. It may be funny, but it has an advantage. It has an advantage to the city and to the dweller. Number one, it really is easy to shop from the Hancock building, you just go down the elevators and you're in the shopping center of the world. Number two, they're near the Art Institute and they don't have to drive there from the suburbs. They're near the new Museum of Contemporary Art. Just think of all the things that are now accessible that are not accessible in Lake Forest. And they don't have to go back at a certain time demanded by a train schedule. Schaumburg is the same way. That's what happened to Sears. A lot of the people who worked for Sears before they moved downtown lived in Cicero and west of Cicero. They were Poles or Czechs. They moved to the Sears Tower downtown but Sears did not pay them very much because they had menial jobs. So when Sears got sophisticated they needed to get a higher quality of people. But when you have to compete for people with Tommy Reynolds's firm, Mayer, Brown and Platt, or Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenberg, or Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or the banks, then Sears couldn't make it. So that's why we were so intent, particularly when I was chairman of the Central Area Committee, to move the city south and to develop the property on the south Loop, towards IIT. Fortunately, Mayor Daley supported that terrifically, and we did build a huge project successfully.

Blum: Was that Dearborn Park?

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Graham: Yes. That's now expanding. You're getting housing even nearer to the Loop than Lincoln Park. And you're getting more jobs and a new housing form— you've now got different kinds of buildings than Chicago had when people were leaving for the suburbs. That may be what Faz was talking about because we did talk about that.

Blum: I just had the sense that he was talking about the continuation of building highrises. He said that they had to serve a larger purpose than just exercising technology.

Graham: They all did. The Hancock building just awakened the Near North Side. Phil Klutznik, the great developer in Chicago, told me that it would never work. Then the first thing he did was build the building next door. Then when Hancock was so dumb as to sell some of their apartments—because they evaluated them in Boston and said they were worth about $60,000 apiece— Phil went in and bought about eight apartments. Now what do they sell for? They have higher ceilings than almost any other apartment building, they're safer, and the acoustics are better. The whole neighborhood has exploded. Saks has moved to a new place and Neiman Marcus has moved...

Blum: I'm glad you have said something more than has already been said about Faz.

Graham: Faz was wonderful. When you talk about Faz's buildings, it's better to talk about him then.

Blum: One of the first buildings, in 1963, on which you worked with Faz and Myron, was the DeWitt-Chestnut apartments.

Graham: I don't remember Myron being involved at all. Let's put it this way, he didn't have much to say about the design. Number one, all of IIT was opposed to the building.

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Blum: All of IIT? Why?

Graham: All of it. IIT and the professors didn't like my building on the sacred ground next to Mies's building [860-80 Lake Shore Drive] and that I was building a taller building. They were all opposed to it at the time.

Blum: They thought it would take away from Mies's thunder?

Graham: Right. It was a tube structure. Myron wasn't into tube structures then, I can prove that.

Blum: Was this your first tube?

Graham: No, the first one was really Brunswick. Then I think that Shell Plaza was before that. But Barney Weissbourd was the one who asked me to do the DeWitt-Chestnut. The reason it's so tall was that I was supposed to have two low buildings like all the IIT people thought I should have, like Mies's. It was dead wrong. It was better to put everything in one building and make it taller so that my building and Mies's were further apart and so that my building did not block the view of 860-880 Lake Shore Drive.

Blum: So your design was in deference to Mies and not in competition with him?

Graham: Absolutely! One hundred percent. How could I move this building further and further away? That was proven, you can talk to any of the people that work with Barney and ask them. There's no question about that. Myron had no decision to make on that building. I did, with Faz.

Blum: The team that listed included you and Faz and Myron.

Graham: Yes, but Myron was the studio head. Natalie du Blois was a studio head. I had studio heads all over, but I made the designs. There's no doubt about

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that. I had a war with Barney Weissbourd and I never got another job from him. I had little wars with him—two wars simultaneously—and I lost both.

Blum: In the same article that I read, it said that this team—Faz and Myron—had been advisors to a student at IIT who had explored the two structures.

Graham: That could be, but I didn't know about it. I was against it. Definitely against it. They were mad as hell at me. If they had explored it with someone else, then they had violated my confidence.

Blum : It was a student's project that was done in the school.

Graham: So then neither one of them had anything to do with the building because they were exploring an alternative.

Blum: I think this was probably happening simultaneously.

Graham: But then why did they explore it?

Blum: Because they were just the advisors to the student.

Graham: Well, whatever. I am appalled that Myron would be thought to have had anything to do with that building. There's no way in his previous history in architecture that he ever did anything even similar to it. Or later. People at IIT keep giving Myron credit for buildings at IIT. They keep doing that all the time, one after another, and it's appalling. When was the Shell Plaza building in relation to the DeWitt-Chestnut?

Blum: The DeWitt-Chestnut was 1963 and the Shell Plaza was 1965 through the early 1970s.

Graham: Shell Plaza is two buildings, that's why it went on so long.

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Blum: But it started in 1965.

Graham: I think the DeWitt-Chestnut was later than you have it there. I can tell you for sure that the people at IIT wanted two buildings. If Myron and Faz went out there to do it, they never told me.

Blum: So the DeWitt-Chestnut building was another tube structure, as was the Brunswick building, and a few years later, you did One Shell Plaza in Houston, Texas. You said there was more about Jerry Hines related to that building.

Graham: Yes. He called one day and asked me—this was the first project he ever called me for—if I would like to do a big building for the Shell Oil Company in Houston. I said I'd be delighted. He asked if I could come down on Thursday and I said that I wouldn't have time to get any ideas together about it. He said I wouldn't need any. So I went down. He and I went to see the chairman of Shell and there were other architects making proposals. Jerry presented me from SOM in Chicago and said that I had done tall buildings before and so on. They asked me what the building would look like. Jerry opened his suitcase and took out a piece of Siesziken German hardware. He said, "It would be like this." Boom!

Blum: What did the piece of hardware have to do with the building's design?

Graham: He was saying that we were going to build a building that was as precise as this piece of hardware. That's where we began to tackle this real problem of how a tube structure hits the ground in concrete. The Shell Plaza building hits the ground in concrete the way we dreamed about. In this case, it didn't come from Faz; Faz had these windows protruding inside, which was the way everyone had built these buildings before, with the upper windows all plastered up. I said that it wasn't very nice because it ruins the inside, and asked to try sticking them out. So Faz said that that was a great idea. The loads of the building were stronger at these points which were stronger at

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the core at the inner tube, so these beams were taking most of the load and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But the windows were staying the same size. The other way you could have done it was to make the windows smaller as you go down. But this way, you are saying that this is a taller than usual concrete building, because you look at the columns and what they're picking up, which you can see from the ground. It's that modulation that gives it a character for a concrete building that I think is a little more exciting than an ordinary concrete building. The other interesting thing is the technical parts of that building were done by the San Francisco office.

Blum: Can you describe what you mean by "hitting the ground"?

Graham: When the columns come to the ground in a building, that's what we mean by hitting the ground. The columns that are taking the most load are obviously the heaviest, so we express that load all the way down to the ground in this building, instead of picking it up like we did at the Brunswick, which was kind of simplistic but turned out all right for the location. The Shell Plaza building was much taller. At one point it was the tallest concrete building in the world as a sixty-story building, which is almost the limit, you can't really build any taller than that.

Blum: It really looks like a giant in its surroundings.

Graham: It is, but Houston is nothing but very tall buildings. Today there are even more there.

Blum: As it comes from the top to the ground, it also spreads out a little bit .

Graham: Yes, because the columns are getting bigger and deeper, but not wider. The column is deeper, although the window is the same size, so you get this undulation. At the top, all the columns are the same size because they're all taking the same load, but as you go down, you start to pick up more load on some columns than on others and the column that has the least load is the

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corner one because it's only supporting that little corner, but it's also forming the strength of the tube against the wind.

Blum: To my untrained eye, it does remind me of Brunswick.

Graham: At Brunswick, all the columns are of the same size.

Blum: Without knowing that, I see this splay at the bottom.

Graham: That exists at the bottom of all columns. It's very different. The Shell design is truer and more honest. The columns are bigger down there because they have more load. When you look at the building you realize that those columns carry more load. Those things are very important to me.

Blum: A phrase that has been used for the Chicago School very often is "honesty in expressing structure." Is that what you're talking about?

Graham: That's right. But they didn't build concrete buildings in that time.

Blum: But doesn't that phrase applies whether it's concrete or steel or stone?

Graham: I understand. The Shell Plaza building is a very honest building and the floor is the same inside all the way, because the columns are outside. If you look at the plan, you can see it.

Blum: Is this an all-travertine building?

Graham: Yes. That's what I wanted to do at Brunswick, but it was too expensive.

Blum: Was this a fulfillment of what you tried to do at Brunswick?

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Graham: Yes, it was an idea that I had gotten from Brunswick. But I had also had a lesson from Bunshaft on that because he had done a number of buildings where he had covered them in travertine. I learned a lot about travertine.

Blum: You said something in Italian yesterday and later you told me was that you learned Italian to be able to go to Italy to select stone?

Graham: Well, Italian is a lot like Spanish, so it was fairly easy. I went to Italy a number of times, not just that once, but certainly for that building. I also went for the Brunswick building. That's also where I met Carlo Marrioti, speaking of travertine.

Blum: He owned a stoneyard?

Graham: His family owned the same stoneyard that Bernini used in the front of the Vatican.

Blum: Every time you needed stone, did you have to go to Italy?

Graham: Yes. For example, it was cheaper for the owner to take quarried stone from Minnesota, ship it to Italy, fabricate it in Italy, and send it back to Minneapolis, than to make it in Minnesota. The stonemasons in Italy are phenomenal. There isn't any stoneworking equipment in the United States that isn't made in Italy. They are the stonemasons of the world. It was cheaper to send stone from China to Italy and back to China than to make it in China.

Blum: What do you mean by "fabricating"?

Graham: I mean taking the big blocks and cutting them down and fabricating them to size, putting the joints in them, putting the anchors in them, finishing the stone. Americans couldn't make thin stone then. They can make it now, but I don't trust them. They would make it two inches, which is a lot more

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expensive than doing it in an inch and a quarter, which is the way Italians do it. It uses less stone. There are whole areas of Italy that do nothing but work with stone.

Blum: So you learned their language to deal with them?

Graham: I certainly love Italy and my friend Carlo Mariotti. There were others, like Vando D'Angelo. He mainly worked on granite, which is different.

Blum: I suppose this brings us to your trussed tube of the Hancock Center.

Graham: Faz was not a partner yet. He worked under an engineer called Al Picardi, who was also a very good engineer.

Blum: Was Al Picardi working with you on Hancock?

Graham: Yes, we worked on Hancock. Faz worked for Al, and Al trusted him and loved him immensely. He gave Faz absolute freedom. I remember when we were working on Hancock that we had another scheme with two buildings, one was an office building and one was an apartment building. I kept telling Jerry Wolman that I didn't think that such a big office building would work in that part of town. It wasn't an office building location, because most of the office building workers came from the railroad station and to then take a bus to this part of town was not very smart. So Jerry said, why don't we put one on top of the other, and he took the apartment building and plunked it on top of the office building. I said, Well, that'll work. I pointed out to him that Chicagoans didn't like to live on the first twenty-four stories anyway. So we decided to design just one building. But the problem was that the uses on the ground floor, which at that time was going to be Bergdorf Goodman, needed a big space, not a little one.

Blum: They are a retail women's clothing store.

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Graham: We got along very well with Bergdorf Goodman, they loved the idea. They were going to bring in all the other people that would later come in. Above that you needed parking. Then you had the office building and then the apartments. If you think about apartments, the efficiency apartments needed more depth than the luxury apartments.

Blum: Why?

Graham: Because they have living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bathrooms all in a row. They only have one window. The one-bedroom apartments needed a little less. The luxury apartments didn't need that much at all. So if you stepped the building up, it was bad because the structure was totally discontinuous. That's been done in New York a lot where the structure steps back, but it is terrible—Trump Tower is a disaster. If you sloped it, it would work, so we tried it sloped. Then Picardi came down one time and said, "You know, Faz has a different way of doing this structure." We were building all these columns that sloped and then eventually we got a lot of them. We meant to have more of them and then stop some as they went higher. But it was very complicated. Then Picardi said that Faz thought that we ought to try making a tube. So Faz came and explained that all these members would be not intentionally, but in gravity... In other words, the diagonals would also be taking vertical loads, and that's different. If Myron worked on a theoretical project, the diagonals were only stiffening the tube, they were not carrying the load. This difference was where Faz was the real engineer. We had Bob Diamant working with us on this. He was the studio head. Bob sat there trying to make sure that all the columns and diagonals crossed at beam points, because it's very important that they cross at the same place so it's continuous. Whenever they cross they meet a beam. But as the building gets narrower, the floor sizes change because they cross at different points. It took Bob a long time to make them work. We always had catch-up floors that were a little bigger so that you could continue it. Then some apartments, of course, enjoyed that because they ended up with higher ceilings. One of the great collectors in Chicago, Robert Mayer, had one of

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those apartments. He wanted it because they had these big paintings. The other advantage to the tube was that you could take out a floor, just like at the Sears Tower, and make a duplex. The floor is really doing nothing, it's the beams that do all the work. That's the beauty of steel.

Blum: With all these calculations that were necessary to get things done, how much did the people on your team rely on computers?

Graham: It was the beginning, but not for architects, only the structural engineers. The amount of calculations were done quickly so that we were able to start quickly, that was a great advantage. If you have to do it by hand, it would take months and you'd have to check it like mad. A guy could make an error by just writing the wrong number in and that could change the whole structure. But they were not drawing on the computer, they were just calculating. That was very short-lived. They started drawing with the computer in the 1970s. By then the architects started drawing with the computer. Bill Hartmann was skeptical about investing a lot of time and programming in drafting for computer use. I was the number one pusher for computer users.

Blum: Are you comfortable with the computer, personally?

Graham: No, I didn't have to be. I had people that were.

Blum: You just saw its possibilities.

Graham: Yes, by that time I was too busy to go to school and start learning about computers. None of the architects were using them, not even at Harvard or Princeton or anywhere. They didn't teach it. Faz got two young computer guys who were just terrific. The two of them quit us to work on Star Wars, after they were doing advanced graphics and other phenomenal stuff for us.

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Blum: The idea of having diagonals on a building... Chuck Bassett used them on the Alcoa building in California.

Graham: That was after Hancock. I always told him, "I don't know why such a short building needs diagonals." He said it was for earthquakes.

Blum: That's been a criticism of the Alcoa building.

Graham: On the other hand, he's right, because it is cheaper.

Blum: But there was historical precedent for diagonals in buildings.

Graham: The Eiffel Tower.

Blum: Also the Crystal Palace, as far back at the 1850s.

Graham: But that wasn't a tall building. And in warehouses and industrial buildings, of course. But I'm talking about structures for tall buildings. The Eiffel Tower was like that. Again, the foot of that building is spread out and there're no columns in the middle.

Blum: Was the Eiffel Tower in the back of your mind?

Graham: Later it was. I'll tell you a joke. Walter liked to name buildings after sophisticated names of history, and I went to Greece with Jane and a Tribune reporter wanted to ask me what I was naming the Hancock and I knew he was referring to what Walter did. I said, "I call it 'tumulus'." We searched for tumuli for about two days and finally found a road to some and it was a bunch of simple stones that sloped on both sides. But the reporter didn't know what "tumulus" meant.

Blum: And did you before you went to Greece?

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Graham: Yes, I knew it meant tombs, that's like it is in Spanish and Italian, but I called it tumulus because Greece had advertised its tumuli so much. It was my nickname for the building.

Blum: Chicagoans are proud of it. They call it "Big John." In a way it sort of became Chicago's Eiffel Tower.

Graham: It was a fun building. And Jerry Wolman was great to work with.

Blum: He had some problems, though.

Graham: He had some problems back in the East, terrible problems.

Blum: I thought he sued SOM.

Graham: No, he didn't sue SOM. Hancock sued him. But then they settled. Hancock paid him everything he'd invested.

Blum: Let me get this straight, Jerry Wolman was the developer and he hired you and Hancock bought it from him?

Graham: Tishman Construction built the building. There was a young guy who used to work for Metropolitan Structures who offered to save some money from our specifications on the caissons. We had put the shells in and our specifications said we would leave the shells in. The caissons had to go to rock, so they were really big caissons. These were even bigger than the ones at Equitable. They said they could save us a lot of money if we pulled the shells after the concrete was poured so that they could be used again. Well, they pulled them and our engineers were watching them, mainly Al Picardi, and they watched one of the columns settle a little bit. So he investigated and found out that there was a flaw in one of the caissons and when they pulled on it, the concrete came up a little bit before dropping. That's exactly what we were afraid of, at least Al Picardi was. Then we had to go in and

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repair it. Hancock got a terrible engineer to come in to check what we were doing. So we had to drill the caissons to see where the flaw was and they even made us drill the ones that still had the shell on them. I'll never forget Faz proving to this engineer that even if it was all sand and no concrete in that caisson, it would still take the load of the building. Of course, the engineer was flabbergasted. Nevertheless, Hancock, in their wisdom, stopped all the work until all of the caissons that were built had been checked. That took a long time, about six months.

Blum: Did you think that was the right thing to do?

Graham: No, they were wrong. That period hurt Jerry because he got in trouble on the East Coast. He owned a football stadium and he owned a basketball team and he owned the Philadelphia Eagles football team. Once he wanted to add a second floor to his own house so he had these cranes pick up the house and then he was going to build the floor underneath and the whole thing collapsed. Jerry Wolman was something else. Leonard Hankin from Bergdorf Goodman in New York loved him, too. But we ended up building the Hancock on time, in spite of that delay, because the American Steel Company went on fabricating and we had everything built like mad. The steel went up like a rocket. But by that time, Jerry couldn't hold on anymore. So he just sold everything. The Hancock paid him back later, when they sued him.

Blum: I'm sure you know that the Civic Center had problems with the welding.

Graham: To have problems like that is not unusual. But this time, Tishman should never have gone against us. They listened to this engineer. In New York, they didn't have these kinds of caissons, they have rock. It is very easy to build a tall building in New York because you just set it on the rock.

Blum: There aren't very many black buildings in the city. Why is the building black?

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Graham: There was 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, and all of IIT was black.

Blum: Inland Steel was almost black.

Graham: I don't think that white buildings belong in the North. They belong in Florida or Atlanta or Houston. Black in a hot climate is not a very pleasant thing. But in Chicago, which is a cold climate, the black looks better against the snow. It's not stone, I wasn't going to paint it pink. It's steel and steel is black. When steel is finished, it's black. When it rusts, it gets red. Stainless steel is bright, but regular steel is black. I wanted to express the black quality. It would have been very expensive to cover it in Cor-ten. It would have had too many cuts. Since then I've learned how to do it better. I've done buildings in Barcelona and in England where the steel is totally exposed. It's not fireproof and I don't have to cover it with aluminum.

Blum: Is that because of regulations?

Graham: No, there's a new paint that was developed by the space agency. It's the equivalent of the fireproofing that we used to put it on all the buildings. Here is a picture of a fifty-story building that was just painted. You can buy the paint in any color and it lasts for fifty years. When the missiles come in from outer space, the heat that they generate hitting the air is enormous, so the cone is made so that when they get up to five thousand degrees, it expands. If you have steel on the face of a building, it will only get up to about five hundred degrees, so this paint lasts for a long time.

[Tape 6: Side 1]

Blum: Is it true that the Hancock has, instead of a cornerstone, a skystone that contains a piece of the Eiffel Tower? Or is that apocryphal?

Graham: If it does, I haven't heard of it. But that may have been true; it was so long ago that I don't remember. Jerry Wolman might have thought of it.

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Blum: But he was out before it was completed.

Graham: Well, he would have thought of it before. Hancock certainly wouldn't have thought of it.

Blum: You designed a little, snail-like garage structure separate from the Hancock building. Why wasn't the garage structure incorporated into the body of the building?

Graham: It is incorporated but the ramp leading to it is not. It's not for parking. The ramp gets you above the store level. You drive up and down it and you get to the floor where the parking starts. The store is the first floor and the garage starts above it. The garage is in the building.

Blum: Is there something else you'd like to say about the building?

Graham: One thing that is curious is that Jerry Wolman spent a hell of a lot of money supporting the club on the same block.

Blum: The Casino Club?

Graham: Yes. They didn't want to sell because it was too emotional. Jerry offered them a lot of money, but they didn't want to sell. He offered to build them another club or put them in the building if they'd wanted. They didn't want to do that because they were an old, traditional club in the city. We had to spend a lot of money pouring concrete around them and under them so that they wouldn't sink when we did the building. I hate to see the next guy that ever has to build around them.

Blum: Because you shored it up so well?

Graham: The amount of concrete in there is unbelievable. It'll never sink, that's for sure.

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Blum: How would you have treated that extra space had you acquired it?

Graham: We would have maybe relocated the building in a different position.

Blum: Might it have been larger?

Graham: It might have been different. Certainly two buildings would have fit better in that profile. That was the original scheme, to do an office building and an apartment building, even though I really tried desperately to talk Wolman out of an office building. I didn't quite succeed. Not that it's bad office space—it's good office space—but the only one that was there for a long time was J. R. Thompson, the advertising firm. I don't think they're there anymore. That's the only office space that makes sense in that part of the city because both the secretaries and the executives all lived on the Near North Side. They don't live in the suburbs.

Blum: For small offices it seems like it would be very convenient for a dentist's office or an eye doctor, but they don't need that kind of space.

Graham: It plainly didn't make sense to have an office building there. There was plenty of office space that was vacant and cheap in that area, like the Palmolive building.

Blum: Before Hancock, you did two buildings in the 1960s and into the 1970s in England. The first was the Boots Pure Drug Company in Nottingham, which was a two-story building with courtyards. It was an industrial park.

Graham: That was for the original plant. They're sort of the Walgreens Drug Company of England, with the difference that they manufacture the drugs. They're highly computerized. Everybody in England, Scotland, and Ireland knows Boots. They're a powerful company.

Blum: So this was where they actually manufactured the drugs?

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Graham: Not in this building, but on the site. There was a big factory next to the site, the whole area was an industrial park. Their new chairman wanted their headquarters right there. That's why we did the headquarters there.

Blum: This was your first commission in England. How did this job come to SOM?

Graham: Through Upjohn. They loved the Upjohn building and these pharmaceutical companies know each other very well. They buy drugs from each other.

Blum: So it was the connection through your previous work? But it seems natural for Upjohn to use an American architect from the Midwest. Was it as fitting for a pharmaceutical firm in England?

Graham: Yes, but at the time British architects were not very awakened yet. We did not have that much experience in England yet. Bill Hartmann knew Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall and he knew Rosenberg. As I told you before, they were a Bauhaus firm, and Yorke and Rosenberg had gone to the Bauhaus, and so we associated with them and shared the work. We were in charge of design and they were advisors. We ended up doing the working drawings partially there and we partially used British engineers and didn't have to go through the whole business of registering, although I did register in England. Bill also registered. The Brits gave us an honorary license.

Blum: Just for the duration of the project?

Graham: No, it was permanent. I'm a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. That was just by an interview. It consisted mostly of their asking me about American technology. They wanted to know how we did buildings. It was fun meeting with them, as it was working with Brian Henderson. He was a young partner from Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall that they assigned to the project with me. Brian and I have become permanent friends.

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Blum: Do you think maybe that American efficiency and American technology were part of the attraction for a client in England?

Graham: Yes, it was. At the time, Britain was just awakening from a terrible war. They hadn't built as much as we had because they had those depression years. So they sought our advice and I think we did help both the client and the firm that we worked with. Faz was involved with that project.

Blum: Was it SOM's decision to associate with an English firm? Or could you have done it all yourself?

Graham: We could have, but it was a lot easier to do it with a partner because they were already there. They could supervise the building and we didn't have to send superintendents. They could tell us about the technology and who are the best contractors and what materials were available. We told them about the furniture that we were designing and open office plans, which they had never heard of. For them everything was in little office cubicles. At first a lot of the upper-echelon employees didn't like the idea, but after a while they loved it. More important, we were able to make furniture there out of wood that was actually more flexible and more technologically advanced than anything in the United States.

Blum: Because of the craftsmen?

Graham: We knew how to do it, but the furniture companies in American didn't.

Blum: So where was it manufactured?

Graham: In England from our own designs. All the wood was done by the craftsmen that made the counters in the drugstores. We told them that we did this all the time in America, which wasn't true, certainly not in wood.

Blum: Did SOM do the interiors?

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Graham: Yes. I must say that Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall shared in that, too. I forget the name of the young man that they assigned to that, but he worked for us too. He came to the United States, as well as did Brian Henderson.

Blum: Even though the language is the same, with different pronunciations for some words, were there other differences that you had to accommodate?

Graham: Yes, the differences were basically the elitist structure in England. It has gotten better, but there was a great deal of meeting the chairman of the contracting company and he's connected to the prime minister, while the guy that's inspecting the job on which a lot of money is invested was only paid peanuts, as much as a carpenter in the United States. How could they do that and trust the guy to be loyal? It's a terrible problem. It's like having a ship turned over to a sergeant instead of a captain. The other thing was that the workmanship in certain trades was very old and traditional—it has changed quite a lot since. The brick layers would have to hire five different brick-laying shops and each one would do a piece. Royalty still prevailed.

Blum: How much did that impact what you were doing?

Graham: Well, it didn't mean much to talk to the chairman of the board. You had to talk to the guys who were going to build the building.

Blum: How soon did you learn this?

Graham: Right away. It was apparent. That was true of everything, even in the company itself. You go up this kind of ladder and even though there may be other brilliant guys, they may be down below. They lost their top computer man, who had invented a whole system of computers for Boots which was connected to the drugstores. If you bought from the drugstore, the computer would tell the factory how much had been sold. Then the factory would tell the manufacturers to make more of that particular drug. They lost that guy

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because he quit. He got so upset with their system that he was hired at MIT as a professor.

Blum: He was English?

Graham: Yes, he had to leave England to get recognition. Elitism in England still prevails.

Blum: This was your first job in England, which was thirty years ago.

Graham: The food was so bad then I almost starved. Brian knew one good restaurant.

Blum: Were you living in Nottingham?

Graham: When we visited, we were working both in London in Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall's office and in Nottingham. Brian and I would go to Nottingham and be put into a lovely guest house. We couldn't get out of there without a car. Brian was Scottish, not a Brit, and he was much more gregarious than a Brit.

Blum: On the heels of this job, you got another job. It wasn't in the drug industry, it was in the tobacco industry. Just as one job was finishing, the second job began. How did you get the second job for the W.D. and H.O. Wills Tobacco headquarters ?

Graham: That was the big headquarters and manufacturing plant for cigarettes. Their real headquarters was in London, but their manufacturing was all over England. They were the biggest cigarette manufacturer. We got a beautiful site overlooking Bristol and the great bridge that goes over the river.

Blum: Is that the suspension bridge by Isambard Brunel?

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Graham: Yes. He was the guy that built the railroad train from London through Bristol and then he built a bridge that went across the water.

Blum: They called it the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Graham: His idea was to have ships go from Bristol to America. He was a great engineer. He did the subway system in London, he was the first subway builder. There is a great story that at the opening they had this great big party in the tunnel with the king and queen and princes and dukes and members of Parliament. The party lasted until one o'clock in the morning and they all left the tunnel and the tunnel collapsed at two o'clock.

Blum: Is that a true story?

Graham: It's true. The track for the bridge was the only track in England that's a wide track and it runs on the opposite side of all the other rails. He bid for the whole project, he wasn't just hired as an engineer. He offered a total price, including the whole system.

Blum: How old is the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

Graham: It was built in Queen Victoria's time.

Blum: Was this bridge very much in view when you looked at the site where the tobacco factory was going to be built?

Graham: Yes. That's why we were interested—me more than Faz, although Faz loved the idea of building the structure on the roof—so it would be a kind of a hello to Brunel across the river.

Blum: This was also another project in which you collaborated with Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall. How did you get this tobacco job?

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Graham: I worked with Brian Henderson, specifically. There weren't really any good industrial buildings being built and there was only one really good architect, although I can't remember his name. He was doing a lot of bridges and roads, and he did the Boots factory that I was talking about before. It was a very modern factory. The tobacco company had heard of the Philip Morris project and so they found out about Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and called the Chicago office. Because of Boots, they also thought of us, and Boots gave us a high recommendation, so we got the job. It was a fun job to do. I learned a lot in both. One thing is that the Brits don't do landscaping like Americans; they plant seeds. The seeds grow very fast in England because they get constant watering and the soil is very good. But they don't do all the fancy instant landscaping that Americans do. Not even in their homes. Not these huge lawns.

Blum: This project was near an area where people live. How did you work with the people who lived near it?

Graham: You don't do that in England. In England a company like Boots or Wills doesn't have to talk to the neighbors. That's an American idea.

Blum: You just plunk your factory in the middle of everything?

Graham: It's zoned. Everything has been zoned for centuries, and so if there are houses, they aren't that near. There's room for other factories. That has already been thought of. They don't go around clearing land and building little houses here and there. The houses have to be built in the village where the church is and where the shopping is. They don't have Wal-Mart, thank god. If you go to Bath, it's a village. They have heavy industry in Bath but you don't see it. Not even from the road that takes you into the center of Bath can you see any industry.

Blum: Are you saying that there is a distinct separation between the residential, the commercial, and the industrial?

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Graham: If you look a Hilberseimer's book you'd see it. He shows where workers should be and where industry should be and where housing should be, where kids go to school—he's figured that all out. They don't change it. They don't go around clearing another two million acres and building trailer homes around them. Trailer homes are completely verboten in England. The only time you see trailer homes is when workers are building roads, as temporary shelters that move with the roads.

Blum: There was a rather extensive write-up on the Wills Tobacco headquarters, in an English publication, written by an English critic. The author quoted Alison and Peter Smithson, who wrote a book called Without Rhetoric, and in that book they assert that American architecture—SOM architecture—is not exportable.

Graham: They were wrong, weren't they?

Blum: In a way you've expressed some of the same reasoning as they did, but about other things. They say that the English people don't think of a factory as neat and clean and tidy as you've designed it. The reason they don't is because they haven't lived through the progressive changes from the factory type that they're used to to one with a clean, neat facade for manufacturing like Albert Kahn's or yours. Is time the unmentioned ingredient here?

Graham: I know the Smithsons very well.

Blum: Did you ever discuss this with them?

Graham: No, but I had to fix his building in London. The one in the center of town. He was an old man at that time, in the 1960s, and he had gone through the war. The Brits were treated like peasants. They had no rights. A British carpenter could not even use a power tool.

Blum: They didn't know how?

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Graham: They wouldn't give power tools to them. They'd give a carpenter fifty cents an hour to saw. That's changed a lot. If it hadn't changed, England would be an economic disaster. When the queen had Hong Kong and India and all the colonies, they didn't have to worry about work. That's not true now. They almost destroyed their steel industry. In a number of projects we had to end up buying the steel from Belgium. Seriously! All the steel in that building in London was from Belgium. That has changed. These men, the Willses and Boots, were aware of that. They knew they had to have sophisticated employees and they had to treat them well. The tobacco company had all these young girls operating sophisticated machines. They did better. They hung banners painted by great artists, they had music in the factories, including the Beatles. Where do you think the Beatles came from? They were a revolution against what the Smithsons were saying. A one hundred percent revolution. That has changed drastically.

Blum: I'm not sure that's the whole point of what they said.

Graham: I know it is. It is the whole point. The Smithsons were elitists.

Blum: I think they were talking about the growth of aesthetic taste.

Graham: Well, Bunshaft did a building there and they all love it. As a matter of fact, I got two national awards in England. Why was that? Because the Smithsons didn't like it? The Bauhaus also influenced things in architecture. Now there are a lot of British magazines that have copies of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill buildings, if you want to call them that. They're getting big awards internationally. Richard Rogers certainly doesn't care about the Smithsons. He's done buildings in France and Spain and they're modernist. Believe me, British architects are doing more Bunshaft buildings than Smithson buildings. There was the great architect who just died a few years ago, James Stirling.

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Blum: Haven't you said somewhat the same thing as the Smithsons in a way? You've said that America has no history. You've called for "civilized" architecture, which means that there must not be much of it around.

Graham: Trailer parks and public housing projects in America are uncivilized. We haven't learned. Certainly in a democracy, we should be leading. We don't have the history of architecture to discover what our culture is. To try to make a single culture out of the United States is ridiculous. The country's too big.

Blum: But aren't they saying something of what you've just said; that their own people haven't had the time to absorb the catch-up process in order to accept and appreciate this great modern building that you gave them.

Graham: I don't think that's true at all. I think that the advances that have taken place in England since the 1960s are phenomenal.

Blum: But this was the end of the 1960s.

Graham: In England that's almost thirty years ago. That's a long time. England had to change and they did change. They're a highly sophisticated industrial nation again. They're not just a banking nation. Travel through England and see the new buildings in Marlboro or Oxford or in Cambridge done by modern architects. Some of the schools that were ancient now have beautiful modern buildings, but they do have a British kind of vocabulary. It's not an American vocabulary. Some of the things that I've built in England I don't think would fit in the United States. They wouldn't look right.

Blum: Another writer thought that the Wills Tobacco headquarters worked very well. One of the reasons he cited was because the collaboration between SOM and YRM worked very well. The grand gestures of SOM were tempered and relaxed by YRM. Do you agree with this assessment?

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Graham: I don't think that's true at all. The buildings were tempered by the industrial environment. This was not the middle of London, they were industrial environments. I mentioned the great engineer who built the railroads and I felt I was walking on revered ground. So we tried to do a great industrial building. We didn't have all the problems that we did in the United States. We didn't have all the snowfall, we just got a little water now and then. In both cases we weren't dealing with monumental sites; we were dealing with very simple sites. I did a plant for Container Corporation of America early on and that was out in an industrial area in Chicago.

Blum: Would you talk a little bit about that building? There's been almost nothing published about it.

Graham: That was done almost exactly like United Airlines. It was done in the 1950s for Container Corporation near Elmhurst.

Blum: Over the years you have given service to the AIA. You were elected to the College of Fellows in 1966. For you, what was the value of being a member of that organization?

Graham: I was not very active. Tom Eyerman and Bill Hartmann were. To be a member of the AIA is almost a requirement for you to practice architecture in the United States.

Blum: Why?

Graham: If you're not, then they don't think that you're any good, like a doctor who's not a member of the AMA, or a lawyer who's not a member of the American Bar Association.

Blum: Is it prestige? Or is it credentials?

Graham: It's credentials.

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Blum: But you pay for those credentials. You haven't really earned anything because you can buy those credentials for two hundred dollars.

Graham: Yes. The biggest support SOM gives or I.M. Pei gives is that we pay the largest amount of fees, which then support the programs of the AIA for the architects who are not able.

Blum: The firm pays for each individual architect's membership?

Graham: Yes, we pay a huge amount. Sometime ago I got mad at the AIA and I wrote a note that said, "Let's all quit together."

Blum: Were you serious?

Graham: At one time I sure was. At that time, they hated big firms. In the headquarters in Washington they didn't like the big firms, and yet we're paying all their salaries.

Blum: What do they do for SOM for being a member and for paying all your architects' fees?

Graham: Nothing.

Blum: Do they set standards for the industry? Do they educate new architects?

Graham: The College of Fellows has scholarships for students. The AIA used to publish a magazine, but now it's published privately. They do have a computer spec program that you can buy. They do not lobby the way the AMA or the American Bar Association or engineers do in Washington. A number of times SOM has teamed up with the engineers to stop some stupid law. We never got the AIA to support it. Other than that the AIA gives national and local awards for architecture, there wasn't anything during my career that I personally got from the AIA.

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Blum: You have said publicly that the AIA should promote public awareness. You think that they should promote themselves to the public, if not to the members. You also said about the awards once that you stopped submitting for awards because the AIA thought that skyscrapers were evil.

Graham: It was not just skyscrapers. It was a jealousy that developed in the profession against SOM. If they ever knew that I was submitting a building, you could bet that I wasn't going to get an award.

Blum: Was the jealousy directed against your work or the firm?

Graham: I think SOM in general, and also me. The very tall buildings didn't have a chance. They knew who did them. The jury isn't supposed to know who did the buildings, but they knew damn well who did them. They knew who did the Sears Tower, so I didn't submit it.

Blum: Was that at the time when the Chicago Seven challenged general tastes and attitudes in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Was that the time when it became more fashionable to submit a residence or a smaller building than a tall building?

Graham: Yes, that's when I felt it. So I fooled them. I submitted a very small building and it got a national award. They didn't know who did it because it was in Guatemala.

Blum: What is the value of an award? For as many projects as you have completed, you have at least that many awards.

Graham: There should be a value, not so much for the architect, but for the profession. In other words, you shouldn't be facetious and political about them. If a building is worth it, it should get an award. It doesn't matter whether I.M. Pei or Joe Blow did it. That promotes architecture. I've seen lately within the last three or four years that the awards are better.

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Blum: By better do you mean much stricter and discriminating? More carefully chosen?

Graham: Before, anything that my friend Frank Gehry submitted, good or bad, got an award. I don't think that the architects understand Frank Gehry's value. His real value was the buildings he did in California. He was trying to do for California what Luis Barragán did for Mexico. He was searching for a language that was unique to California. He did these ticky-tacky buildings with the chain-link fence. There were artists at the same time in California doing painting on the back side of the canvas rather than on the front side because that looked like the cheap little houses out in the valleys. I like Frank a lot, he's a good friend, but then he got this hang-up about doing museums. Who's going to ask him to do museums?

Blum: The American Center in Paris did.

Graham: That's much later. The best museum he ever did was the Temporary Contemporary Museum out in Los Angeles because it was the best one to show art in. These other shapes are not conducive to showing art. Although he knows how to do it, because he did the University of Minnesota Art Museum up in Minneapolis, where you can go inside and see a beautiful museum. The exterior doesn't reflect the inside at all, it has these funny shapes. I've worked with Frank in Barcelona. I invited him and the mayor thought it would be a good idea. I had him working hard as to what his piece would be but I had already showed the mayor what I thought he would end up doing—we had a little model of it. So finally Frank got his idea and it was the same thing that I had anticipated he would do.

Blum: Was it like what you had shown the mayor?

Graham: Yes, I hadn't shown it to Frank, I had shown it to the mayor. Frank came and showed his to the mayor and the mayor went to the drawer and pulled out my fish.

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Blum: Well, you were pretty safe doing a fish design for Frank Gehry.

Graham: But he hadn't done that since Japan. So now I have the one that Frank built himself, the little one, up on my shelf. Louis Kahn did a great museum, the Kimball, down in Fort Worth, Texas. That museum converted the city to appreciate art because the collection they had there before the museum was built was no good. After that museum, they had a great collection. Philip Johnson built another one across the way, the Amon Carter Museum, which was not even close to Kahn's. Kahn was a great architect. Barragán was a great architect. Barragán was discovering a language that Mexican architects could understand. He could do it with words. I worked with him and it was just unbelievable. The project was never built, but we had collaborated. That the AIA doesn't do. It is not helpful to architects. If you're not within the club, you're out.

Blum: Haven't you always been in the club? An insider in the establishment?

Graham: I've really never. If you keep meeting with fellow architects, you're never going to get any work. You have to meet with potential clients and contractors. You don't meet with other architects all the time, that's silly. You have to participate in the larger community. You get involved, which SOM and I have always done. Hartmann was very involved in the city, and so was Eyerman, so was I. Owings was very involved, maybe too involved.

Blum: This was always you and not under the auspices of the AIA?

Graham: No, the AIA never participated in any of the Central Area Committee's plans, or the Commercial Club's.

Blum: Have you received an award that really means a lot to you?

Graham: Not really. The building is the greatest satisfaction, whether people like it or not.

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Blum: What about any personal awards? The International Visitors' Center elected you "Man of the Year".

Graham: That was nice because of the previous winner, Saul Bellow.

[Tape 6: Side 2]

Blum: You talked about the AIA and memberships that you maintained and your opinion on how valuable or inadequate they were. You were a member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. What prompted you to join?

Graham: I was doing a project for Canadian Pacific in Montreal.

Blum: Was it mandatory that you be a member of this organization?

Graham: Yes. I always thought it was proper to register in the nation where you were working.

Blum: Was this a registration for licensing or was it a professional society like the AIA?

Graham: The Canadian and British societies are required to practice architecture—in other words, membership in those societies is your license. There is an agreement of reciprocity between Canada and the United States, even though the American Institute of Architects is not a licensing board. You don't have to belong to the AIA to do architecture.

Blum: Is there any connection between the AIA and the licensing board in the United States?

Graham: Not legal connections.

Blum: But as a service to the profession?

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Graham: Not really. Studying for the exam is done by professors at universities who give courses to people who are going to take the exams.

Blum: What if someone who has been out of school for a number of years decides that they need the license?

Graham: They can study at their local college or university. Now in California they're doing it though the Internet. They can do this at night. In California it's very important because you have to know about earthquakes. Most universities don't give courses in earthquakes. The exam is fairly easy. When I came to Chicago I took the exam and I didn't study for it at all.

Blum: Were you right out of school?

Graham: Yes, but not quite right out of school.

Blum: Is the RIBA a licensing board?

Graham: Yes.

Blum: You also gave talks there as well. Would that be similar to the AIA lectures in Chicago?

Graham: Yes, they do it for the members and the public. Most institutes do. The Spanish Institute of Architects does that and I gave several lectures for them in Barcelona.

Blum: Are you a member of the Spanish Institute of Architects?

Graham: No, it was going to be too lengthy a procedure. It was very bureaucratic. It was meant to exclude others.

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Blum: You have a long list of licenses for various states. Did you take a national exam or one for each individual state?

Graham: I got licensed because I was licensed in Illinois. I got a national registration as well. But in California you have to take a separate earthquake exam. In Florida they should give an extra requirement for hurricanes, but they don't.

Blum: You were a trustee of the Institute for Urbanism and Planning in Peru.

Graham: I was an honorary member.

Blum: Did that also include licensing?

Graham: No, that did not include a license. In fact, I'm not sure they have a license in Peru. I have no idea. They did it because my mother was Peruvian and I also gave a lecture at the university there, which is the oldest University in the Americas.

Blum: What is its name?

Graham: La Universidad de los Andes.

Blum: Were any of these memberships useful to you other than for the license?

Graham: I was also one of the founding members of the School of Architecture in Bogota, Columbia. When you put all of that into your curriculum vitae, it helps.

Blum: How did it happen that you were one of the founding members of the School of Architecture in Bogota?

Graham: The Rockefeller family were almost the fathers in funding for the university in Bogota, and they asked me to be one of the founding members.

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Blum: What was their interest in the university in Bogota?

Graham: They have an interest in charity all over the world and they were asked to help.

Blum: So you helped them organize the school?

Graham: I really didn't do all that much. They just wanted a lot of architects to support it. They picked what I thought were pretty good architects and I was proud to be one of them. I have given talks there since then. It was a lot of fun to do. Now it's a very important school in Latin America. The students that came to my lecture, there were over 1500 and they came from all over, from Brazil and Argentina and Peru and Ecuador.

Blum: Are there many architecture schools in South America?

Graham: Yes, some very good ones. Barnardo Fort-Brescia is a very good example from Architectonica. Also, Brazil has a history of some very great architects, and Mexico, too, although that's not South America. This conference I gave was for South America. Mexico is in North America.

Blum : How does the architecture in Mexico differ from that in Peru or Guatemala or Brazil?

Graham: Mexico's architecture is quite different. It's been affected more by recent architecture—by Luis Barragán, specifically. He virtually invented a language for the architecture that you see right now. He was a powerful, wonderful poet and influenced everybody.

Blum: How does it differ from that in Colombia or Peru?

Graham: Most of Chile, for example, has no Indian population. Chile is all European: Italian, Spanish, German, English. It is quite different from Peru, which has a

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white population of probably around fifteen or twenty percent and a mixed population of twenty percent. The other sixty percent are pure Indians, so it's quite a different country with different problems. Then in Peru, it never rains at all along the coast. The desert blooms because the land is so rich with volcanic ash. Peru is a very wealthy nation, unlike Mexico. They have everything, including gold, borax, steel, iron, and aluminum. The farm lands along the coast were started by the Incas bringing water over the mountains. It's phenomenal. The farms in Mexico are nowhere near as rich. In Colombia, it's made up of mountain, huge ones like in Peru. The cordilera of the Andes goes all the way through. They have a lot of volcanoes. Bogota is way up in the mountains and it's a powerful city, so it requires a different kind of architecture. Mexico doesn't have cities at that altitude. Arequipa, in Peru, is at 10,000 feet. Cuzco is at almost 12,000 feet. Most of those cities are higher than the Rockies. The mountains of Peru are much higher than the Rockies. They were connected by roads, so they had a very strong socialist government because each city had to keep its own bridge going. Then the food was collected centrally and distributed. The traditions were very different. Brazil is a jungle. The highest mountain in Brazil isn't any higher than the highest mountain in Puerto Rico. The Adjuntas are at six thousand feet and there isn't a mountain higher than that in Brazil. When the Amazon river floods, it will go sixty or seventy feet. There are cities that are built on stilts that will just float when the Amazon floods.

Blum: Aren't the cities built at higher levels?

Graham: Not in the valley of the Amazon. It all floods. The big cities are generally on the coast. The exception is the capital that they built inland from the coast with the idea of expanding into Brazil. That really didn't succeed.

Blum: You obviously have traveled to many of these cities in South America.

Graham: I've never been to Argentina or Chile.

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Blum Is there much European colonial influence, or is it more modern?

Graham: The differences are very great. Brazil is Portuguese, not Spanish, so they brought that culture with them. There's very little mixing between Brazilians and Indians. In fact, they're quite evil to the Indians, who have been historically treated very badly. You don't see the same mix that you see in Peru or Guatemala. The same is true with Colombia and Ecuador, which have a strong Indian population. It's not as high a percentage as in Peru. Bolivia is almost one hundred percent Indian. Each one of these countries is very different. That's why I resented the reporter from Chicago who sort of generalized about South Americans. I kept telling her that they're all so different. She's an international reporter generalizing about South Americans. They're all so different and they don't think the same way. That's why Chile and Argentina never get along. When Simon Bolivar liberated Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile he had a chance to make one nation, but he couldn't do it because they were so different. Peru was the center of Spanish colonization and Lima was the capital, not just for Peru, but for the whole area. They later split. The architecture is different in each place.

Blum: Thank you for the short course on South America.

Graham: Peru was the only country I know of that ever elected an architect for president. He also came from Arequipa. Fransico Belaunde was his name.

Blum: Going back to the Canadian and the British Institutes, do you belong to them for status or potential contacts?

Graham: No, they are much more helpful. They publish a magazine. They have a very substantial and accessible library system and computer centers and slide libraries that are very usable by the British architects. They have more technical conferences for architects. They are much more powerful because they have the power of licensing. It makes them much more important.

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Blum: Would it suit you if the AIA did that?

Graham: It's too late, because the politicians are not going to give up their licensing power. Each state has a bureaucracy all its own for licensing.

Blum: Were you ever on the national licensing board?

Graham: No, I wasn't interested and I had no time for that.

Blum: In 1976 there were two exhibitions in Chicago and each had its own catalog. The first one was One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago. It was, for the most part, organized around work by architects who worked in the Miesian vocabulary. The other exhibition was called Chicago Architects. It was a counter-exhibition that resurrected the work of some older architects who had been forgotten, and presented the work of some architects working at that time who were doing things other than in the Miesian vocabulary. You were in the catalogs of both exhibitions. How is it that they were able to draw on your work from both points of view?

Graham: I have no idea. I had nothing to do with organizing them.

Blum: Do you think there was any validity to the second exhibition and to resurrecting people like Andrew Rebori, the Kecks, and older people like that?

Graham: Of course I do.

Blum: The exhibition organizers used older architects work as a springboard to show their own work also not in the Miesian idiom.

Graham: I think that is valid. I think that any exhibition of an architect's work helps architecture. That's very important. Because the AIA has so little power, architects are attacked constantly. The engineers want to be able to do

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apartment buildings, and they're not qualified by any stretch of the imagination to do them. If you're going to have beautiful cities, don't have people make ugly buildings. And contractors do the same things, which they couldn't do in England or Canada. Here contractors hire architects as a corporation and then do the building. A lot of architects have incorporated in the United States to protect against that. There is also the liability that is not specific by laws. The American Institute of Architects doesn't have the power to do that. They have contracts that they give to architects, but they never cover the subject of liability, for example. I think they're afraid of getting sued, because they're not an authority. They're more like a club. You don't have to be an AIA architect to practice architecture in the United States. Now contractors are even attacking the little bit that architects have.

Blum: But architects must carry insurance.

Graham: Some architects got smart. They don't get insurance, then they never get sued, because they can separate the company from their private work. They did this defensively. I don't blame them. We were sued once by a woman who slipped on the sidewalk at Helmut's building in Chicago. Helmut didn't have that much insurance. They looked across the way and the other building at 32 West Monroe said Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, so they sued us. They had the wrong side of the street. That's the way lawyers are. Do you realize that Japan has fewer lawyers than the state of Illinois? That's a fact. Here in the United States you get sued for anything, even if you didn't do it. Those lawyers keep busy doing it and they advertise on television.

Blum: I'm surprised to hear you say that it's not mandatory for architects and contractors to carry liability insurance.

Graham: Some insurance companies won't insure certain architects. Insurance companies are only interested in making money, they're not interested in protecting architects, or you either. When the big hurricane came and destroyed Homestead, Florida, all the insurance companies got out of

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Florida, out of the whole state. They claimed they were losing money. How did they lose the money? They lost millions in the real estate business, not in paying off claims. They started developing real estate themselves. It's a risky business. The insurance executive that developed projects worked nine to five, he didn't take risks, the company did. You didn't get the quality or the research of a real developer. Jerry Hines always said that you have to have a back door. The back door was an agreement that the company would purchase the building whenever Jerry called on it. So when times got bad, it was theirs. But the guy in the insurance company doesn't need a back door, he has no risk at all. So the architects in the United States are generally very nice people but are not respected as in other nations. In Germany, you're called a professor if you're an architect.

Blum: If you're a practicing architect?

Graham: Yes. In some countries, it's "doctor". In America, there isn't any title.

Blum: Do you think that's an old-world kind of respect, or is it truly indicative of today's attitude in Europe toward architects?

Graham: It's truly indicative of years of a lack of culture in America.

Blum: Isn't it a more democratic attitude?

Graham: Does democracy mean you have to be insulting?

Blum: It's not insulting to just treat someone as an equal regardless of what their profession is.

Graham: Think about it for a minute. In Chicago there was an architect named David Adler. He designed most of the houses for the very wealthy. He realized that most of these people were industrialists who were uneducated and had never gone to a university and didn't know the difference between

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Michelangelo and Richard Haas. Adler used to travel and bring back postcards of buildings in Europe. When he went to a client, he would flip through them until they would find one that they liked. Then he would say that they were going to have a palazzo like this or that. He would design that. But he went beyond that. He told them what furniture to use, how to cook meals, what wine to drink. Think of what these men were. These clients were brilliant and brave, but they were animals. None of them had gone to any university. They just came west to Chicago from the East Coast. Look at pictures of Chicago from before the fire and then after the fire. It was ugly, badly built. Then the fire gave Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan the great opportunity to rebuild in a vision of a beautiful city. They loved it because they were powerful men. I loved those men, they were pioneers. They built the city of Chicago and they influenced the world.

Blum: How do you know that story about David Adler and the postcards?

Graham: Every architect knows about that.

Blum: If that's how Adler's clients selected the style of their building and that he taught them everything, isn't that, in a way, what SOM did when they furnished a corporate office down to the ashtrays?

Graham: No, by the time we came along, our clients had gone to college.

Blum: Yes, they were much more sophisticated but SOM's approach was all- inclusive nevertheless.

Graham: But they hadn't studied architecture and they hadn't studied art. Well, some of them had; Dr. Robb at Penn, had a full classroom from the Wharton School. They took him because they thought it would be an easy course. It wasn't. They found that out later. There were some terrific people at some of these universities, like Vincent Scully at Yale, who teach all kinds of

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students. There are Yale students and students from outside of Yale. Mies came to a jungle in Chicago in the 1930s.

Blum: Do you think Chicago was less developed than a comparable city in the East at that time?

Graham: In the East, they were more developed. The schools in the East, like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, were all teaching the arts. Sullivan actually stopped in Philadelphia and was an apprentice with Frank Furness. You look at Furness's buildings and you look at Sullivan's and you'll see the similarity. There is quite a difference between Chicago and the East. We still think that Thomas Jefferson was a great architect. He wasn't a great architect. If you actually go visit some of those buildings they're pretty ugly. I think that George Washington's home at Mount Vernon was better designed. But it was designed by Washington himself, as everyone did at the time. It was a better looking house than Monticello. Yet we still revere Jefferson.

Blum: Was that because he was more authentic?

Graham: No, he just advertised more. Washington didn't claim to be an architect. I still think that Washington was a better president than Jefferson. Jefferson invented the party system. The Constitution of the United States did not intend to have a system of political parties. You can check with any historian. The system was to have the president, the Supreme Court, and the senators each representing a state. The House of Representatives was supposed to have two-year terms because they were supposed to be farmers who could not afford to give up more than two years. The representative were supposed to represent their town and they were supposed to check that the interests in their town prevailed over the senators. It doesn't work that way anymore. The parties determine it and interfere with everybody else's neighborhood. Jefferson did not bless this country.

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Blum: The two exhibitions that were held in Chicago in 1976 caused something of a stir, and perhaps it was also about what was happening at the time in the field of architecture, and for other reasons as well. Younger architects, with much smaller commissions than yours, were given a great deal of attention. Out of this exchange among architects came the Chicago Architectural Club. It was an old club for architects that had fallen into disuse for years. It was revived. You joined and you were part of it. What interested you enough about the club to join?

Graham: I didn't do that much, but I was interested because it was a effort to strengthen the profession, which has always been an interest of mine, as I've told you before. I think that SOM, in my mind, was designed to build cities, but not by ourselves. We needed other firms and individuals. That is hard to achieve because of the kind of jealousy that exists between architects. They don't collaborate very well. Doctors and lawyers do and they've taken over the country.

Blum: Could that be because architects are so distinctive with their own individual personality and their own style and characteristics? Or are they competing for a few jobs among many architects?

Graham: If they worked together, they'd get more jobs.

Blum: Would you work with other people?

Graham: I have many times.

Blum: Are you easy to work with?

Graham: Some people say no, some people say yes. I worked with Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall a number of times, and Brian and I are intimate friends.

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Blum: What happens when you feel very strongly about something in a building and the other person you've been working with says "It'll never work!"?

Graham: It actually doesn't work that way. On a single building, you might have something like that. It's less likely with what I'm getting at, where you're building the city together. That's why at Dearborn Park I asked other architects to share the work. I didn't have to give them the work, but I did. I only did one of the buildings at Dearborn Park. All of the others were done by other architects.

Blum: Dearborn Park came out of an idea from the Central Area Committee plan, which you headed with Bill Hartmann. It was to bring housing into the center of the city on the Near South Side.

Graham: Mayor Daley was very helpful. George Hallas, the owner of the football club, was very helpful. He had bought rights over the railroad lines that were in that direction. He had wanted to build a stadium in that area, but he never got it off the ground. Thank god he didn't because I don't think that it was the best place. I think where the stadium is now is just right. A stadium is not a good neighbor. For the Loop, it would have been a disastrous neighbor, with the traffic and the way it would have been built up. So Mayor Daley twisted George's arm and said, "Sell that land to the Central Area Committee." He sold it for about six dollars a square foot. He sold it to the committee that was formed to build Dearborn Park, not to the Central Area Committee.

Blum: Was it primarily SOM?

Graham: No, there were other members of the Central Area Committee. Draper and Kramer was in charge of all the real estate. In fact, Ferd was very involved in creating the idea of it, even though he was not a member of the Central Area Committee. He was hired to do something there that got him involved. They got both financial support and a lot of help from the city. Mayor Daley

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wanted this because it made sense for the city. It extended the railroads and it also extended the river front. Bertrand Goldberg had done some buildings along the river already: River City and Marina City. We were mainly interested in bringing families to the area. How well we succeeded, I don't know. I do know that all the houses are bought and now they're expanding it. The idea of one hand doing everything bothered me. Such projects have usually been a disaster, if you think about it. Lake Meadows survived, but still, there wasn't as much thought put into the urban planning of Lake Meadows. It was more an extension of Corbu's ideas, which don't really fit in the United States. Europeans live easily in apartment buildings—in France, Scandinavia, Germany, everywhere, but in England less so— certainly because they are one race, one society, one religion. Chicago is not like that at all. Then we had this invasion of the black population into the North from the South after the war, looking for jobs. These projects ended up being ghettoes. They were designed by architects hired by the city; Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes were brutal. Lake Meadows was at least designed by an architect. The buildings are in good shape and they're located between IIT and the Michael Reese Hospital. They should have built low-rise buildings, and not this great green expanse. They should have built little town squares, not with the shopping center in the corner, but in the middle as you would in a normal town. But that was the Corbusier ideal and it doesn't work well in America.

Blum: But that was the best thinking at the time. Aren't you saying that it doesn't work here with the benefit of hindsight?

Graham: SOM thought it would work, so did New York Life, so did Draper and Kramer. But on the other hand, Phil Klutznik's project [Park Forest] out on the deep South Side did work. It was both highrise buildings and low-rise.

Blum: I thought that was primarily for returning GIs, so they would have a place to live.

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Graham: It went beyond that. It was designed for the workers who would work on the South Side in industrial jobs, which they did. It was less for commuters. It was different. It was for the industrial center.

Blum: Was the plan for Dearborn Park to include mixed housing?

Graham: Yes, some high, some low, with shopping areas. Now they need to have a school there for the children if they don't have one yet.

Blum: What role did SOM have in the design of Dearborn Park and what part did you play in that role?

Graham: I was head of the team. We did the master plan for the Central Area as well as for Dearborn Park. I did one building and none of the others. All the other buildings were done by other architects. We selected a range of highrise buildings to be done by people who had done highrise buildings before.

Blum: Were these all Chicago architects?

Graham: Yes, I can't remember all their names now. They were good, professional architects, but not great.

[Tape 7: Side 1]

Blum: Who were they?

Graham: Tom Beeby, Larry Booth and others.

Blum: Did they do low-rise housing? Or did they do individual houses?

Graham: Tom Beeby did low-rise single story housing. Larry Booth did some middle- size buildings, as did Jim Nagle.

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Blum: And you?

Graham: I did just one building, with terraces. It faces State Street, but the terraces face the south side. I remember Ferd Kramer telling me that we shouldn't have terraces, so I stepped them a little less and then he went on and moved them back to real terraces. It was typical of him.

Blum: I thought Dearborn Park was an ongoing project.

Graham: It still is expanding beyond the limits of what we had originally. They just bought more land. It sold like hot cakes. It has proven to be a huge success, as has the whole south end of the Loop. That whole area there now has restaurants that never existed there before. That's exactly what we wanted.

Blum: As we went though some of your projects, there were a few that we have missed. One of them was the Hartford Insurance building in Chicago. You did that in 1959. Would you talk about that building?

Graham: There was a threat of New York developers moving into Chicago with architects from New York. Most of the developers thought that Chicago architects didn't have the experience in development-type buildings. We fought very hard when the Hartford Company decided to put a building in the city of Chicago. We came up with a very good presentation and we were awarded with the project. That proved that we could do an economical building. Then in doing the building, the regular block buildings were just either glass or stone and quite brutal in my mind. So I came up with the idea of a twenty-one foot concrete flat plate of bays which are arced a little bit. That was an homage to Robert Maillart, the Swiss engineer and bridge designer. He invented the flat plate for buildings. It was a great idea and very economical. Then the idea to express it was to show it on the outside and therefore set the glass back. That had a number of advantages, which I've used ever since. One of them is that it sculpts the building, it softens it. Number two, the people of the city can understand it because they can see

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the structure and how it stands up, not in the sense of safety, but in the sense of space. Then finally, the wall is much easier to build because you're only building one-story walls, as opposed to multi-story walls.

Blum: Do you mean one story at a time, like a layer cake?

Graham: Well, there's the slab below and above, so what you're building is like a storefront. The one on the ground floor is the same as the one on the top floor. They don't have to span any more. They don't have to be worried about water running down, which is one of the problems they discovered at Lever House. They always used to put weepholes in the buildings, but they found out that in glass walls, when the wind blows, the water blows in through the weepholes. So the technology is much easier in a one-story building. It's like a one-story house, like a layer-cake. I liked that building and I've used that technology since.

Blum: Was that the first time that you used that technology?

Graham: Yes, and then I used it again at the Container Corporation. More important, I used it at the Business Men's Assurance building in Kansas City, Missouri. They had seen the Inland Steel building. They loved it and asked me to come and do one like it, but by this time I was into another vocabulary, which was this building with a set-back glass wall. That BMA building was done in white marble and was on top of a hill—a fantastic site—with a park in front of it. So when you're up on the top floor, you're in the equivalent of a thirty- or forty-story building in Kansas City. It was very simple. That was the first time that I had Art Takeuchi along as a friend and as an architect. Art was a young guy from IIT and he worked with me on it and provided an awful lot of help. The engineer was Ken Naslund. It was a fairly simple engineering system. There were thirty-foot bays and a very simple core that meets all the columns. The simplicity of it was what I admired. Bunshaft did a similar building, but without the glass effect, in Dallas. He was always a little jealous that the proportions of mine were better.

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Blum: This was a nineteen-story building, in a place like Missouri. Was wind much of a consideration?

Graham: No. Again, the fact that the frame was there, outside of the glass, helps break the wind. It's a very logical, understandable, simple building. If you look historically at the structures of the past they all are like that. It's during the Renaissance that logic begins to disappear for monumentality's sake. The Parthenon has columns exposed. The structure of cathedrals is very clear with the flying buttresses.

Blum: When did this fact occur to you?

Graham: Early. Even in school I was interested in having the structure be clear. Some of my professors at Penn didn't like that because they were Beaux-Arts.

Blum: But for the structure to be clear—I'm thinking of the Terraces at Perimeter Center in Atlanta—at what point did you decide that hanging the building on to a structure that was in front of it was a good way to do things?

Graham: At first it was a simple thing. After a while I began to think that it would really be more beautiful if you had a structure that was endless and you could just put pieces of the building inside of the structure.

Blum: And just have a moveable building?

Graham: An exciting kind of a building or structure is when there is no exterior wall and you're inside the building, like in the Sears Tower, and you see through it. Things are framed by the structure and the wind blows through it. That's when a building is really good. That occurred to me later. I really brought it to real fruition in the Terraces in Atlanta. If you walk through that building, you'd understand it. In the atrium you walk into the elevator and the cabs were designed by Artigas. So were the lobbies. The elevator is glass and down below, on the terrace, it's all tile, not marble. Artigas did that. There's

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a fountain, and he wanted it to be quiet. As you're going up, you see it and you see the structure between you and it. That kind of void through the building is very exciting to me.

Blum: The rendering of the Terraces reminds me that when I first saw pictures of the building, I would have bet it was a residential development.

Graham: It's softer. All those buildings are softer. The sun plays a part with the shade and shadow.

Blum: Maybe because it's only ten stories it somehow brought it into a residential scale for me. Was there anything special for you about that building?

Graham: There were a lot of things. The site was beautiful, for one thing. The natural landscape of central Georgia is quite beautiful. The idea was to have each facade designed to take care of the weather in each direction. For example, you can see the shading effect is on the west side, which has the worst sun.

Blum: Are there Venetian blinds?

Graham: Yes, they're fixed. On the north side you don't need them, so there are none. The curious thing to me was that the weather in Atlanta is hotter and worse than in Florida. We got a call after the glass was up from the construction man, and I asked him about the weather—it was up over one hundred degrees—and asked if he was still working. He said the workers loved it because it was cool inside, even though the air conditioning wasn't on yet.

Blum: What provided the coolness?

Graham: The overhang and the fact that we put these devices where you need them. Some places it was even set back more.

Blum: Is it routine to do shadow and sun studies for your buildings?

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Graham: It's one of the things we study most carefully. At the same time, we study how to make the space livable. But it's not just shade that we worry about. In northern climates we have to worry about cold. In Guatemala, the weather is perfect, so we try to take advantage of the weather and not put in systems that are designed for bad weather. For example, in Guatemala, there are no air conditioning or heating systems, because they're not required. I've seen a lot of people do a lot of glass banks, imitating New York or Chicago, and then they have to put air conditioning in it because the sun is phenomenal. You have to have shade in a place like that. That's why I tell you that the architecture in each part of the world should reflect the ecology of that place. The ecology shapes the people, not the other way around. Man destroys the ecology and then he has to live with that non-ecology. The ecology is the basic formation of the culture. The Nile made Egypt. It wasn't the other way around. The Mediterranean made Greece, they didn't make the Mediterranean. You have to make the buildings sympathetic with God's designs.

Blum: You've described the Terraces as a Sol LeWitt sculpture. That's a very graphic, but apt, description. What led you to believe that your friend Artigas would be good for this project?

Graham: In the first place, I met Artigas at the same time that I met Miró and Artigas's father in Spain. They had this studio in the mountains outside of Barcelona called Gallifa. There was no doubt that Artigas's father was the top ceramacist in the world. He didn't only do ceramics for Miró, he did them for almost all other famous sculptors or artists that you could think of. He did a lot of them for Dalí. I found out how he trained his son: he sent him to Japan because the Japanese have the art of the real oven in which you should make tiles. He wanted him to go over there and learn about these tiles and how to build an oven. He ended up marrying a Japanese girl that he met in Paris. She is a fantastic designer in her own right. I realized that if you do tile walls, generally they are a lot cheaper than granite, marble, or travertine. If you can get a top designer to do it, then it's a lot more exciting. He will

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respond to the people and the site. Artigas has worked for me in various countries and in each case he has responded to the people and to the country. He has worked in England and Egypt and Atlanta. As a young man, he also did the ceramic tile base for the Miró sculpture in Chicago. Miró designed the sculpture, but Artigas did the tile work.

Blum: Is Artigas for you as Noguchi was for Bunshaft?

Graham: Bunshaft directed the artist more and certainly Noguchi. I didn't. Sometimes I was wrong and I should have interfered but said that that was not the right way to do it. I find that if he's a very good artist and sympathetic to the project, then he'll do a good job. Now I realize that, but I didn't before.

Blum: Are you satisfied with the Terraces at Perimeter Center?

Graham: Yes, but I'm not satisfied with the Lippold in Inland Steel. I should have been more aggressive. Bunshaft would have been more aggressive.

Blum: I don't think that a lot of people would fault you for that.

Graham: I know. To find the artist who fits is the best way to do it.

Blum: You said that you wanted to use Bertoia at Inland Steel. Did you ever use Bertoia for anything?

Graham: No, I never did get a chance to. Bunshaft did.

Blum: You worked with many artists: Artigas, Henry Moore, Botero, Louise Nevelson. When the choice of commissioning a work of art is indicated, are you involved in the choice of the artist?

Graham: Not always. Sometimes the owner has selected somebody. But usually when it involves an outdoor piece or a major piece in the lobby, I have. The owner

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has always made the final choice. I recommend an artist or give him two or three choices. Botero is a good example: there were other artists that we thought about. Of course I'm sorry that I never got Paul Klee or Giacometti. They were my two favorite artists.

Blum: Do you have a favorite pool of artists, in your own mind, that you like to choose from?

Graham: No, my wife and I know a lot of artists because we have traveled all over and looked at a lot of them. Normally if the situation is where I may not know the artist, but if I have a good place for their work, then I introduce myself and ask if they're interested. Or, for example, with Valerio Adami, I saw his work at the Maeght Foundation and we had this challenge in Wisconsin Plaza. The president was a wonderful man. In that project there were two ideas. As I've told you before, I'm not that interested in single buildings, but rather in how a city unfolds. So the idea was to surround this little plaza with all glass and have the inside of the building be landscaped. In winter when it's terrible outside, it would be like a greenhouse. It would be wonderful to walk around this plaza with the green all around you. Then behind the green I wanted to have very bright colors against this long and depressing winter. So when I saw Adami's work, I thought he was ideal. He did a series of murals and you see them from the street. If you recall, that was the time when University of Wisconsin students were in militant revolt against the United States. This bank president had the bravery to build an all-glass building.

Blum: Did you fear that it might be vandalized?

Graham: It ran through his mind and it ran through my mind. It ran through everybody's mind. Then he was elected by the students of Madison, Wisconsin, as "Man of the Year" for being a banker with that kind of guts. He had a lot of students that became his clients. This was a peaceful building. The students were against Vietnam.

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Blum: Would you consider this to be an atrium building?

Graham: It really is. The whole thing is sitting within an atrium. But if it had run around the whole square it would have been really something.

Blum: But you never had a chance to build it that way.

Graham: I was hoping that other architects would get the idea. I always do that, try to signal something.

Blum: The photographs of it that I've seen show the glass of your building reflecting the classically styled Capitol building. When it was built in 1974 was glass sufficient for energy conservation?

Graham: By that time glass had advanced a lot. There were two things: in a northern climate, you want the sun to come in because it helps you heat the building—Madison suffers more in winter than it does in summer—you may pay more to air condition, but you pay a lot less to heat. Also, when you have an atrium space, the criticalness of the sun disappears because the trees inside are shading the people. Finally, the glass that they make today is much more sophisticated than they had before. You have what they call reflective glass, which I don't like because it makes the building look strange and wobbly. And there is another glass that filters the infrared and doesn’t reflect. I think that an architect that uses any other glass is not up to date. It's a little more expensive than the reflective glass. But we do have dual glazing in Wisconsin for the winter. It's not mandatory, but we did it for the winter.

Blum: Was it a surprise to the bank people for you to present a glass building? Was it contrary to what they had expected or had they asked for it?

Graham: They didn't ask for it. I had already done the First Wisconsin bank in downtown Milwaukee and this president was very bright. It was very easy for him to see what I was getting at. It's different now when architects work

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because people are much more sophisticated than they were in the nineteenth century, by a lot. They're educated and they've traveled around the world. If you go to Lincoln, Nebraska, or Omaha, compare the people who started those towns with the people who are there now. The University of Nebraska is a highly sophisticated and very good architecture school. I gave a lecture there once and met a professor who was the chairman of the architecture school in Petrograd, Russia. He was a terrific guy. He was Latvian but he spoke perfect English. In fact, the dean of Nebraska's architecture school became head of the AIA. It was the first time they ever elected a really top architect recently. These things are happening slowly but surely. Oregon is a highly sophisticated little state. They know more about urban design than anybody in New York. The top professors in urban design are now in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota.

Blum : If I understand what you're saying, then it should be easier for architects to work with clients now because they're more sophisticated and because architects in places you wouldn't expect are trained better.

Graham: Yes, but there's one problem, they are too many lawyers involved now. I used to meet alone with Jack Kimberly and with the bank president alone and with Jerry Hines alone or with just one other guy, and now you go to a meeting in the United States and there are five lawyers around the table. Unfortunately, they all feel that they have to say something. Bill Graham was the last CEO in the United States where I didn't have waste time trying to get all these guys to understand what I was saying. I've dealt with the top lawyer in Chicago, who's recognized as the best lawyer in zoning—I taught him everything he knows about zoning because he didn't know a thing about it—I still think he doesn't know a thing about it.

Blum: So there's a mix of good and bad, easy and more difficult, today?

Graham: Less so in smaller cities, but in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, there are a lot of them. I don't have that problem any more. When I practice now,

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the first condition is that there are no lawyers involved. The second condition is that the client has to be very nice, because I don't have to do this. Jane does a pre-interview. We don't want problems anymore.

Blum: Getting back to the art in your architecture, you were or may still be a trustee of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Graham: I resigned because I couldn't attend regular meetings.

Blum: Bill Hartmann was also a trustee for many years. You have said that you were instrumental in helping the Art Institute get the Henry Moore that is now placed in the north garden.

Graham: It wouldn't be there without me.

Blum: How did that happen?

Graham: I got Jerry Hines to get the sculpture in Three First National Plaza building. Bunshaft had talked to me a number of times about Henry Moore. I thought it was a good idea because Chicago didn't have a major Henry Moore—there is one at the University of Chicago, but not downtown. I had met Henry before, and I was very smart and I got Bunshaft, who was retired by then, to come with me and Jerry Hines and Jane to England to visit him. He was very nice. Bunshaft approached him, as Moore was already trying to finish some of the lessons that Bunshaft had given him. First of all, Henry Moore sculpture really looks best in a landscape or a park, not in an urban setting. I knew this because the Banque Lambert got both Henry Moore and Calder to do outdoor pieces. Bunshaft and Baron Lambert decided to put the Moore in the front near the street and the Calder in the back yard. Calder thought that they were wrong because Calder thought that his could stand traffic movement, while a Henry Moore is usually a quiet piece. But they wouldn't change their minds. Calder called his piece Red Baron and in his will, he made it clear that the Baron Lambert and the Banque Lambert would never

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get the Red Baron. Bunshaft wanted to teach Moore about scale. He made him make a sheep and put it in the edge of the green by the house. Then Moore made two or three and Bunshaft told him, "Henry, it's too small!" So they became very good friends. So we came to visit Moore about Three First National Plaza and when we were having dinner and I said to Henry, 'You know, Picasso gave his piece to the city for free. Miró gave a piece. Calder gave a piece. Why don't you give a piece for free?" He had agreed that the bronze for Three First National Plaza would not be reproduced, which was very unusual. Usually he could make five copies and keep one or two, sell two and have one for the owner. He said, "You know, I've always wanted to see the child inside the mother and child. What if I give that one to the city of Chicago?" I said, "Why don't you give it to the Art Institute?" He said he thought that was a good idea.

Blum: Were you a trustee at that time?

Graham: Yes. The Miró money was being used to protect the existing pieces, because we had made a lot of money by selling the Miró prints. Then there was a lot of money contributed for it, but Miró gave it for nothing, so there was this pile of money.

Blum: Do they require much maintenance?

Graham: The worst is the vandalism. The Picasso has some damage done to it, but it protects itself because the Cor-ten covers over it.

Blum: What about the finish on a Henry Moore?

Graham: I think the patina is the beauty of bronze when it's outdoors. When you try to clean it, you ruin it. They have taken some really important bronzes in the world indoors and then put a copy outside where it used to be.

Blum: You've also given some Peruvian pottery to the Art Institute.

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Graham: Yes, some Chavin. They did not have any Chavin at the time.

Blum: How did you decide to do that?

Graham: My brother, George, has a fantastic collection of Peruvian pottery and we had an uncle who made it easy for him to get it out of Peru.

Blum: Is that legal?

Graham: It's legal, but he just made it easier. Alan Wardwell was in charge of the collection at the Art Institute and Alan asked me if I could get him some Chavin. So I asked my brother to get some, which is very rare. Now the Art Institute has collected about ten pieces, which is very good.

Blum: Are your and your family's ties to Peru very strong?

Graham: My mother's family is huge in Peru. There were thirteen children in my mother's family. Beyond that there are uncles and aunts, all kinds of family.

Blum: Do you keep in touch with them?

Graham: Not really. Not since my brother and my aunts died. We were very close to my aunts. They were terrific women, all four of them. My aunts were all very different. Carmen Rosa was a tiny woman who weighed eighty pounds and she was a secretary to Peter Grace, of Grace and Company. Peter respected her a lot, because she would always arrange his taxes with the president. She was very religious and would go to church twice a day—my mother only went once a day—and she always won the lottery but she always gave it away. One time she won a trip to Rome to the Vatican. The Bishop of Lima arranged for her to see the Pope—at that time it was Pope John—so she went to the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel and she was waiting there to see the Pope and as they announced his arrival she fainted. She never did see him. Another was Aunt Margarita. She was an expert at

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horse racing. She was engaged to a man all her life but never married him because she thought he was a little odd-looking. She used to go to the horse racing. She would sit next to the president to see what horses he was betting on. She was a complete leftist in politics. Aunt Mary was quite different because she worked for the railroads. She had a lot of spark. She never married; she was going to, but just before the wedding she changed her mind. She was a very modern woman, amazingly modern considering she was from Arequipa. She was the one who took Carmen Rosa to the Vatican.

[Tape 7: Side 2]

Blum: I have heard about an uncle of yours who was a philosopher.

Graham: He was the chancellor of the University of Arequipa. He was very liberal, but liberal for a democracy. He was a lawyer for the mining corporations. And, at the same time, the lawyer for the engineers who sued the corporation because of lung disease. He represented both sides and the mining corporation didn't mind because he had such a good reputation. He was also very political, in trying to have two democracies in Peru.

Blum: What was the military situation in Peru?

Graham: It varied a lot, depending on the military. He was not APRA, which was the party that Margarita liked, which is the socialist party. He was an individual and was philosophically independent. The military hated him and incarcerated him. That's when Carmen Rosa went to the president and told him that my uncle must be let go. He gave a speech one time to the students in Arequipa and they revolted and reverted to violence, which he regretted terribly. He never again gave a political speech. But he was a real poet. Jane could describe going down the Amazon with him. He said you didn't need anything but a canoe, a fishing rod, and a knife. Then he could go and find anything you needed to eat on the Amazon, which is true. It was so peaceful. To give you an idea, when you get there, all you hear is birds

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fluttering around and all of a sudden, you hear a little rumble and all the birds quiet down. Then this storm comes and it's like going to the opera. The thunder comes and the rain comes and there's this fantastic music. Then it rumbles away and disappears.

Blum: Is your uncle still living?

Graham: No, he died.

Blum: Do you think that it's essential to have your architecture seasoned with a piece of sculpture, or painting, or murals, or a ceramic fountain, as you have done?

Graham: Architecture contains life. People move through it. Part of life—perhaps the most neglected part of life, although maybe less in Chicago than elsewhere—are the arts. You notice that the Republicans are trying to kill all the support to the arts—not just a little bit—they want to wipe it all out. It's ridiculous that these civilized men try to pass such laws. They need the arts themselves. They should walk through museums, they should hear the music, and go see ballets, and become civilized. Cities that don't have art are sad indeed. That is what happened in Russia. There were no artists under Stalin. He eliminated them all. What he called art wasn't art at all. What he called architecture wasn't architecture at all. It was just a desert of uncivilized people. You can see the results of it now. Now that Russians are free, they act like animals, although not all of them. Unfortunately, it's the animals who are ruling. So I see art as important in my buildings. I like to see not just sculpture and painting, but poetry and music in the piazzas, for example. In most cities in the world, they use the piazzas that way, but we don't in Chicago. There should be music playing in First National Bank Plaza. Look what's surrounding it: Inland Steel, Helmut Jahn's Xerox building, and Walter's Harris Trust building on another corner. It's a great place to have music. It should be the same in the Civic Center Plaza.

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Blum: They did have music for a while in those places, but they've stopped it. Have you ever encouraged the owner of a building to include a work of art that they hadn't thought of doing?

Graham: I hate to say this, but I only succeeded outside of the United States because it's already a custom there. Rockefeller Center does have it. You see it in Chicago. Very few cities have such a major amount of sculpture in such a little space. You don't see it in Houston. Even in I. M. Pei's City Hall in Dallas, which is a natural place for it, you don't see it.

Blum: Is that because overseas they're more sensitive to it and they have the tradition?

Graham: It's growing in the United States, so I don't feel bad about it.

Blum: In Chicago we have a lot of early twentieth century civic sculptures, like the bronze generals seated on their horses.

Graham: But they wouldn't compare with a Picasso. Monuments are different. New York and Philadelphia have those too. I'm talking about real art. That is growing in America.

Blum: The work of important artists?

Graham: Yes, and even very good regional artists, too. Claes Oldenburg has pieces in almost every city now. Los Angeles has one of his pieces and so do Philadelphia and Barcelona. Imagine the mayor of Barcelona: he built one hundred city parks in all the poor neighborhoods. The idea was to lift the spirit of the people. The way he did it was so brilliant—it's something that Chicago should do and I've told the Central Area Committee that they should start thinking about this—he gave them the materials and the design and then let each neighborhood build it with their own hands, which they did. Then the mayor had sculptors from all over the world, for $25,000 each,

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put sculptures in these gardens. Let me tell you, it lifted the spirits of those people. Some of them have learned crafts, which is what I thought should have happened during the 1992 World's Fair in Chicago—Liz Hollander and the city planners for Mayor Washington wanted to build the World's Fair in the neighborhoods and that's ridiculous. She eventually convinced Mayor Washington not to do it. But number one, we had a recession, in other words, God sent them a message.

Blum: You think that recessions are messages from God?

Graham: He does it every time. After the 1871 fire you had a world's fair and that changed it. In 1933 you had a world's fair and that changed it. The city grew economically because of the world's fairs. In Chicago, it would have given jobs to the people in the neighborhoods. I said to Liz, "What you do is start training them now. Start training them to do these jobs and to run these businesses. That's your role. Have the world's fair so they have something to do." But the mayor of Barcelona went beyond that. He not only made the whole waterfront over again, but he did these parks. The people of Barcelona learned and industry came again to Barcelona. It is the most successful city in Spain now. You just try and put graffiti in one of those parks now.

Blum: I can see where the neighborhood would take pride in their own work.

Graham: They did it. They have a huge Richard Serra, it's a least one hundred and fifty feet long.

Blum: Who were the sculptors hired to work in these parks?

Graham: Name anyone. Miró was the first one. They were world-class artists. There were American sculptors, English sculptors, German sculptors, Japanese sculptors, they were from the world. It was quite an achievement. Some of these parks have six or seven pieces. Claes Oldenburg wanted to get in on it.

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It was Frank Gehry who asked the mayor if Oldenburg was going to do a piece and the mayor opened his closet and there was a maquette.

Blum: What a fantastic idea to place work of important sculptors in neighborhood parks.

Graham: I only met with the mayor in his office once. The rest of the time we met in the street, or in the museum where they were opening a show, or at the entrance to the symphony. He was always involved in the arts. He has been elected mayor more than any other mayor in the history of Barcelona, which starts in the twelfth century.

Blum: It sounds like he was really committed and people backed him.

Graham: He was fantastic. I met him in Chicago once before he got elected. He was a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins. He not only gave me the job of the Hotel d'Arts, but he told me, "Bruce, why don't you do this project that we need here along the waterfront." There were two towers that the architect Oriol Bohigas had placed there for the Olympics. He said that I had to get the developer. He had to be the Jerry Hines type, so I got one: Ware Travelstead.

Blum: I don't quite understand the distinct lines between the architect, who's hired to do the design, and the developer who...

Graham: Normally, the developer has a project and he hires an architect, not the other way around.

Blum: Who usually has the responsibility to get the financing?

Graham: That's the developer.

Blum: Like Jerry Wolman did for the Hancock. So the developer is your client?

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Graham: The developer was my client in that case. Unless it's a private project: when the developer is Ford Motor Company, my client is also Ford Motor Company.

Blum: You got the developer for this project for the Olympics. You pointed out a project that strikes me as somewhat unusual in your work. It's Horizon House. Is that residential?

Graham: Yes, it's an apartment building.

Blum: That was done in 1967. Would you talk about that?

Graham: We had met John Tishman, of the development company, by this time. They sort of liked the quality of Chicago apartment buildings as opposed to New York apartment buildings.

Blum: What is the difference?

Graham: Well, as Tony Peters, of Cushman and Wakefield, put it, in the best apartment building in New York—the United Nations—if you pulled the pump at one end of the building, you'd hear it at the other. They are just badly built. There are very few well built apartments. So they asked me to do this project on Horizon House. It dealt with building in concrete, which is not easy on its own in New York, because it's just bad. Most New York apartment buildings in the city are built out of structural steel because of that.

Blum: The concrete itself is bad or the workmen use it badly?

Graham: The tradesmen are bad and the contractors who pour the concrete are bad. So I thought about it and decided that both the site and the workmen were so bad that maybe a Corbu-like exterior—with the rough-wood forms showing—would enhance the building. I didn't want to try to make them do

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it smoothly, because then they'd just make mistakes. Technically, there's an advantage this way as well: if you use wood forms that absorb water, the concrete becomes a lot stronger than if you use smooth plastic forms. We did this Corbu-like building and it turned out, I think, quite beautifully.

Blum: You just adapted to what you found there.

Graham: When you build in any place, you try to find out what the capabilities and the talents are in that place. It varies around the world. When China opened up for buildings, they had really terrible workers because they hadn't built anything for years. The elevators in hotels didn't work. Now they're getting better, because the Chinese are very bright.

Blum: You did a project in Hong Kong: the New World Centre, including the Regent Hotel. That was in the late 1970s. What was the workmanship like at that time?

Graham: Hong Kong had done a lot of building before I got there. They were not like the rest of China, by any means. They had craftsmen and workers, although highly underpaid, who knew how to put buildings together. The contractor was also the developer in that case—his name was Mr. Chang. It was fascinating to me to meet the Chinese. Part of the client was the Peninsula Hotel, which is a very famous hotel, and the Kaduri family were extremely wealthy. The family had been there for centuries. They wanted to build a new hotel in front of the Peninsula. This new project was in front and to the left, and one piece to the right was to be the hotel side. So we worked with the Kaduris on the Peninsula itself and with Mr. Chang on the rest of it, what is now the Regent Hotel. The Kaduris did all the programming, so if you go to that hotel now, you'll find the fanciest bathrooms in any hotel in the world.

Blum: The Peninsula has the reputation of being one of the world's best.

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Graham: This one was the one they dreamed of having.

Blum: The Peninsula is so superb, how could you outdo the Peninsula?

Graham: It was easy. The Peninsula had a number of mistakes. For instance, the bathrooms have a glass wall above the wall to the bathroom, so that if your husband or wife goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night, the whole bedroom lights up. That's not exactly stylish. It was made in a very old building, so the bathrooms couldn't be as nice as the new ones. Young Kaduri really spent a lot of time with me working on the bathrooms to make them the best bathrooms in the world. Then, finally, the rest of the building contains a 140,000 square-foot restaurant on the eighth floor. It also has a huge shopping center and another hotel that has one thousand rooms that are tiny—they're like six feet by ten feet with a small bathroom shower.

Blum: What was the point of that?

Graham: The Japanese go to Hong Kong in droves to buy goods because the prices are so much lower. They run to this hotel and drop their bags and go shopping all day. Then they come back to the hotel and spend very little time in their rooms. It's the direct opposite of the Peninsula. The Japanese are not used to big bathrooms, anyway. We designed this dining room facing Hong Kong with all glass so that you could see the city. It was a fantastic view over the water. Then they have really elegant shops within the hotel and the best Chinese restaurant I have ever been in, by far. The only sad thing is that the Kaduris became very sentimental about the Peninsula and so they sold it to a group of Chinese people with a wonderful manager who runs it very well. It's now ranked number one.

Blum: Faced with the challenge of putting a hotel right next to the Peninsula, that must have been formidable.

Graham: It's not right next to it. The shopping center is between the two of them.

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Blum: Can you see the Regent from the Peninsula?

Graham: You can from the top floor, over the big terraced shopping center roof between them.

Blum: So you didn't think of the two of them as face-to-face?

Graham: I thought of all of them as a single building, almost, even though they each have their own character.

Blum: How did you treat the Regent as part of this?

Graham: It's the most detached piece from the rest of it. Between them there's the swimming pool and the outdoor terrace.

Blum: Does it relate in any way on the exterior?

Graham: The materials are similar. It does look like a unified complex. It's very tight because land in Hong Kong is extremely expensive. I understand that since then they have built some kind of building for exhibitions on what used to be a park in front of the Peninsula, which is too bad. Now the Peninsula doesn't have a view to the water.

Blum: You were speaking about Mexico. You did a project in Mexico in 1979 for Grupo Alfa. Would you speak about how you treated that?

Graham: It started first with Grupo Alfa and we formed a joint team with Luis Barragán, Ricardo Legorreta, and myself. We did a scheme for them, which I thought was quite beautiful. I must say it was a really good collaboration. I had this idea of a courtyard where you had to go through to get into the office building and to get to the parts that were private. It was a square plaza with a kind of gazebo in one corner, which became the entry to one part of the building, and a landscaped area which was more like a music place, and

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the courtyard was square. I brought the model for Barragán to look at and I thought it was a terrific scheme. I'll never forget him saying, "Bruce, you ought to move that wall to a slight diagonal." I asked why, and he said it was because only God is perfect. He was right because it made that whole square more interesting. But we never built that building because the company split. So Barragán did one building for one part of the company and I did another building for another part of the company. The one we did together has been published and it was quite different; it was quite a lot smaller. It was a wonderful experience to get Tamayo to do a huge glass window. There's a big entry to the building with a barrel vault and at the end of this thing is Tamayo's mural, which was kept in storage for quite a while because the company was in trouble because they had borrowed American dollars and had to pay it back in pesos, which was not so easy. They were very good people. I got a wonderful letter from one of them who was at the Hotel d'Arts to compliment me on it.

Blum: What was the language the three of you spoke when you worked together?

Graham: Spanish. Barragán doesn't speak English very well.

Blum: Did you have special pleasure working with these two world-class architects who are from Spanish-speaking countries?

Graham: Nobody can meet Barragán and not have pleasure. That man was a poet. My daughter wanted to visit him one time when she was studying architecture at Harvard. She took a friend and went down there and I arranged for them to meet Barragán at his house. He was happy to do it and talked to them for a while, and then he said to my daughter, "Mara, why don't you stay for lunch?" Mara said she didn't want to bother him, but Barragán said, "First in my life come horses. Second in my life come ladies. Third, architecture." So she stayed for lunch. He was known for his horse ranch which was beautiful, and his house was phenomenal. I actually had met him before on a trip with the Art Institute.

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Blum: Would you please speak about the studios for artists you designed for the Josep Llorens Artigas Foundation in Gillifa, Spain?

Graham: That was a fun project. In a way, that was why I knew Barcelona so well. I went there a lot to visit Miró and to do a project in the same place that Miró and Joan Artigas spent so much time. It was an old twelfth-century church where part of it had been converted into a house. That was where Artigas lived and Miró spent a lot of time. I visited Miró at his home in Majorca and there. He was much more at home with the Artigas family. The sense of humor just came out with Miró. So when his son, Joanet Gardy Artigas, asked me if I could do this for him, I said I'd love to. So we did. It's a combination of uses: it's a center for the exhibition of art—not just ceramics, but oriented to ceramics, like painting. We started with very little artwork other than what he owned already from his father and Miró and some from Dalí. The idea was to build a cluster of studios which contained both living quarters and studios. The site was very beautiful, it was on a hill. Artigas was to build one of these ovens—in Spanish they're called ornos— I told you about that for the ceramics. It's a very sophisticated piece of structure. It was in the middle. The idea is that artists are invited to stay there for nothing and work for periods of up to six months.

Blum: Ceramicists?

Graham: Painters, too, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it was in honor of Miró. A lot of artists also come visiting all the way from Barcelona to cast in these ovens. They have meetings and exhibitions there, as well. In fact, there was a major exhibition of ceramics held there, which the mayor sponsored. It is a beautiful site. The building, I must admit, looks like it's Spanish. I think it's because of the relationship to the landscape and to this twelfth-century building.

Blum: How extensive are these structures that you built?

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Graham: There are eight studio apartments. Then there are some small apartments that are not studios that are under the main exhibit halls. Then there's the exhibit hall itself, with the offices. Then there are vaults to store things. Every artist that has been there leaves a piece or two or three.

Blum: Is that a requirement?

Graham: No, but they all do it. So you're surrounded by all this wonderful pottery.

Blum: How did this foundation come into being?

Graham: Young Artigas founded it in honor of his father. They had some paintings there by Miró that were worth a lot of money. I felt honored that he asked me to do it.

Blum: Your work is certainly scattered around the world. In another part of the world, in Cairo, you built the Arab International bank. What was that experience like?

Graham: I was working with Hyatt on some international hotels, very few of which ever got built, and they were interested in having a hotel in Cairo. There was this project that the Arab International bank had created. Pete Tatulio, who headed Hyatt International and who had been an hotelier in the Middle East for years, had been the one who started the Hilton in Istanbul with Bunshaft. Pete was a fantastic hotelier. He knew how to run a hotel and he saw it as entertainment, not as just a room. He changed things, for example, at the Hilton in Cairo—he ran all the hotels in the Mediterranean. There's a great staircase that runs to the second floor ballroom and guests always see an Egyptian wedding. He gave them the place free to have the weddings so that guests in the hotel could stand there and hear the Egyptian music and see the bride and groom. He also brought pizzas to the Middle East; there were no pizzarias there before. He has them in all his Hiltons now. He brought Thursday night swimming parties to the hotel in Kuwait, where the

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ladies come in bathing suits. Liquor is prohibited, so he serves ice and water for the price of a Scotch and the guests all bring their own Scotch. He was called the King of Cairo by the Egyptians. He was very friendly with Nassar.

Blum: What was it like to work with him?

Graham: It was terrific. It was really fun to travel with him. I even met with him in Mexico and it was really unbelievable. I went to Egypt with him before I got the job and I went to the race tracks and when Pete walked in it was like Nassar walking in. So we did this apartment building, but we never got to the hotel. We got to do the bank and I got to meet Ali Nassar, who was one of the five colonels who took over from Farouk. He was from a famous family down the Nile. I asked him how come he was a colonel and also an architect. He said, "Well, I wanted to be an architect but my uncle—when you're in this village life you have to ask the head of the village if you can study architecture or not—he said I could study architecture but I'd have to go into the army." He asked why and his uncle said that in about ten years there'll be a revolution and you'll be a colonel. And sure enough that happened. Ali Nassar was a wonderful man. Ali introduced me to the chairman of the board of the bank, who was a wonderful man, an economist. I got to know him very well. There was an assistant who had been prime minister of Egypt. The idea was to build a complex not dissimilar to the one I did in Hong Kong. It would have two apartment buildings and a bank building and a shopping center, which we did. They didn't know much about development, so I got Jerry Hines—he was not doing much at that point because there was a lull in real estate—to act as the developer, which he did very well. Jerry loved Egypt. We went ahead with the apartment building, except for the hotel, which was the last part. It started in 1973 and lasted for seventeen years. They haven't quite finished the hotel. It's not a Hyatt, but another one is being built. I was always in a hurry to get it finished. Ali finally said, "Bruce, this is Egypt. We don't do things like that. Just go slow. We've been at it here for centuries. There's no reason to hurry up now." Sure enough, they didn't hurry. We got a French contractor to put

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it together and they were so good that in many cases they made suggestions to upgrade certain areas where I had kept it simple because there was a lot of work. They just wanted it to look beautiful.

Blum: What did you do to absorb the culture before building anything?

Graham: Remember that as culture, Egypt is not so far from Peru. No other culture built masarabiahs, which are wooden screens.

[Tape 8: Side 1]

Graham: The masarabiahs are screens that they put on to cover windows. The women used to be able to look out without being seen. It's also a kind of a sun shade. They filter the sun in the rooms so you don't get as much light.

Blum: Is this what is used in Iran to screen the women from the male population?

Graham: Yes, but it doesn't come from Iran, it comes from Egypt. And you see them in southern Spain, too, particularly in the Alhambra. When the conquistadors came to Peru, they brought that custom with them, so you'll see modern houses today with masarbiahs. You can see that the desert of Peru, the desert of Egypt, and the south of Spain are all the same, both culturally and in nature.

Blum: Are you saying that you didn't have to do much homework to build in Egypt?

Graham: Well, we did anyway. We traveled a lot. We looked at other buildings and hotels and the old British hotels that were built there when Britain controlled Egypt. Near the pyramids there are a few of them and they're quite beautiful. Ali Nassar had rebuilt them and brought them up to date. Every country you go to, you learn something. Unfortunately, too many American

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travelers think that it's the other way around, that they're going to bring something to the country that they're going to visit.

Blum: Hearing you talk about being in Egypt and these other countries reminds me that Gordon Bunshaft once said something that I thought was sort of sad. He said that he had designed the National Commercial bank in Saudi Arabia— he considered it to be one of his best and one of his favorite designs—but that he could never go to see it because he was Jewish.

Graham: That's not true. Gordon didn't want to go see it. He didn't want to go to Saudi Arabia. He may have meant that he couldn't go because he was Jewish, but it was from his own side, because the Saudis wouldn't allow people from Israel to go there. I know Jewish American architects that have been to Saudi Arabia.

Blum: I'm sure you do. But I'm saying that he couldn't go because the Saudis wouldn't allow Jews. He couldn't obtain permission from them. This information is documented by Carol Krinsky in Gordon Bunshaft.

Graham: The Saudis wouldn't allow people from Israel to go. I have a Jewish friend who I crossed the border with. He was a lawyer and I crossed the border with him into Israel and also into Lebanon.

Blum: Have you ever had a situation where you were refused entrance?

Graham: We were offered a project in Nigeria, and I wouldn't go.

Blum: Why?

Graham: Because the last architect that was there was jailed for no reason. He spent about a month in jail for no god-dammed reason at all. I'll be damned if I was going to spend time in jail. Nigeria's full of bandits and crooks and I

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didn't want to go. They're two-timing a lot of Americans through the mail, it's fraud. The FBI hasn't been able to catch them.

Blum: Have you ever had a project that you would like to have done, but there was some restriction that you couldn't fulfill?

Graham: No. Bunshaft did more important work than that bank in Saudi Arabia. They knew he was a Jewish architect and yet he did the Hajj Terminal. That's a more important building.

Blum: He also spoke about that and said that that was why Faz worked so closely with him, because he was the one who used to come and go to Saudi Arabia during that project.

Graham: Yes, because Bunshaft didn't want to go to Saudi Arabia. I can tell you that that's the reason. In fact, one time they moved the site for the National Commercial bank. Some prince took over the site, and so they asked Bunshaft to come over and look at the new site, and he said "One piece of the desert is the same as another piece of the desert." He was right.

Blum: You have given a lot of service as a civic leader. You have said that one of the most important endeavors that you have been involved with was the Central Area Committee. You were the president from 1984 to 1986. What was that committee all about?

Graham: [Richard J.] Daley died, all of a sudden, while he was mayor. He had worked so closely and done so many things with the business community that they wanted done, both economically and developmentally. The problem was that he had been mayor for so long that the business community had relaxed and wasn't really as active as it could have been. In fact, the Commercial Club virtually did nothing.

Blum: Were you a member of the Commercial Club?

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Graham: Yes, then the new mayor took over, Michael Bilandic, and he didn't last long. Bilandic wasn't a politician. So they elected Jane Byrne. The business community didn't think much of Byrne, by and large, except the developers.

Blum: Was it because she was a woman?

Graham: No, she was a little wild. She was active, and she got things started. As you may have heard, she became famous for being overbearing and drinking too much, and so on.

Blum: She also lived in Cabrini Green for a while.

Graham: That was a political act. And a pretty good one, for a political act. She was also brave for doing that, although she had a lot of cops around. The only unit that was still active was the Central Area Committee, and they collaborated with Daley a lot, like on Dearborn Park, but the Commercial Club didn't do anything. If you remember, the Commercial Club was the group that commissioned Burnham's 1909 plan. They continued their involvement in the city. Chicago businessmen were very involved in the city. They all belonged to the Commercial Club and it kept going. It wasn't just a one-day affair. They had to get Burnham's Plan of Chicago built and keep going. It wasn't just a plan, but building the parks and the avenues, and not just along the lakefront, but Douglas Park, and all those inner parks. The politicians were very weak at that time. If you remember, Edward Kelly was nothing and Martin J. Kennelly was less. Then came Daley and he sort of took over what the Commercial Club was doing. It was very easy and smart to have the Commercial Club do the Plan of Chicago, because cities don't dare do plans that actually show, physically, that you're building a road through somebody's house. Politicians don't dare do something like that. But the Commercial Club doesn't care, they published it. If you look carefully, that's been the way, historically, in Chicago. You look and see that some of the things in the Central Area Committee plan were actually built. They were shown in the plan. That is the strength that the business

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community has, regardless of who's the mayor. Because Mayor Daley can always say, "Well, I didn't have anything to do with that, it was the Commercial Club, or it was the Central Area Committee."

Blum: But do the plans incorporate the wishes of the politicians in power at the time?

Graham: Yes, so that they can support it, but it's never an official plan. It's never been approved by the mayor or the city council. The Central Area Committee plan was never submitted to the city council. It's just published, just like Burnham's Plan of Chicago. Burnham's plan was even published for grade school students as the little Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago.

Blum: What was the relationship between the Commercial Club and the Central Area Committee?

Graham: The Central Area Committee was made only of the heads of business in the central area of Chicago. The Commercial Club goes beyond the boundaries of Chicago to the suburban communities as well. Bill Graham is a member of the Commercial Club, but his Baxter Lab is not in Chicago. The Commercial Club reaches down beyond the range of the senior executives, while the Central Area Committee is just the senior chief executives.

Blum: Were you the senior chief executive of SOM?

Graham: Yes, at that time. And Hartmann was before me, when he was a member of the Central Area Committee. We didn't really call ourselves that, but we were the senior partners.

Blum: If you say the Commercial Club was not very active, did the Central Area Committee take over to fill the vacuum?

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Graham: Yes, but only in the central area. We didn't go beyond the central area. That's where the Commercial Club failed, because the whole idea was to go beyond the central area, to include the University of Chicago, the South Side, Cabrini Green, Taylor Homes. They did nothing.

Blum: What came out of the Central Area Committee, other than Dearborn Park?

Graham: The World's Fair. Also more things than that. There was support for additions to Adler Planetarium and Navy Pier. We had arranged for Meigs Field to be closed on the plan for the World's Fair. We arranged for the National Park Service to build a national park on the lakefront and extend Meigs Field out to the Adler Planetarium. The National Park Service had agreed to do it. Do you know why? It's a well-kept secret, although I don't know why it's so well kept. Maybe it was because the mayor was so embarrassed. The state of Illinois has no national parks. It has a little piece of ground around Lincoln Spring in Springfield. but that's it. It's a little piece of ground, not even any other monument. At that time, they paid $50,000 a year for the support of national parks in the state of Illinois.

Blum: So all the parks we have in Illinois are either state or city parks?

Graham: Yes. When we discovered that, Tom Ayres went to them and said, "You guys haven't got a park in our state. If we build one, will you take it over?" They said that they would. This is what the city really lost, because at the end, not only would Meigs Field have been closed, but the South Side would have gotten a park like Lincoln Park on the North Side. It would have done a hell of a lot for the black people on the South Side.

Blum: But on the South Side we have Jackson Park.

Graham: It's hugely overcrowded. And it's way south. There's a huge area between the center city and Jackson Park where there's no park at all. You can't call Lake Meadows a park.

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Blum: How did the World's Fair Committee evolve from the Central Area Committee?

Graham: We added more people. The World's Fair Committee was headed by Tom Ayres.

Blum: I understand that the charrettes for the fair were kicked off by a dinner at the fashionable Century Club in New York City. And that at your request, Stanley Tigerman hosted it.

Graham: That's right. I don't know that Stanley paid for it, though. He was the toastmaster. I brought other Chicago architects into it, besides Stanley. It was not so much for doing the plan, which we did later, but to kick-off a way to incorporate architects from all over the United States. So we had a number of charrettes across the nation. We had one in New York and in San Francisco, and in Houston.

Blum: Were they all working on their own plan?

Graham: It was not so much that. We divided into teams and they each produced a kind of idea for the fair.

Blum: Who were your teammates?

Graham: I didn't participate in a team. I thought that would be unfair. After all this, I was invited to come on in the design of the campus.

Blum: So you weren't on any of these preliminary teams?

Graham: No, but I attended them all.

Blum: Who was the team in Chicago?

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Graham: There was more than one team in Chicago. We usually got two or three architects and then we got students to work with each one of these teams.

Blum: That was a nice opportunity for these students.

Graham: Yes, it was part of the idea to get students to work with architects they had never heard of.

Blum: Were you involved as an individual, or were you involved as a representative of SOM?

Graham: SOM was paying me, but I wasn't getting any money for doing all of this. It was part of my responsibility for the fair.

Blum: Were there other architects from SOM involved with these teams?

Graham: Yes, we had planners and other architects, like in any studio. But there was no other partner involved.

Blum: Why did the fair not materialize?

Graham: Because Liz Hollander killed it. That was Tom's only mistake. It was not the architects at all. The original 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the 1933 Century of Progress were financed privately. The World's Fair submission that we got was also private. It wasn't for the city of Chicago, it was to be the private group that put the team together. Then we needed the city's cooperation to get the land and all that, and we got it. But then Tom decided that it would be cheaper to finance through the state and city than through private loans. That was a big mistake because now that the financing was public, they felt in charge. Then you had to get the approval of the mayor, and we never got it. Mayor Washington shot his own people in the behind. I think he destroyed the best opportunity in the world. He

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destroyed the opportunity for black people of the South Side. He blew it totally.

Blum: As far as the plan for the fair went, did it provide some permanent benefits?

Graham: Yes, it had a lot of different things in it from what the other fairs had. One thing was to include more nations. We thought it would be well if each of the big nations would include some of the poorer nations in their pavilions.

Blum: Such as?

Graham: The United States Committee and the International World's Fair Committee agreed that it would be countries like Guatemala or Nicaragua, as the poor nations. The Europeans would do the same with some of the African nations. Russia and China would do the same. Japan agreed. That was on. So these countries would not only have exhibit space, but days in which they would give a program. One thing that we were thinking about, but that didn't get that far, was to build a new opera house for Chicago. I don't think that our present opera house is a good one. It's too long, it doesn't have the acoustics that it should. That was to be one permanent benefit.

Blum: Did the planning go far enough to include that?

Graham: We had shown the opera house in the Central Area Committee plan. That would have been where the Illinois Central station is now, south of the Art Institute, but not in the park. Also, we wanted to expand McCormick Place.

Blum: That has happened.

Graham: Yes, but not in the right place, and not done very well.

Blum: Were you talking about placing an opera house where the Polk Street Station is, south of the Loop in the cultural area complex?

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Graham: Yes, and there would also have been a marina for the South Side. There were a few other things that we had in mind. There would have been residual buildings in the neighborhoods that would have stayed, for people to visit.

Blum: So there would have been lasting benefits in the neighborhoods.

Graham: The most important benefit was going to be jobs and job training. And the factories to make the materials to build the fair. Chicago was the number one manufacturer of equipment, and they disappeared. This was the great chance to rebuild and recover. I can name one thing after another that are needed for a fair that would have required a lot of technology and equipment.

Blum: Do you feel that was a big opportunity for the city that was lost?

Graham: It was not only missed, but as I told you, God gave them a punishment of the recession and Chicago lost a hell of a lot of jobs. They absolutely faked the projected attendance. They said it would only be thirty-six million people, but we had done a different study with a highly sophisticated group and found it would be sixty-five million. With the recession, it would have been more, because the vacations would have been cheaper. In 1933 people had less money but the fair had the highest attendance ever and they extended it another year. It was cheap entertainment. Chicagoans would have been able to rent rooms in their homes. That's what happens with a fair. There was no way that the hotels could have held everyone. The benefits would have gone out all the way out to Wheaton, Illinois. Instead, they had the fair in Seville, which was hopeless. Seville doesn't have any future in becoming the technology center of Europe, which was what they were hoping. They don't even have the university or the site.

Blum: There are people who said there was no reason for a World's Fair today. There's communication and exchange between countries already.

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Graham: Tourists are all over the place. They go to Disney World because they've got kids. Don't you think that kids would want to go to a World's Fair? You've got to be kidding. Disney would have been there with four feet.

Blum: Before the Central Area Committee plan, there was Chicago 21. That plan preceded the Central Area Committee by ten years. What was the idea behind it?

Graham: That was Bill Hartmann's. It was an earlier plan, not as physical as the central area plan. It covered the whole city, not just the central area.

Blum: What were the features to improve the city?

Graham: I think, partially, they were worried about the decay on the South Side and in the Loop. So they started the Chicago 21 project. I don't know very much about it.

Blum: By 1972, the Loop had started rebuilding somewhat.

Graham: They started recovering somewhat, but unfortunately, the city took over the planning and the design, like on State Street.

Blum: Was closing off State Street to traffic part of the Chicago 21 plan?

Graham: I think so.

Blum: Well, it has been reopened.

Graham: Good. In the meantime, we lost Sears, Roebuck and the south end of the Loop. And they put the Harold Washington Library in the wrong place. It is a central library and State Street is the anchor street, and where the library is didn't make any sense.

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Blum: Were there other committees that you belonged to that had important work to do?

Graham: The Central Area Committee kept me very busy. That was more than enough.

Blum: Did you you have your own agenda to get work for SOM when working for the Central Area Committee?

Graham: No, that had nothing to do with it.

Blum: Doesn't that often underlie memberships on boards or committees?

Graham: No, I thought it was the other way. Since I am on the Board of Directors of the Art Institute I would never work for them. I've been on the board of the University of Pennsylvania since the 1970s and I refuse to do any work for them. I did some work for them for nothing, showing them how to fix old Franklin Field Stadium, because they weren't doing it right. Bob Venturi has refused to go on the board of the University of Pennsylvania because he needs the work. He's done a damn good job at the University with what he has done architecturally. He's on the Board of Overseers, but he refused to be on the Board of Trustees.

Blum: You were a director of the Urban Land Research Foundation. What was that organization?

Graham: That was different.

Blum: Is that where you made contact with a lot of clients?

Graham: Yes, because it's a developers' organization. Any developer who is anybody belongs to it.

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Blum: And you joined for that reason?

Graham: I was asked by the directors to join it.

Blum: Is it by invitation only?

Graham: You can apply for membership but not to the board of directors. Membership is very good, because they're a well-run group. They do a lot of research, which they publish and you get as a member. They have some very good people working as staff. They work closely with the National Board of Realtors. Tony Downs, for example, is a Chicagoan and is with the Brookings Institute and is very active in that group. Professor Grasskamp at the University of Wisconsin is, in my mind, the top brain in real estate research. I used to be lucky enough to sit next to him. It was all alphabetical. Jerry Hines was very active. You name them, and all the top developers are in it. Charlie Shaw was president of it for two years.

Blum: What do they study?

Graham: In meetings twice a year they have a lot of presentations about different problems with real estate and development, all the way from the laws that cities pass that they debate the benefit or damage. And they make a report of this debate that is then published. If a developer finds that there is a certain problem in his city and that there's a fight between the mayor and the people, for very little fee, they form a group of developers that are expert in that problem and they visit that town and research the problem. Then they have a big meeting where the public of the town is invited and they debate it. At the end of it, they publish their solution to the problem. It's a great organization and very well supported. I've been a member for quite a while and Bill Hartmann is a member, too.

Blum: Did you have time to work, with all these committee meetings you had to attend?

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Graham: Ask Jane. Between that and traveling to Egypt, it wasn't easy.

Blum: You also are a trustee of the Urban Land Institute.

Graham: It's the same thing. The foundation was part of the institute, but it gave grants for studies. The institute is the "us" that ran it and where the research took place. It was both non-profit and non-political.

Blum: Is it correct to say that you were a trustee of the institute and a director of the foundation?

Graham: The mother is the institute, and the foundation is just a part. I had one title, since one serves the other. I was on the committee for the foundation, where we approved the money for the grant requests.

Blum: It seems so much of your activity was involved with planning and urban research.

Graham: Right. It started with that little boy walking along in the slums of Puerto Rico. You see I started by saying that SOM was designed to build cities, not buildings.

Blum: Would Nat Owings agree with that?

Graham: At first he wouldn't, but in his book [The Spaces In Between] he sure took credit for it. He gave me hell for that. He would tell me, "We weren't designed to build cities. You go out there and design buildings and make money." Then in his book, it's all about planning. In his later life, that's all he did.

Blum: Well, some of the book is about that. I thought that he was more devoted to preserving and conserving ecology after he moved to California.

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Graham: Even there he was involved in planning, and in Santa Fe. It wasn't only preservation, it was urban design. He made a speech—I had him come down to Jefferson City, Missouri, where I did that little drive-in bank building—and I discovered a lot about Missouri on that trip. All the politicians met together in the basement of a building, Republicans and Democrats, and determined what the hell was going to happen. They were just marvelous people. I got to know the chairman of the bank and his father. One day they asked me if I could have Nat Owings come and give a speech to their Commercial Club, which was a group of businessmen and politicians. So Nat came and he started the speech by saying, "In 1865 the federal government gave you this beautiful site to build this capital city of this wonderful state. Why don't you get to it?" The crowd roared. He was right. The city hadn't done much and the site was absolutely fantastic with the river down below and the hill above.

[Tape 8: Side 2]

Blum: In 1973, something happened, maybe there were people who predicted it, but it seems to have taken us all by surprise: the oil embargo and inflation. Later, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration closed the tax loopholes for investors, which meant that it was not beneficial to invest in commercial buildings because losses could no longer be deducted from their income tax.

Graham: Did you ever read Milton Friedman's book? There's no such thing as eliminating taxes. Tax loopholes are never closed. Reagan was the favorite president of all developers. Without any doubt.

Blum: What was called a loophole, as I understand it, was to invest in commercial real estate and have that loss offset your income on your income tax.

Graham: The loopholes went on and on beyond that. None of those people ever pay any income taxes like they should.

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Blum: How did the change in the tax law affect your business?

Graham: What happened was the reverse of what you're saying. There was a huge amount of overbuilding that Reagan promoted. The developers loved him. They ended up in a real estate crash in 1989 and 1990. Bush got blamed for it, but it wasn't really Bush's fault. Many of those developers went totally broke. You have to combine that with the technology in building office buildings, where it required fewer workers because computers eliminated so many jobs and changed the type of buildings that were built. In England, all the buildings had underfloor wiring capabilities, but American builders didn't do that. They started to do it later, but the buildings were not designed to do that, so they weren't so hot. Further, it occurred in housing too. There was a huge overbuilding of housing all over the United States and it took quite a while to absorb it. I told you how smart Bill Sanders was to buy these buildings at ten percent and finish them and sell them or rent them. There was no question that Reagan did not help the real estate world, he destroyed it. Obviously, his advisors told him to do it, because he didn't know a damn thing about real estate.

Blum: How did the oil embargo and the inflation that followed impact construction and your business?

Graham: I don't think that SOM felt it.

Blum: That was the time that SOM looked for work in the Middle East and Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada, London, Mexico, and Guatemala.

Graham: We didn't look for it, it came to us. We did not go to the Middle East with a carpet bag looking for work. Bill Dunlap and I were asked to do the airport for Jeddah. We went to England to meet with the prince and he said we had the job. Then they sent us this letter telling us that we were going to be the architects of this airport, but, of course, there was this ten percent kick-back that the prince was supposed to get. So we told him, forget it, we don't give

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kick-backs. So that's how much we were seeking work. They gave the job to a Washington, D.C., firm. Then some years passed and nothing happened. So the Saudis got very upset and went to the SOM New York office and asked them to do the airport, but without the ten percent kick-back. That's how we got the airport. Nobody went to Saudi Arabia looking for work. It was the other way around.

Blum: Kick-backs was the system in Saudi Arabia?

Graham: It was against the law for American firms to do it anywhere in the world. The United States is the only nation that has that law. All the other nations pay a ten percent "finder's fee," but not the United States. I agree with that. When you're the architect, you have to be totally disinterested in your own investment.

Blum: This was when you worked in so many places around the world.

Graham: Because the firm got to be more known, a lot more known. Now we were the architects who did the Air Force Academy and the Hancock building and Chase Manhattan bank and Lever House and this and that. You get known. All these countries were looking for American technology. I didn't get the Arab International bank in Egypt from Egyptians, we got it from Hyatt International. It was more by our reputation. We were, by far, the most well- known firm in the United States, at that time. There was nobody that was close, there was no Kohn Pederson Fox or anybody like that. And there wasn't post-modernism.

Blum: One of your commissions in the 1970s was the Banco de Occidente in Guatemala City. You have cited that project several times when you have been asked what you consider to be your best work. You have said that it's one of your smallest, too. Would you talk about it?

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Graham: The chairman of the bank—it was not one of the biggest banks in Guatemala and the headquarters were not really in Guatemala City—was a wonderful person and well traveled in the United States. Obviously, he had heard of Chase Manhattan bank and Harris Trust and the Bank of America and SOM. So he thought he should go see SOM. He called and he spoke in Spanish, so they sent him to me and I talked to him. That's how I got the job. Then I went there and I thought it would be a good idea and a friendly gesture to associate with a Guatemalan architect in a consulting kind of way. They showed me around, although I had been to Guatemala before, but not on business. Then they gave me the job and this was when I found out that the climate was perfect. There isn't a better climate. It is air-conditioned naturally. The temperature doesn't go above 77 or 78 degrees, the sun isn't too hot, it rains predictably at the right times and it never gets colder than 65 degrees. I looked at some of the banks that had been done, including a building by the U. S. State Department. They were all glass and air- conditioned. I couldn't understand why they did this. The Guatemalans themselves live virtually without walls. They have an exterior or courtyard wall and then the house inside is virtually open all the time, which makes sense. There are no mosquitoes because it's too high in the mountains. So we started on the project and I began immediately to work on the idea that I talked over with Sam Sachs, the engineer. Sam said, "Well, it should be naturally ventilated." From an energy point of view, any mechanical engineer is delighted because they hate air conditioning. Sam Sachs never had any in his house. So that's what we designed. We designed a building where the banking room was inside and looked like a courtyard protected by a removable canvas roof. Then there are slats so when it rains, it fills the canvas and goes across the top and still the ventilation goes through. I made and kept the promise that everything would be made in Guatemala. There is not one stick of anything in that building that was not made in Guatemala. They made everything from native materials. The bankers loved it.

Blum: Was that unusual, especially from an American architect?

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Graham: Generally, a Guatemalan architect does the opposite. He buys everything in the United States and then brings it down because he has no trust in his own nation. It happens all over the world. They'll say, you've got to have this American or this German thing.

Blum: In terms of the design of the space, was the courtyard arrangement specific to the culture?

Graham: Yes, courtyard living is a way of life in Central and South America. Our house in Peru was a courtyard house, in Arequipa. It was the most civilized form of housing.

Blum: Did the courtyard serve the function of a gathering place?

Graham: The houses are built around the courtyard. It defines the house and beyond the gate is the city. My children, in Chicago, would come through our gate, and then they weren't in Chicago anymore. They were in our house, a family place. Then you walk down the street and there's Lincoln Park. But in our house, it was private and they felt safe. One time, the alarm went off and the police came and my son opened the gate and my son told me the policeman said, "Mr. Graham, don't worry, they wouldn't break into this house. They'd break into the one next door." I always say the row houses of America were designed in England by the owners of mines to make sure that everyone was in bed at the same time. They could walk through the front. There are some places in America where there are these courtyards.

Blum: In the Southwest?

Graham: In St. Louis. There's a whole series of gates in one neighborhood that links the whole place with a bunch of deadends. There's a gate to the whole place and traffic only comes in, turns around, and gets out. The houses then have courtyards. That is very civilized and safe. That's why they do gates, for safety.

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Blum: Was it for safety in Central America, or was it just to mark the difference between the public and the private spaces?

Graham: Historically, the Greeks had courtyards and the Egyptians have courtyards. The Romans had courtyards.

Blum: Was that to accommodate the climate?

Graham: No, it was to accommodate a sense of family. In Guatemala it was quite beautiful because all the houses are the same. There's just this big wall with gates in it. The only thing that distinguishes one from another is that they don't like to paint things white because the sun is so bright. They will paint their piece of property soft pink and the next one blue, and so on. The bank was not white, it was off-white. The only other thing that is different is the gate. Each one is unique, they are painted or carved. That's a very civilized way. In France, you go through gates to courtyards to houses.

Blum: Were there other features in your design that you took from the Guatemalan tradition?

Graham: I just described the Guatemalan tradition: simplicity. It's very simple.

Blum: Adrian Smith worked on this project with you. What did he do?

Graham: He was just one of the kids I used. If he put his name on the building, that's nonsense. There's no way. He prides himself for doing Rowe's Wharf, in Boston, and he prides himself on having done it secretly because I didn't see it, because I wouldn't have done it that way. It's the direct opposite of the one in Guatemala. Ever since I left, he hasn't done a modern building. They're all these postmodern buildings.

Blum: He designed the NBC Tower in Chicago, with the peacock on top.

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Graham: Do you think that I would have done that? Forget it. No way. There's a tendency for a lot of these kids to take credit, but there's no precedent in their work for that. If you look at my work, there is a precedent. He wouldn't have known a god-damned thing about Latin America.

Blum : But he worked with you and is listed on the credits.

Graham: Sure, but he didn't design much on that project. I designed one hundred percent of that building. He did the detailing on that work. I didn't draw every line of every drawing, even on my own house. I designed it, but I had other kids do the working drawings and work on the details. Neither did Mies or Corbusier or Bunshaft make all their drawings, believe me. There's a chief designer that does the building and then there's the crew. Adrian was one of my crew. Actually, Pat McConnell contributed more to the design of that building than Adrian did.

Blum: Well, the photographs are quite beautiful. You have said that building is a brave little building. To be more specific, it was actually three buildings.

Graham: One was a drive-in bank and the other was a shopping center. Pat and Adrian worked more on the shopping center than I did. The drive-in and the main bank were one hundred percent my designs.

Blum: At some time, late in the 1970s, modernism fell out of favor. With the oil embargo and the energy crisis, it seems that your forms started to change. There were more atrium buildings. They were spoken of as "energy-savers" with a bigger footprint, such as the 33 West Monroe building.

Graham: I don't think that had much to do with energy-saving. Energy saving has always been an issue. The Terraces in Atlanta were much more energy efficient than 33 West Monroe.

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Blum: But you couldn't do The Terraces in the center of a city because it needed too much ground.

Graham: The requirements of 33 West Monroe were more for Arthur Anderson than for us.

Blum: Was 33 West Monroe built for Arthur Anderson?

Graham: They were the first big tenant and now they virtually occupy the whole building. An accounting firm has totally different space requirements than any other tenant. In a way, they're more similar to SOM. They need a big floor, but not necessarily with everyone having a window. Everyone needed to talk to one another, and the accountants are rarely there. Very few people go to an accountant's office, it's usually the other way around because the accountant goes to the client. It was an idea to build multiple atriums so that one identified the client with that particular floor. I used that idea also in Columbus, Ohio, with the Huntington Center, which is a highrise building with multiple entrances. All elevator systems have to be multiple: floors 1-10 are on one bank, and 11-20 are on another. You can't send all elevators to the top, because there would be too many elevators. So at each of the stops you put an atrium, so when the client gets off the elevator at the office, he remembers the atrium. That was the idea at 33 West Monroe.

Blum: Did you build 33 West Monroe for a developer?

Graham: No, Arthur Anderson was part owner and part investor, as I was. A lot of Skidmore partners were investors. Draper and Kramer were investors. The three of us had thought of doing a building much before doing that building, but we never did get a chance to do it. Then Draper and Kramer found this property and we did it. We hit it just right because it was built and completed before inflation took over. We built it for thirty-four or thirty- five dollars a square foot and after that, building prices and mechanical equipment jumped up.

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Blum: Is there a conflict of interest by investing in a project that you're designing?

Graham: No. What was important was that all the SOM partners were invited to participate. Not all of them did, but most of them did.

Blum: It turned out to be a good investment?

Graham: Sure, it was fully rented and that's the name of the game.

Blum: But SOM isn't there any more.

Graham: No, but we still own a piece of the building. That was two unrelated deals.

Blum: So if you were going to be your own client, SOM was, in a way, like a corporate client,.

Graham: That's not unusual. Saarinen had his own building at Cranbrook. Holabird and Root had their own building. That's not unusual.

Blum: 33 West Monroe was built in 1980. In 1982, you designed Madison Plaza.

Graham: It was a totally different building.

Blum: It was a variation of the tube idea that you had done years before.

Graham: Yes, but it had another idea that is better to draw and then I'll explain it. At that time, people were talking about doing something about the elevated stations, one of which is right out front of Madison Plaza. So we had a crossing of the building and many of the corner sites around it were empty. So I thought, again like in Madison, Wisconsin, if we did a building with tubes that cut the square diagonally and you do the same on the opposite corner, you end up with a city square. You celebrate the subway entrance. You end up with a totally cohesive little park in the Loop.

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Blum: Except that you also end up with a pretty busy intersection.

Graham: Right, and for that same reason, it was better to open it up. For the pedestrian traffic, they could walk through it in several ways. The best way to think of the building is to go to Barcelona, where I got the idea. The whole of Barcelona was designed by one engineer, Ildefonso Cerdá, the whole damn town, and his idea was to mandate that at every corner was an entrance. When you have an avenue that's wider, you get a park. Then when you have a super-avenue, you have a fantastic little park. I always thought that was a democratic city.

Blum: So your idea for Madison Plaza was for it to be one quadrant of four buildings on corners facing each other?

Graham: I thought I was going to do the second building for Miglin-Beitler. But then he got mad at Tom Eyerman. He gave the job to Cesar Pelli and Pelli did a design for the tallest building in the world with the smallest floor-plate, which was totally impractical and impossible to finance, so it all fell apart. At least I would have gotten two corners done and another architect might have picked up on the idea and finished the other two corners.

Blum: You hoped that another architect would have finished the park?

Graham: Sure, he would have been cursed if he didn't. If only one side of the street had the park and celebrated the new station? Come on.

Blum: You had a job for one new building, and you were already thinking of two, three, and four.

Graham: It was exactly like Madison Plaza in Madison [Wisconsin]. I was thinking of the city. This would have been a symbol in Chicago that would have celebrated not only itself, but the El. That was the idea.

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Blum: Well, part of that never happened, but the Madison Plaza building did. About that building you have said that you were "in search of an expression of a structure that allows the building to land gently on the earth and yet celebrate the romance of the towers."

Graham: Yes, but I could say that about almost every building I design.

Blum: This one did have an accordion-pleated facade.

Graham: Yes, but I had used that before on 33 West Madison.

Blum: The materials in the building are alternating horizontal bands of glass and aluminum. And there is more aluminum than glass, therefore it conserves energy.

Graham: That's on the west side, mainly. That's on the side where the sun really hits a tall building. At that time, you couldn't use steel on the exterior.

Blum: What is the proportion of metal to glass?

Graham: It's about fifty-percent each. But it's more glass on the diagonal side, which made very nice little offices because everyone got a window.

Blum: Was there any effort to design for energy conservation?

Graham: There always is in every building. We measure that very carefully. The sun is not the only problem in a modern building. The people and the equipment are a bigger load than the sun. No matter if you had no exposure to the sun, you still had the energy that's being used by the people and the equipment. So you still have to ventilate it. In Chicago when it gets so hot, you have nowhere for the heat to go. On a cool day, you have the heat from the people going out the window and the sun is coming in. You need a balance and to

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think of the orientation of the building. You can never make it perfect, except in Guatemala.

Blum: Miglin-Beitler developed this property and also had their office in the building. What were they like to work with?

Graham: On the building, they were fine. I happen to relate more to Lee Miglin, but we had to work more with Paul Beitler. Miglin let him run the project. I know that Miglin did not have any ideas about this being a great, tall building. That was Beitler.

Blum: How did the Louise Nevelson sculpture that is in front of the building come about?

Graham: Again, you have this square made up of the four corners. You can imagine if you end up with this square, you need sculpture in all these corners. I had told Beitler about it. But then he got mad at Eyerman—he was a child.

Blum: Why was Nevelson selected?

Graham: They preferred Nevelson, and I had no problem with that.

Blum: Who were the other sculptors who were considered?

Graham: I don't know of any others. They were hung up on Nevelson to begin with. She was a good artist.

Blum: You have said that you did some teaching at Penn in your last year of school. Have you taught there since then?

Graham: No. I've given lectures, but I've not taught as such. I did at Harvard, but not at Penn. They never asked me.

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Blum: Would you have been interested?

Graham: Of course, if I did it at Harvard, I would have done it at Penn.

Blum: You have given many lectures and interviews. In an interview published in the newsletter of the University of Illinois at Chicago, you said that architectural education is all wrong as it's taught in the school system.

Graham: There are a number of reasons why it's wrong. The big reason is that in the undergraduate level, the students are asked to do too much work that they're not ready for. Therefore, a lot of students graduate that never become architects. They have very little time as an undergraduate or graduate, like at Harvard, to take advantage of Harvard. My daughter, Mara, did because she's very independent. She insisted that they give her a bachelor of architecture degree, which they don't give anymore. They gave it because she had taken courses beyond her curriculum. At Harvard, instead of working in the building on campus, she did most of her work at home. She actually taught an English course on James Joyce because nobody else had read him thoroughly. She went to other classes at Harvard. She had a great critic, Jerzy Soltan, the Polish architect, who no one paid any attention to. He lived near her apartment and he used to come over and criticize her projects and talk to her. He had worked with Corbusier. He's still at Harvard, I think. She would go to lectures in subjects beyond architecture. I think that's very important, to learn academia. You're going to learn architecture when you get out. The current system works fine for someone who has a degree in poetry or history and then goes to graduate school in architecture . In the first year, they're not as good as the student who has had undergraduate architecture, but by the third year, they're at the top of the class.

Blum: The program you propose for educating architects is not the going norm. How did your idea come about?

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Graham: Because very few of the teachers are architects, they're theoreticians. Penn didn't have a single practicing architect on the staff. That's ridiculous. They had one, but she quit and went to San Diego. At Harvard, there were two: Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti. They have won a lot of competitions. That helped, but they taught the students directly. Harvard did have a program—too small, frankly—where they had visiting architects give studios, which is what I did. I gave a studio for a term, two days a week. Then they had a proctor who worked with them in the interim period. I think that worked well. Columbia does the same thing. Now Penn has practicing architects teaching. They had the degree changed, so that a practicing architect can have the benefits of a professor, including retirement, for a five year period of professorship. In our professorship, the Bruce and Jane Graham Professorship in Architecture, I gave them a maximum of two years, and they would be called the Graham Professor of Architecture. It's very good for young architects because they don't have that much work and it gives them a way to get known and to explore ideas with students. That's what Mies was doing at IIT. So apprenticeship is still the way to teach any art. You can't teach painting without a painter. Penn had painters and sculptors and musicians teaching, but for some reason, architecture was left out. It really all changed drastically during the Vietnam War.

Blum: Were practicing architects teaching prior to that?

Graham: Yes, then they got just the professional teachers. Then there were all these foreign students who needed doctorates to go back and practice. So they started granting doctorates. When I was in school, there was nothing higher than a master's degree. Myron tried to get a doctorate from Mies. Finally, Myron asked Mies after years of waiting. Mies said, "Myron, you have to contribute a new idea in architecture, and that's very difficult."

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[Tape 9: Side 1]

Blum: You were saying [off tape] that Mies didn't have a license.

Graham: I'm saying that Mies didn't have a degree, or Frank Lloyd Wright, or Louis Sullivan, or Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci.

Blum: Today, young graduating architects need so many degrees before firms like SOM will even look at them.

Graham: That's not true.

Blum: Isn't a master's degree mandatory for SOM to consider someone?

Graham: It's mandatory by the state for them to get a license. Again, all of these are, without a doubt, programs to benefit the professors in the school or the state employees. That's why the RIBA is so much better, because they do the licensing.

Blum: Do you think that there's any value in students taking more classes?

Graham: It's important that students become civilized people. As I said before, if they go to a university, they should take civilization courses and broaden themselves. Once they become architects, they should learn how to draw. But beyond that, there's not much more. Maybe they should learn the computer. But they learn architecture out in the field with workers and contractors in the city.

Blum: Were you seriously involved with the young architects who were in your studio at SOM?

Graham: Yes, very much so.

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Blum: What did you consider important for you to communicate to them?

Graham: They would learn not just from me, but from the whole team. They would learn by sitting around listening to me talk with Faz. I even have pictures that students took of me sitting around with students and of Faz and me talking about sketches. I talked to the studio. We would all get around and talk about the project, from the start and all the way through. I didn't just meet with the studio head. In many cases, the studio head was not the strongest person on the team. I can name a number of people like that.

Blum : What do you mean by studio head?

Graham: The studio head was the first associate partner. Each studio had a head and in old times, he wasn't necessarily the best designer in the team.

Blum: How did someone get to be studio head?

Graham: He had experience and as you go along, they get promoted. But making a team work was a real responsibility. For example, Michel Mossessian was without doubt the brightest of the young men in the last few years when I was there, but he was never a studio head. I worked more closely with him than with anyone else. in that studio. We worked on Ludgate and projects in Spain, along with John Burcher who was studio head.

Blum: As the teacher in this apprenticeship system, did you enjoy it?

Graham: It was part of the process. I enjoyed all the fields of architecture. Working with a very bright student was very enjoyable, because a very bright student doesn't pretend to know everything. It's the other way around for those not so bright. I think that it was Einstein who said that the world of an idiot is very small, he knows all about it, and he says he knows all about it. The world of a genius is huge, he knows little about it and he admits it.

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Blum: Smart man, that Einstein.

Graham: He was not too bad. He just barely made it out of Europe in the 1930s.

Blum: You have been so well published, do you think that in most cases your work was fairly treated by the press?

Graham: Mostly I didn't really care one way or another.

Blum: Did you read some of it?

Graham: No, although sometimes people would send down an article. I was rarely interested in what the press said. There was no Lewis Mumford writing. Who were these guys writing? Who are they now, writing about architecture? What do they know about architecture? Nothing.

Blum: Maybe they were the spokesman for more than just their own opinion. Maybe they were expressing a generalized view about architecture.

Graham: Is that the new system? You just get an overall vote? You just take an overall vote and then the genius flunks because nobody understands him?

Blum: So many of your buildings have been photographed and almost all of these photographs are really superb. Who was your photographer of choice?

Graham: Ezra Stoller was really my favorite photographer. He was the architectural photographer and he was a wonderful guy. He was also humbler than most photographers because he didn't assume that every picture was going to turn out. He would not come just for one day and take pictures, he would come for three days and take pictures. If they didn't come out, he would stay another day. He always wanted me to go with him, or he wanted Bunshaft, or whoever the architect was, to explain what the intent was. He understood

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architecture and that was very important. Hedrich-Blessing was the best in Chicago.

Blum: Did you use them?

Graham: Yes, on a couple of buildings. But, for example, in England we used Ezra Stoller.

Blum: He was an American, wasn't he?

Graham: Yes. He lived outside of New York.

Blum: Nat Owings said about you, "Graham was one of the strongest personalities ever to surface in SOM. He dominated everything he touched. He had an abrasive power drive that captured the imagination, needs, and money of the establishment. He epitomized the steam of the SOM generator. I can only hope that we built SOM strong enough to withstand the strain." How do you respond to that?

Graham: He exaggerated. I wasn't aware of that quote, but if he says that...

Blum: He said that in 1973 when he wrote his book, The Spaces In Between.

Graham: If he says that and someone else says "such-and-such a building designed by me and Bruce Graham...," then that is wrong. I insisted, especially for the kind of quality and the kind of spaces, on being good to the people, I was very good to them.

Blum: Are you referring to your colleagues?

Graham: The employees. I was one of the big promoters of the whole idea of participation in the firm. The whole idea of limiting the amount of points

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that a partner could get was totally mine. They were trying to give me more points than others and I refused.

Blum: Didn't you have to buy your points?

Graham: Yes, but after a certain point, you had enough money. Before the change, some partners had had eleven hundred or sixteen hundred. Then it went down to a thousand point maximum. The New York office thought I should get more and I said no. We were treating the employees right and treating Tom Eyerman right and John Burcher right. If an employee was in design and wasn't doing good design, then I would actually change them from a design partner to a management partner, for their own sake. They were not really qualified. Chuck Bassett and I did that together to one partner that nobody believed could be done, and we did it. It was done to a New York partner, Donald Smith.

Blum: What was your relationship with Nat Owings like?

Graham: As I said, at the beginning, it was not close at all. I'm not sure why. That was when I was designing Kimberly-Clark, and so on. But as we went on, things became more like mutual respect. As I told you, I brought him to Jefferson City. I didn't have to, I just thought he would enjoy it because he had been sick for a while. I think that we had mutual respect. We didn't meet that often because we didn't work together. It wasn't really part of my life.

Blum: How long was he in the Chicago office, after you came, before he left?

Graham: He left by the time I got back from Japan.

Blum: So it was very early and there was not much overlap. But you saw him at partners' meetings?

Graham: Yes.

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Blum: It has been said that you are a good businessman. And that under your direction, SOM, which was an intellectual cooperative, became a corporation. Not literally, but in the sense that it moved from a forum for intellectual exchange to a business. How do you respond to that?

Graham: I don't agree with that at all. In the first place, I am not a good businessman. My wife will testify to that. Bill Hartmann was a very good businessman. Until he retired, he led SOM and was ipso facto in charge of the firm. But not really, because we had a partners' guild and he was chairman of the guild.

Blum: When you say he led the firm, do you mean the Chicago office or all of SOM?

Graham: All of it. He was chairman of the national partners' committee. He had a good sense of business. He proved it by having made a lot of good investments throughout his life. I didn't do any of that. I was lucky in my investments. I think probably Bill Sanders made good investments. It was not because he was right, but because of an accident. I knew enough to let people who knew how to run a business run it. Tom Eyerman was a hell of a businessman. He had the time to be a good businessman and I didn't. Sometimes I wouldn't charge a client for the time that we spent because I didn't think that we had earned it. That's not being a good businessman. But it does mean that you are being honest, and that I tried to do all my life. I tried not to cheat the clients, not cheat the employees, but to treat them fairly. I happen to think that's one of the things that good businessmen are not doing now, and that's also bad. In terms of investments and budgets and all that stuff, I was really bored with all that, so I tried not to do all that. But in getting work, that was something I could do. Owings and Hartmann could get work too.

Blum: By the time you were getting these important, huge projects Owings was sort of phasing out.

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Graham: Owings never left. He died. The whole Washington D.C. thing, he was going like mad on that. David Childs wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Owings. Owings got all the work.

Blum: At some point, you became very powerful in the office, without, as you claim, being the businessman. How did that transition take place?

Graham: The structure of the firm, from the beginning, had a partners' committee. That committee represented all the offices, but it was not in charge of telling any other office how to do architecture. It was only to deal with the everyday problems. I like to call it being the janitor. I was chairman of that committee and I liked to call myself the janitor. John Merrill was the janitor before me. He can testify to that title. The janitor had to clean things up. Most of the things that we had to deal with were problems: individual problems or a partner who was making problems or who was a problem, like when Marc Goldstein got very ill, or Myron Goldsmith. Those were the problems that we dealt with. Then Tom Eyerman would tell us what we should do with the banks and the money and how much money we were going to make and blah, blah, blah. I wasn't the janitor for very long. Hartmann was the janitor longer than I was.

Blum: Do you think that this happened after Bill Hartmann slacked off and was close to retirement?

Graham: He actually was close to retirement at sixty-five, but he stayed on because we asked him to. At that time, you could ask a partner to stay on and so Hartmann did. I actually quit at sixty-four because I felt I had done what I wanted to do in architecture. I was the only one left of the team at SOM that I grew up with.

Blum: Who was that?

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Graham: John Merrill, Bill Hartmann, Roy Allen, David Hughes. That was the team. And there were others like Al Lockett, and a new generation had come in. There was a lack of enthusiasm in that new generation to allow Tom Eyerman to do his thing, and all of us before had felt respect for Tom. So Tom quit, which was too bad.

Blum: So there was no sense of continuity when you left the firm?

Graham: There was that sense among the staff, like the senior designers such as John Burcher and Michel Mossessian and Robert Turner. There was a whole set of them, and most of them quit because they were not respected as much.

Blum: Were they your generation?

Graham: No, they were younger. They were the next generation. They were stronger in philosophy. There was a wonderful planner that we had in England and he left. There was Roger Seitz in Chicago, and he left too.

Blum: Were all these departures at the time when SOM was scaling back out of necessity?

Graham: No, this was before that. They left because they felt that they could have run it better, and they truly could have. They are outside now, doing better.

Blum: For the forty years that you were at SOM, did you ever have those feelings, that you were ready to leave because things were not the way you thought they should be?

Graham: No, but I had an idea once that Bill and I should retire together and form a new firm.

Blum: Did you ever get serious about that?

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Graham: I mentioned it to him once, but he didn't want to do it. I guess he wanted me to stay and fund his retirement.

Blum: In a newspaper article, Owings was quoted to say that after a while the original concept of SOM, this anonymous group dedicated to improving society, had been lost. He said that what SOM had become was not creators, as he envisioned in the beginning, but order-takers. How do you respond to that?

Graham: I think it's baloney. Of course the nature of the work changed, because the United States had changed. We had a much tougher road than they did earlier. The broadness of the firm gave you a much bigger responsibility than when you just had three guys sitting together in Chicago at the Century of Progress Exposition. It was quite a different responsibility. I agree with them about maintaining the anonymity, but the profession changed that. I. M. Pei never mentioned his partner Harry Cobb. They were all like that at that time. Eero Saarinen never mentioned Kevin Roche, who was a pretty damn good architect. Owings was a dictator, without doubt. He would fire people, partners, whomever. But when you have a collaborative, it's different and it's much more difficult to manage. You want them to be independent, but not to be rude. I never had anything to say about what Raul de Armas did in New York, and he was a very good designer. It was the same way with Mike McCarthy, he was a very good architect in the New York office. He was very shy, but the most talented architect in the New York office In the group practice he was marvelous because he didn't have to bother with all this stuff. He was internally creative. I think that Mike is still there but greatly diminished. I think that Mike was to New York like Walter Netsch was to Chicago, in that Walter didn't care about the business side of things. Whether he made or lost money, it didn't matter to SOM.

Blum: SOM didn't care if he lost money?

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Graham: It didn't matter, what mattered was that he was doing good work. That's true of Mike McCarthy, although I think that Mike did make money because he was so extremely talented. He didn't have any idea if he was making money or not. In a way, we didn't want him to worry about it. We certainly didn't want Mike worrying about Chicago or San Francisco. Marc Goldstein was the same way, a terrific designer but a lousy businessman. But he didn't have to be a good businessman. The firm wasn't ruled by the designers, including me. The John Merrills, the Severinghauses, the Hartmanns, they ruled most of that work. I just ended up being chairman of that committee because I was the last one left of that generation. It was really only for a short time.

Blum: But you were sort of in the mid-generation. You were a little younger than Bill Hartmann.

Graham: I was ten years younger than Bill. John Merrill was about two years older than I was, and Roy Allen was about two years older. Dave Hughes was about that. Bob Diamant was about my age. He acted a little older though, and he retired before I did. He was a very important architect on the Chicago team. The firm was never the same. The times changed and Owings didn't understand them.

Blum: Were you ever "order-takers"?

Graham: We never were. That's ridiculous. Was I an order-taker in Spain? I didn't even have a client. Were we order-takers on the Holy Angels Church in Chicago? We were givers.

Blum: Those are singular examples. It was my impression that he was talking about how the nature of the business had changed and how SOM had changed to accommodate it.

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Graham: How about my work in Lawndale? We were order-takers? We were out working in the neighborhood there with Father Egan and building them a daycare center and working with the post office and those who were involved with the community leadership. I took five ministers from Chicago to meet with Mayor Daley and I found out that Mayor Daley knew their fathers better than I knew their children working on the South Side project. We were not order-takers. What did he mean by that?

Blum: Order-takers in that everything came out...

Graham: In that sense Mies was an order-taker, more so than I, because his buildings were all the same.

Blum: I understood it to mean that the production of the entire firm was somewhat standardized.

Graham: Standardized? Baloney! There was much less division of ideas than when Owings was around. I liked Marc Goldstein's work, but it was nothing like mine. I liked Chuck Bassett's work, but it was nothing like mine. The same with Roy Allen or Gordon Bunshaft or Walter Netsch. My work and Walter's were not alike and we were in the same city. Owings is full of baloney. Standardized, that's baloney. He was a big blabbermouth in many ways.

Blum: You mentioned Father Egan, who runs Lawndale. Would you talk about him?

Graham: He was a very liberal monsignor. Cardinal Cody banned him from Chicago and sent him to Notre Dame. There was a whole community of people in the center city that supported Father Egan and his work. He was a very strong supporter of civil rights and he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama. He was a great activist. I think I got the project at Notre Dame because they had heard that I had worked with Father Egan—it was a

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nuclear research lab. Father Egan and I were friends all the time, and we still are. He writes me letters and I write to him.

Blum: How did you meet him?

Graham: I can't remember exactly, but it was through somebody who told me that they were in trouble. For example, Father Egan brought me a young black man who had been in jail for murder and had been let out after some years and who had married and studied very hard. Father Egan asked me if I would hire this man, and I said yes. He worked in the office and we taught him how to draw. The city offered him a job and he went on to work for the city and he got a very good job there in the planning department. We had another man who did research on the Latino community. I liked Father Egan a lot.

Blum: You built something for him in Lawndale?

Graham: Yes, there was a daycare center that I made some drawings for and he got the whole neighborhood to build it in an old building.

Blum: Did you do that pro bono?

Graham: Yes. I don't think that Owings ever did anything pro bono.

Blum: Who was the father at Holy Angels Church?

Graham: Father George Clements. He was a black priest. He knocked on the door of my office one day and he said that he wanted to see the architect of the Sears Tower. So I met him and he said, "I wanted to meet you because I want to build a church for me. You did the Sears Tower and you probably can do my church. Would you like to do it?" I said, "Yes."

Blum: You must have been amused by his approach.

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Graham: Being with him was amusing all the time. Totally, one hundred percent, all of the time.

Blum: Was he serious?

Graham: Yes, and he wanted to know how much I would charge to do the design. I said, "Well, we'll come to that later." So I went to find out more about the church. It had been an Irish church that had burned down and he had a school out there. The school was from kindergarten to sixth grade. None of the kids that graduated from out there had any money. So a lot of them had to go to public schools after sixth grade where many of them excelled. Ninety-two percent of his kids went to college.

Blum: They must have gotten a pretty strong foundation in his school.

Graham: Damn right they did. How did they get the foundation? They all wore uniforms, mandated. Father and mother had to come once a month to review their child's record. Students would come in the morning— policemen volunteered to block off the streets so they were safe—and when it was time to go in Father Clements would ring the bell and they would all stop in their tracks. They had to think what they were going to do next. Then they would march in by class. All the kids took French. How did he get a French teacher? He found out that Canadian nuns retired at sixty, so he got two of them to volunteer. The nuns were delighted to be back teaching. He did everything like that. He had this little chapel at the school, which wasn't big enough. But the big part of his career was fighting drugs. He used to go into drugstores that sold drug paraphernalia and smashed the counters with a baseball bat. I'm serious. His car was bombed once by drug gangs and there were other attempts on his life. He was involved in the national fight for blacks. He described what he wanted me to do for his church. He said his biggest problem was energy; his electric bill was too high. He said, "With this church, at certain hours the church is packed with kids, but other times it's only partly full with old people, but I still have to heat the whole thing.

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The air conditioning doesn't work very well." So I designed a church with a main nave and a side chapel and a bell tower. The idea was that for the elderly, they could use the side chapel and shut off the air conditioning or the heat in the rest of the place. More than that, I told him that he should have a solar collector on the roof. But that was very expensive. Ray Clark got it for nothing; He got the manufacturer to donate it. I got the contractors to do the whole job for $50,000 and I got McDonald's to give all the kitchen equipment and train all the cooks. Don Lubin, a Chicago attorney, arranged it.

Blum: Why did he need a kitchen?

Graham: It was a big operation and he needed it for the kids and for Sundays. I thought of the idea of having an altar that would spin, so that when the old people came to the side chapel, they could face the altar, and it could also be back facing the regular way. I got the granite top given by Carlo Mariotti for nothing. It was huge and beautiful. I had Richard Hunt make the candelabra for it and the stand that spins it. The floor was also donated by Vando d'Angelo, from Italy. The plumbing contractor virtually gave them the plumbing. One of the black contractors came over one day to complain about all these white contractors on the job. Father Clements said, "That's fine. Are you going to underbid them?" They said, "Forget it." It all amounted to about two-and-a-half million dollars. About the altar—Time magazine had some work by African artists, and I thought that the work of one of them looked really medieval, like the paintings of Europe, so we contacted him. Tom Reynolds and I paid for him to come to Chicago from Africa. He loved the ideas and did this beautiful painting and came back and put it up. It was a fantastic painting. He turned out to be an African priest. When we asked him what he charged, he said, "The only charge is that I give the first mass." Father Clements also adopted three kids. He was the only priest ever allowed to adopt kids. They all were rigorously brought up. Then he adopted one from Nigeria and someone said, "How did you adopt another kid from Nigeria?" Father Clements said, "This kid was so

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well disciplined and so kind and respective that I thought I would adopt him. The only problem was that I didn't know that osmosis went both ways." His kids have all gone to college and all four are wonderful kids. When they had the opening for the church he went to see Cardinal Bernadin for approval of the church drawings, there was a woman who was supposed to make sure that all the liturgy was being taken care of and she said our plans were all fine except for the spinning altar. She said they didn't have any spinning altars in the Catholic Church. Father Clements explained why I thought it would work. Cardinal Bernadin said, "Do you like this?" Father Clements said, "Yes" Cardinal Bernadin said, "You can have your spinning altar." The last story about Father Clements was one time I was at the Chicago Club and I had a date to meet Mrs. Ryan, of Ryan Insurance, and Father Clements. I wondered where Father Clements was, and she said, "Didn't you read the paper this morning? He was arrested in Atlanta for smashing a couple of counters with Dick Gregory, the actor." Then, all of a sudden, in came Father Clements. Mrs. Ryan said, "I thought you had been arrested." He said, "Arrested? The police came and said, 'Father Clements, we're on your side.'" The police had driven him to his hotel and to the airport. That was my client.

Blum: Where did you get the idea for a revolving, or spinning, altar?

Graham: It was the idea of not having all the people see the side of it. The liturgy of the church says that you have the altar in front of the priest and he speaks from behind the table, like Jesus Christ did at the Last Supper. That was the new liturgy. They only turn the altar when they use the side chapel. At the opening of the Holy Angels Church, a party was held in the big ballroom of the Hilton Hotel. It was absolutely packed with every black actor and musician in the United States of America. Father Clements was speaking to the crowd and he said, "I know that today is the championship game of the Bulls. The score now is 5 to 2, Bulls. Every so often, he would interrupt his talk to give the score. He said "You were all so great to have missed the game to come for the opening, I will not let you down."

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[Tape 9: Side 2]

Blum: In around 1979, the SOM Foundation was created. What was that?

Graham: It was created mainly to promote architecture nationally by giving fellowships to students, at first from a limited number of schools. I think there were six approved schools.

Blum: Do you remember which ones?

Graham: It was Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Illinois.

Blum: The six top schools in the nation?

Graham: Yes, at the time, anyway. Later IIT and other schools were also among them.

Blum: How were students selected?

Graham: We had a committee within the firm that reviewed the submissions and a board that reviewed their suggestions. Senator Patrick Moynahan and Steve Smith were on the board. They reviewed the final selections. They were also there when the students won the award.

Blum: Why was someone like Patrick Moynahan included?

Graham: Moynahan had always been very involved with Nat Owings. He was a very knowledgeable man, not just in architecture, but in the arts as well. That's true of Steve Smith too.

Blum: So it was a national committee that reviewed the final candidates. Where did the money for this come from?

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Graham: At first, when this started, it was from two sources: one was from commissions from designing furniture that was then patented by a manufacturer; the second was from income of the firm.

Blum: So a portion of SOM's profit was set aside to fund scholarships?

Graham: Yes, we felt that taking commissions for furniture eliminated impartiality in selecting manufacturers of furniture in the design of our buildings. So we wanted no money from that.

Blum: Was SOM in the furniture business?

Graham: No, but we had designed furniture for Chase Manhattan bank. Then the manufacturer wanted to be able to sell the same furniture to other users. Some of the furniture became very famous and very popular. For that reason, we didn't want to feel limited to recommending that furniture on our other projects.

Blum: That's like the Le Corbusier Foundation that holds patents on furniture Corbu designed that's manufactured and sold by Cassina, an Italian manufacturer. Some time after that, the SOM Foundation bought and restored the Charnley house. Why did you need that house?

Graham: Because we had expanded the role of student grants to include research in architecture and to promote architects and historians in their work. We would help fund research and publish it.

Blum: What was the restoration of Charnley house like?

Graham: It was very interesting, because we found out a lot about the Charnley house. We tore out a lot of it that had been added on. I was convinced in this process that the house was the design not of Frank Lloyd Wright but of Louis Sullivan. At that time, Sullivan had employed Wright. I am certain

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that it's Sullivan's work. Details like the fireplace and the staircase are strictly Sullivan's and the living room has some detailing and paneling around the top that is just not Frank Lloyd Wright.

Blum: Did you find any features in the house that could have suggested to you that they each may have done certain features?

Graham: Sure, but that's true of any building when a young architect works with an older architect and he puts in some details that the older architect approves of. There's no question that the overall design of the house is Sullivan's. If you look at his work, like the small Minnesota banks, you realize that it is a Sullivan house.

Blum: As this building was being restored, the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism came into being. Was that born out of the SOM Foundation?

Graham: Yes, definitely. But it had a separate board. The institute board was composed of architects from across the country.

Blum: Who was on that board?

Graham: Harry Cobb, Frank Gehry, Charlie Moore, Peter Eisenman, Tom Beeby, Stanley Tigerman, David Childs, Marc Goldsmith.

Blum: Were some of the people from SOM?

Graham: There was one from the East office, one from the West, and one from Chicago. The majority were not from SOM. Harold Schiff was also on the board. He was a contractor and very interested in the arts and music and architecture.

Blum: Leon Krier was the first director, but he didn't stay very long. After that, he was replaced by John Whiteman. What was he expected to do?

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Graham: He actually self-published a book on his ideas about architecture. Then he convinced others to commit work. One of them actually worked in the foundation basement. He is now teaching at IIT.

Blum: How did the purpose and work of the institute differ from that of the foundation?

Graham: The foundation was promoting just students. The institute promoted serious people who needed help and money to further the ideas and work that they had in mind.

Blum: From an interview with John Whiteman, it was my impression that people other than architects were eligible for these monies.

Graham: Yes, but the work had to be related to architecture. They had to be historians or theorists.

Blum: How was all this theory going to reflect itself in the built environment?

Graham: They were working on architectural ideas and publishing them. There wasn't much support for that in the United States, anywhere. The professors in the universities were only publishing their own work, not the work of others. Our idea was to go beyond what the university did with people who were much more involved in the field. Maybe we could discover a Lewis Mumford. That would have been sensational.

Blum: You have been given the lion's share of the credit, 199% of the credit, for bringing these ideas of the foundation and the institute into being. Why?

Graham: I felt that it was the responsibility of SOM to do that. Architects, by and large, can't afford to do anything. Very few, as we noted before, make any real money. The AIA doesn't really sponsor things of this sort. That was the main reason for doing it.

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Blum: Do you think that it might be fitting for the AIA to do something like this?

Graham: Absolutely. That have plenty of money, if they would concentrate on those kind of issues. They certainly charge enough fees.

Blum: You mentioned that you didn't think that architects have a lot of money. Aren't there some that are very well paid?

Graham: Yes, there are.

Blum: How would the profession stack up against doctors, say, as a whole?

Graham: Doctors make two or three times the amount of money that an architect makes, at much less risk.

Blum: People doing medical research, they don't make a lot of money.

Graham: But you should count the people in hospitals, and in pharmaceuticals, they're paid lots of money. At the time, the average head of an architectural firm in America got somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty thousand dollars a year. That's not much.

Blum: Were you well paid?

Graham: SOM was well paid. I. M. Pei was well paid. You can count those firms on one hand. The average firm struggles a lot. In Florida, it's really pathetic. Most good architects are into architecture the way a good musician is into music. They're not well paid either, but they love it because it's an art. That's why we're not so well accepted on campus. We don't write; what we do is build buildings, like a musician plays music. The other people on the campus don't understand architects. They want architects to write, and unfortunately that's why in a lot of universities, the professors are all people

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who write and know nothing about buildings and therefore nothing about architecture.

Blum: So why did this very well-intentioned institute disappear?

Graham: Because there was a huge recession. Therefore, both the firm and the profession weren't making any money and we weren't able to attract any money. So we shut it down, but we continued the foundation, with the scholarships. The Charnley house was sold and is now occupied by the Society of Architectural Historians, which is a darn good group. We ended up, almost by accident, doing a great favor to architecture anyway.

Blum: Do you know how it came to be purchased by Seymour Persky, the investor who then turned it over to the SAH for their headquarters?

Graham: He had always been interested in architecture. I was somewhat surprised, and grateful, that he did buy it.

Blum: Did you propose it to him?

Graham: No, it was sold after I left.

Blum: Did SOM as a group propose it?

Graham: I don't know. The foundation owned the Charnley house, SOM didn't. That's why it was bought and why it was sold. SOM didn't own it at all. The foundation supported it all along, because it was their house. They cleaned it and reconstructed it and paid all the electricity bills. SOM paid the salary of the secretarial work at the foundation and the institute.

Blum: How long did the foundation exist before it ended?

Graham: I don't know. I was out already when they closed it down.

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Blum: They were holding semi-public lectures for the larger architectural community, other than just SOM.

Graham: Yes, we did that all along. Now maybe the Society of Architectural Historians will fill the void.

Blum: The Graham Foundation sort of fills that void. They give small grants and present public lectures.

Graham: That's the difference between the AIA and international organizations of architects. The RIBA holds lectures and has exhibits of architecture. That's true in Spain and Colombia. These are the roles that the AIA should play. In some cities, the AIA does do that, but it's not a national thing. It's surprising that the AIA is so well-supported. They have this convention over the years where they give awards, but it is not the same as they do at the Royal Institute where they have regular public lectures. That's a great way to promote architecture to the public.

Blum: It was, and is, a forward-looking gesture on SOM's part to establish the insitute and the foundation for the long-range benefit of the profession.

Graham: Well, the Graham Foundation does the same thing.

Blum: You have had a connection with London since the early 1960s. In the 1980s, it really flourished when opportunities for building on reclaimed land began. You were involved in the Kings Cross master plan. That actually dates from the late 1970s.

Graham: The earliest one was with Stuart Lipton.

Blum: From the list I have compiled, there were the Canary Wharf master plan, tthe Morgan Stanley headquarters, Bishops Gate and the Broadgate Center, Stockley Park, and Ludgate.

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Graham: Broadgate was the first one.

Blum: Was that with Stuart Lipton?

Graham: Yes, he headed an English development group, Rosehaugh Stanhope.

Blum: What was the vision for Broadgate Center and how did you come to be selected for the commission?

Graham: He came to visit the United States and our office quite a lot. He came to learn how American developers worked. He spent quite a bit of time with Jerry Hines and others. He had this very big development in London near Liverpool Street Station, virtually attached to the station, with a terrific piece of land. He had already started some of the project, but he had the key piece left, bordering the railroad tracks. He came and asked us if we would do the project for him. So we did the master plan for the whole area first, and then we went building by building. All of it was carried out except for one small site that's still left. There were a lot of buildings.

Blum: How large was the whole area?

Graham: We finally built nine different buildings.

Blum: So when he was on his exploration of American architectural firms, he was already...

Graham: He had already been to our offices a lot and talked with us and looked at our work, over the years, not just when he needed an architect for his own work.

Blum: When he finally asked you to work with him, did you know then that you would be doing such a large project?

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Graham: Yes, SOM opened a London office, and it got bigger when we started to work on even more projects.

Blum: What buildings did you, personally, design in Broadgate Center?

Graham: All of them.

Blum: Someone has written that the major building you designed there, Exchange Square and Exchange House, was the most exciting recent architectural experience in London.

Graham: I would agree with that.

Blum: How would you explain it from a British point of view?

Graham: Britain is a complicated society. There are Tories and others and, more importantly, there are the King and the Queen, who essentially have no power. But they exercise a lot of power, particularly in getting respect from a lot of people. There is still fear of them. The bureaucrats are afraid of offending Prince Charles, because when he says something, even though it is not law, they respond to it. When Charles talks many people listen. There are, however, a lot of intelligent people who would never listen to him.

Blum: He was one of the reasons why Mies's last building was never built.

Graham: That's right. And neither was James Stirling's. It has to do partially with that. In the case of Mies's building, it went even beyond that. There are two sides in England: there is the highly intellectual one that says, "Let's get on with it and become a modern nation," and there are those who say that we have to preserve England as it is, which is fine. They do a fantastic job of preserving things environmentally, they don't go around cutting down all the trees. They feel that way about London and certain streets in London. Mies's building was in one of those streets. It was very emotionally offensive to

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people in London. Frankly, I think that that's childish, or unreal. You can't build buildings like they used to anymore. They don't have the craftsmen to do it. I ran into some of that with this Broadgate project. There were some buildings that the planning authorities felt should be respected and not violated. On one side of the project, where these buildings were, I designed buildings that looked more traditional. But if you look carefully, there was the Chicago window. On one street, there is a building that has windows that look more like Carson Pirie Scott windows.

Blum: Did you think that they looked British?

Graham: No, that was more comfortable in Illinois. There was an English architect named Graham who had worked for Sullivan and he went back to Liverpool and built Chicago-type buildings. So I took a cue from him and put Chicago- type windows along the street. But on the back side, towards the rail station, there were much more modern windows. But they work, because they are related to the building: on one side is corridors and the other is offices. That worked fairly well. The sad thing is that since I did that, they tore down the so-called famous building, the building that my work was supposed to relate to. Eventually, this nostalgia has to pass and the new Britain has to take over. Who are the most popular architects in Britain today? It's Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. When you look at English publications, they're all modern buildings.

Blum: What does Prince Charles have to say about that?

Graham: He doesn't like it very much.

Blum: Is he very verbal about it?

Graham: Yes, he was very verbal about it. Once I was able to relate some of my buildings on the street sides to old and modern architecture, I didn't have a

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problem. I was then able to do a piece in the middle that was my own architecture.

Blum: What was the excitement about the Exchange House? Can you describe the building?

Graham: Sure. As you know, Rogers and Foster had done a lot of buildings with steel structures. Rogers had done the Bank of England with the exposed pipes on the outside. But they had not done, and still haven't, a structure that's totally exposed. The technology that we used was new paint. It was fireproof and developed from space technology. This had always been a dream of mine— it's something that I would have used in Hancock or Sears or any exposed- steel building. I think that Inland Steel would look much more exciting if it showed the joints and the bolts and all that. It would have actually made Clarence Randall happier because he didn't make stainless steel, he made structural steel. Therefore, the building becomes a lot lighter. Now it's no secret how the building is held up. It's very clear in Exchange House. You have the footing and the columns that span all the way across to another column on the other side of the railroad tracks, two hundred and forty feet. This arch recalls the arch of the railroad stations right across the square. So you have the railroad station, in structural steel, and that could be exposed, and you can see the arches of the railroad station against the arches of Exchange Square. It just lent itself to a very romantic kind of context.

Blum: Hadn't you begun to have a dialogue between forms before with the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Wills Headquarters?

Graham: This was obviously more dramatic, because it formed the Exchange Plaza in front of the square. There was the building and the fountain and the little theater. It was much more romantic. People walked through it all the time. There were the railroad tracks and it was a symbol of England. Railroads in England are loved and have made England a strong nation.

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Blum: You had begun to work on ideas like that with Madison Plaza and the First Bank of Wisconsin. You began to work with these larger concepts.

Graham: Not all sites lend themselves to that concept or opportunity. In other cases, you had to hope that other architects would pick up your ideas because you didn't have control of it. In this case, it was quite different, because we did have control of both sides of the track.

Blum: So you were able to complete the vision that you had. On the other hand, some people said that there was no sensitivity to British scale. How do you respond to that?

Graham: It's nonsense. What do they mean? The railroad station had big scale, it spanned the tracks. More than that, there are much bigger buildings in England at that time. There were some towers that were built in London that were huge. They also built housing projects that were very big.

Blum: Why was this area of Broadgate developed?

Graham: It was at the edge of the city, and it wasn't developed. It wasn't developed before because it was on the edge. There was nothing there.

Blum: So Stuart Lipton wanted to build offices?

Graham: Yes.

Blum: There was another project that you say was inside the Broadgate project: Bishops Gate.

Graham: That's the same thing, it's just the name of one of the streets in Broadgate. The street that I was telling you about was Bishops Gate. That area faces a residential area.

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Blum: I read about a rather humorous idea that the lights for the streets of Bishops Gate were supposed to be illuminated with bishops' heads. Is there any truth to that?

Graham: No. England has so many gates and Bishops Gate was just one of the streets into London.

Blum: Was it traditional that the bishops went through that gate on their way to church or used the road for any special purpose?

Graham: I don't know.

Blum: It has been said that your work was just a notion of London architecture, especially Bishops Gate. I think that meant that it wasn't authentic, it didn't really fit into the British scene.

Graham: We were making the British scheme. Don't tell me that Norman Foster wasn't making the new British scene. Or that James Stirling or Richard Rogers didn't make a new scene. I can name architect after architect that made new scenes in England.

Blum: Did you think of yourself as creating a new standard?

Graham: No, it was just an opportunity that gave me the idea of making this new building. I think that the opportunity of discovering the paint that made it possible to use structural steel was something that Richard Rogers would have used.

Blum: But that was a technological discovery.

Graham: Yes, but it changed the quality of the building. It changed the character. It was a new material. There's no way that Mies wouldn't have made all his

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buildings fireproof if he had known about this stuff. There's no question in my mind about that.

Blum: At a conference presented at the University of Illinois, of which you were one of the participants, you presented your Bishops Gate project and among the participants were Stanley Tigerman, Tom Beeby, Susanna Torre, Helmut Jahn. The majority of the comments about your building on Bishops Gate said that it was out of character for your work. They said, "What has a Chicago window got to do with Bruce Graham's work, the way he does things?"

Graham: I told you it had more to do with understanding the influence of Graham the architect in Liverpool. He built whole streets like that.

Blum: I can't help thinking, because of the way in which they were photographed, that Chicago Place, built in Chicago, somehow was reminiscent of what I saw in Bishops Gate.

Graham: It was. Bishops Gate came first. Chicago Place was an opportunity for Larry Oltmans, who was young then, to work on a unique project. He used to work with Walter. Now he's a design partner in Chicago. He was the studio head.

[Tape 10: Side 1]

Graham: Chicago Place is a shopping center. I don't like buildings that have solid walls on Michigan Avenue, like Water Tower Place, with its massive facade. They do that because department stores don't really like to have windows. They have the back of the house along the wall. That's changing more now that windows are actually being used to show what's going on, to soften it and to make it relate to the history of Chicago, almost as a Disney-type building. We made it a kind of inviting and a fun place with the atrium

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inside and other recollections inside of Chicago. It's more theater than architecture.

Blum: The interior struck me as sort of Victorian in a way, with the stenciling and so on.

Graham: That stenciling comes from early Chicago buildings.

Blum: Were they authentic designs?

Graham: No, it was just the idea.

Blum: What part did you have in it?

Graham: I was the over-all in charge. But I didn't spend too much time on the project because I was too busy in Europe. That's also true of the Neiman Marcus building. I started that project and then I turned it over to Adrian because I was too busy in Europe. The original massing was my idea, to put the low building on Michgan Avenue and to put the tall apartment building in back. Adrian changed it a little. The arch was there when I was part of the project and I was the one who took the keystone out, to show that it was not a real arch.

Blum: That, certainly, was very much like Sullivan's banks.

Graham: Yes, but this is a fake arch. Some of Sullivan's arches were real ones, with keystones. I took this one out, in respect for Sullivan and also for Richardson. I also had tried the idea of having the building have a vacuum in it, where you set back the walls a lot and all of a sudden you see...at the top of a tall building. Adrian filled it in. The structure keeps going up, but the spaces are stepped back inside of it.

Blum : So the structure stays out in front?

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Graham: Yes. Then Adrian changed it, for a very good reason. A very wealthy family wanted to have a very big apartment at the top and there wasn't a very big apartment at the top.

Blum: Considering Chicago Place, with its Chicago-style windows and the historically-influenced interior, and Sullivanesque arch on Neiman Marcus, when did your feel for playing around with these old Chicago forms come into being?

Graham: I never had the chance to do department stores before. It was a notion to preserve the character of Michigan Avenue. That's really what it was all about. The arch is not essential to the building, so it doesn't have a keystone; it's just a simple gate in masonry. You can make gates in any kind of forms.

Blum: The idea for the low street side and tall tower of Neiman Marcus followed Water Tower Place. They had done the same thing.

Graham: Yes, but they didn't face Chicago Avenue. The facing of our apartment building is much nicer. It faces into the little park where the Water Tower is. The entrance faces right on to the old Water Tower building.

Blum: But Water Tower Place has entrances right on Pearson.

Graham: But they're very hidden, ours you can see.

Blum: I'm thinking from the street. You see the low building on Michigan Avenue and then you see the tower when you turn the corner.

Graham: But from the north to the south you see the apartment entrance to the tower, you can see it clearly because of all the set backs. The opportunity was easier for us, because Water Tower Place and even Hancock face a minor street, which is all right for residential, but not great for a hotel.

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Blum: When you were talking about Bishops Gate, you said that you wanted everyone to know that it was done by a Chicago architect.

Graham: Not really, it was just an off-the-cuff remark. That had nothing to do with it. I was very concerned with getting a building that fit the dichotomy of British planning. In other words, the Royal Fine Arts Commission is much more sympathetic to modern building than the authorities are.

Blum: The authorities being?

Graham: The Planning Commission. The Royal Fine Arts Commission has no legal power. But every project has to be reviewed by them.

Blum: Is the Royal Fine Arts Commission similar to our Fine Arts Commission in Washington? Does it serve the same function to review projects?

Graham: They're appointed by the Queen. The Washington commission is an authority, while the Royal Fine Arts Commission has no authority at all.

Blum: Do they make any suggestions for projects?

Graham: They review them, make criticisms, and people obey them out of fear of the Queen. She has no legal authority other than opening Parliament. She doesn't appoint the Planning Committee, they're elected. Then they go through the ceremony of an appointment. There's no way that she can appoint the commission, it's already fact. There's no way that she can refuse to appoint them.

Blum: Is Broadgate finished?

Graham: Yes. I don't think that they're going to build the other two buildings, although they may sometime later.

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Blum: Did you design the other two buildings?

Graham: Yes, we showed them in the master plan, but there were no final designs.

Blum: Now that you've retired, if they called you back to finish them, would you do it?

Graham: Maybe. If Stuart Lipton was involved, I would do it.

Blum: Was he the developer throughout the project?

Graham: For example, I have walked off jobs in England.

Blum: As you were finishing Broadgate, how did Canary Wharf come into the picture?

Graham: There was a New York developer named Ware Travelstead that I had met many years ago when he was with Chase bank. He went around the United States trying to find out about real estate to help the bank. They came to Chicago and asked me who to see. I told them to see Jerry Hines and these other developers, which they did. Eventually, Travelstead, which was one of Ware's companies, formed a relationship with First Boston Corporation. We remained friends through that. In fact, my son went to work for Travelstead when he graduated. Anyway, Ware had the opportunity for this project for Canary Wharf, which was an island in the Thames. I might add that this was because there was a need for office space in London and they had severe restrictions on the density of office space in London. So I'm not exactly sure why Ware and First Boston was selected as developer, but they then linked themselves with a Swiss bank. So you had those two and then, finally, they had Morgan Stanley as well. Ware was linked to First Boston but had a separate company called Travelstead Development. He called me, knowing that I had worked in England, about doing Canary Wharf. It was a very exciting project, so I said I would do it. It was a very big project, so we got

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other architects involved, including Harry Cobb, from I. M. Pei, as well as Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall—the same firm that I had worked with years before—and Laurie Olin, from Philadelphia, who I think was the number one landscape architect in the United States, if not the world. Laurie had worked with me on a planning project in New Jersey and he had a lot of experience in urban design. All the top landscape architects have been very involved in urban planning, including Sasaki Walker, now called Sasaki Dawson. Stuart Dawson is also a good friend of mine. We formed this team and did a master plan. By then, London was getting very upset because they could see that we were going to build this huge amount of office space and they were afraid that we were going to empty London. So they relaxed the densities and approvals, which helped him, in reverse, get approvals faster. I'm not sure that it was a good idea, because London since then has built a lot of larger buildings.

Blum: Did London relax the regulations to compete with Canary Wharf?

Graham: Yes. Broadgate is in London, but Canary Wharf is not in London.

Blum: So it was the competition between the two that prompted this?

Graham: Yes. Canary Wharf was kind of a desolate place, but very interesting. It used to be docks, so they used to call it "Docklands." But those docks had been moved down the river because of the technology of container ships. These big docks wouldn't work for container ships so they moved much closer to the Channel, and they abandoned it. They had built a small airport near there and a small housing project. That was about it, there was nothing else. So then we had to get a plan, which we did. Before, obviously, we had asked a lot of questions of the Dock and Canal Corporation, which was a British government company which owned the land. Their responsibility was to see to its development. Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister at the time. By the way, I met her a number of times and she really liked architecture, modern architecture especially. She really liked modern architecture and

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architects. Anyway, Ware met with her a number of times and we both met with the Dock and Canal Corporation. Ware was meeting with her because when we started we found out that there was this little train that went out there to this residential area, like a Disney kind of train. I told Ware, number one, you've got to make sure you've got enough electric power. Two, you've got to get a better railroad track and connections to the Bank of London and the subway station there. That's the key to the subways, if you're going to get people to come to Canary Wharf, you've got to have a connection to that intersection and then you can transfer to any other train lines. Without that, it wouldn't work. We also had to see that there was enough water and all of these things. None of this infrastructure was there. Of course they said, "Oh yes, we have enough electric power." Well, the Dock and Canal Corporation didn't know what they were talking about. We even told them how much power they needed and they didn't have enough power. So we had a list of all the things that had to be done before we could proceed and we did a master plan which was reviewed by the Royal Fine Arts Commission, and they loved it. We had been very sensitive to a number of issues and having Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall was very important because they knew a lot of these mysteries about what was important and what wasn't. We also had an architectural historian aboard, who knew about all these things.

Blum: Did the experience of dealing with the British on Broadgate benefit you?

Graham: Yes, but each part of London has its own history. In this one, if you stood in the middle of the island and sighted along the island's center, the island pointed directly to St. Paul's Cathedral. Crossing that line was the Greenwich International Dateline. So we had these two lines absolutely perpendicular to one another. Christopher Wren, when he did the Greenwich buildings, sighted them deliberately and it crossed the line of St. Paul's. It went around the line and at the other end, on the other side of Canary Wharf, there's a church that's famous. So the key to my master plan was never to stand anything in that intersection. You can see that in our plan. The buildings are angled so the line goes this way and that way and

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nothing stands in the crossing. Instead, I put the railway station on the line to St. Paul's. The cross of the railroad station preserved Christopher Wren's concept. Then Ware went on trying to get the railroad station going.

Blum: This was while you were doing your master plan?

Graham: No, we finished the master plan, and then Ware was trying to get tenants. But before he got the tenants, which he was getting, he tried to get the railroad station to the bank and he tried to get the electric power. He wouldn't proceed until he got all these things, which was right. But Ware didn't have the holding power to just sit there forever waiting to get all these permissions. The master plan included a lot of detail as to where the parking was going to be, for example. Unlike the United States, the Brits don't drive so much because they take the train or the bus. So we had minimal parking, which was important because it was difficult to fit it on this muddy island. The original corporation had the plan of building underground parking under the water and I told Ware to forget it unless he wanted the office buildings to be flooded. We had the idea of having remote parking, where everybody would drive to a certain point and then take a smaller train to the office building complex. That saved a lot of money.

Blum: Was that done?

Graham: Yes. You build as much parking as you need and you don't have to spend a huge amount of money on parking that you might not need. So you take the train from London and you have a remote parking area away from the island. That keeps cars away from the island as well. But Ware couldn't hold on much longer and he sold it to Olympia and York, a Canadian developer, although I think he kept some interest in it. Their top guy, who knew a lot about development, didn't want to get involved.

Blum: Why?

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Graham: Because he knew that Ware was right and he knew that I was right. So he stayed out of it and assigned two other people who were bureaucrats from Montreal. Those guys started telling me how to design it, that I should change this and change that. They wanted me to put the parking underneath and put a tower in the middle where the crossing was. Subsequently they awarded the project to Cesar Pelli and he built a tower in the center. That's why I had refused to be in the planning anymore. I quit the project, but SOM didn't. The London office kept going with it. Harry Cobb did a building and I did a building, although much reduced because by this time Morgan Stanley was losing interest in the project, they were afraid of it.

Blum: At the time you left, you had already developed plans for some buildings and you say that SOM continued. Did they follow your plans?

Graham: No, they reduced them. I finished the one for Morgan Stanley because I knew them very well. But it was a much reduced building because their commitment wavered by this time, for the same reasons that I didn't like Olympia and York. Morgan Stanley was very expert in real estate.

Blum: Was it lack of cooperation from the authorities that held things up?

Graham: Yes, London was holding back the connection to the tunnel. They didn't want Canary Wharf to be connected to London.

Blum: Has it been done since?

Graham: No. The pressure in London for space, even with the expanded allowances that the city made, delayed any chance in signing up for Canary Wharf. In the meantime, Olympia and York started to build. They went way over the budget. I mean way up to the sky even when they didn't have any tenants. As you know, Olympia and York declared bankruptcy. That was one of the reasons, if not the major reason, for the bankruptcy. I think that they went about two billion dollars over budget.

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Blum: What's the status of Canary Wharf now?

Graham: It's now owned by the banks. With time, they have gotten tenants, including some of the banks.

Blum: In spite of the fact that the railroad doesn't connect?

Graham: Yes. People have moved to the residential areas around there.

Blum: Was that all planned in your conception?

Graham: No, the residential areas were there before us, on the mainland. Now it's a success, financially. I don't think that it's a success architecturally, especially with Pelli's tower there as a violation of history and Wren's axis. It's almost as bad as the Pan Am building in New York City, on top of Union Station. The Pan Am building is a real dog. I don't care if that building had been designed by Gropius, it's just the wrong place to build a tower. It destroyed the railroad station.

Blum: If someone wanted to go to Canary Wharf, looking for evidence of your work, what would they find?

Graham: Some of the parks remain. There's entry to the whole thing and the first park. But the railroad station no longer celebrates anything. It's just kind of sad. You'd see the one building for Morgan Stanley and the edges. Laurie Olin did finish all the landscaping, although he had to do it over again, he did a fine job. Bringing Laurie Olin to England was a good idea.

Blum: At the time of the Docklands, and I assume it was Canary Wharf that was being referred to, writers in British publications were asking why American architects had invaded England. How do you respond to that?

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Graham: Should we eliminate all British and European architects from ever doing work in America? They'd all go broke. Every museum in the United States is using them. Who did the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago? Are there no Chicago architects that could have done it? Come on.

Blum: That's an apt comparison, but at the time that you were the invader...

Graham: European architects were still working in the United States at that time. Alvar Aalto did buildings here.

Blum: But he didn't take huge pieces of property and develop them.

Graham: That's probably what it was, because no British firm was up to it yet at the time. They were all doing little buildings. I did involve a British firm: Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall. Ware Travelstead loved Brian Henderson of YRM. He was one of the ones that told us all these things about Christopher Wren, and so they stopped listening to them and he quit too.

Blum: So to answer the critics, you would say that you had the large-scale expertise that British architects did not have at that time?

Graham: Yes. Since then, some British architects have gone on to do things like that. They had already done towers, but not very good ones. The history of British architecture is not very strong. There are very few really good British architects in the history of architecture. It is not a British art. They are tops in words, nobody can match Shakespeare and all the writers that have followed. They are tops in the arts of literature and speaking. Brian Henderson was an expert in speaking. Jane and I went once to his office and Brian and his partner started talking—we had gotten there at about five o'clock—and they went on and on and we didn't realize that it was about eight o'clock when we left for dinner. They had us continually in stitches. Only the Brits can do that.

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Blum: In as much as you didn't really see Canary Wharf to completion, when you left the project, had Cesar Pelli been called in at that point? Did you have any hand in selecting him?

Graham: They had been called in but I had no input in the choice, that was strictly Olympia and York.

Blum: Who from SOM's offices in the United States was involved in the London office?

Graham: Robert Turner was one of them and he was originally from Chicago. He went to London with John Burcher.

Blum: They ran the office?

Graham: Yes. There was also, at that time, a managing partner from the New York office, Gordon Wildermuth. Later they added Jim DeStefano out there, and he was not involved with Canary Wharf.

Blum: These other people continued the work after you left?

Graham: Yes. Jim actually left the firm before I left. Brigitte Peterhans was also there, by the way.

Blum: Broadgate and Canary Wharf were not the only two projects you did in Britain. There were other projects, such as Ludgate.

Graham: Ludgate was very interesting because before Ludgate I had done a competition for a big project next to St. Paul's Cathedral with different developers—this was a young development team. The competition had different densities and we were very gentle about it. The developers had not said how much density we could build. We convinced these young developers to do a plan which was very sensitive to St. Paul's and to the

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neighborhood and to the square and so on, and to build less than what was required.

Blum: Was this a project to build offices?

Graham: It was mainly residential, with some commercial shops. The other developers built a much bigger density than was called for. Prince Charles intervened and cursed all the entries for violating the density requirements, which wasn't true because ours didn't.

Blum: Your SOM design was cursed?

Graham: Not just mine, all the submissions. In general he made this wild statement that wasn't true, because my entry was less dense than was called for. But fear ruled, so the authorities abandoned the whole project. Later, he hired Tom Beeby, who worked for over a year in developing the Prince's scheme. He was going to submit it to the Royal Fine Arts Commission. But then Prince Charles's uncle asked him if he owned this property and Prince Charles said no, and his uncle said then that he couldn't submit any designs. That is the end of the story.

Blum: Tom must have been disappointed.

Graham: He should have know better. But he got paid.

Blum: But you did build at Ludgate.

Graham: Ludgate was a different site, in front of St. Paul's. Right opposite St. Paul's, there's a street that's called Ludgate. There's a site there that Stuart Lipton owned and he asked me to do a scheme for him. I did a scheme for three buildings, but I had a problem for the first one because the Planning Commission didn't want a modern building on the street, no matter how little and I had done a little building. I'm sure that the Royal Fine Arts

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Commission would have approved it. I tried a couple of schemes, but they would never make it. So I had an idea that I would do the one in back, which was the tallest one, called Ludgate One. Then Adrian designed Ludgate Two and Three, since he was into Postmodernism at the time. The Planning Commission was very happy with that because Postmodernism looked more like a traditional building. Adrian did a nice job with those two buildings. But on Ludgate One, I did the scheme with a structure that was almost free in front of the building.

Blum: You say that you don't like Postmodernism but you thought that Adrian's two buildings were good. What appealed to you?

Graham: It was a softened Postmodernism. There were no real postmodern buildings in England at the time. Perhaps the only one that would fall into that category would be Cesar Pelli's tower. I liked Cesar, he was a good guy. I introduced him to the President of Argentina and that's how Cesar got the Argentinean Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Blum: Was there more about Ludgate?

Graham: No, except that it was another experience where I felt you should involve more than one architect on a project without scale. In Ludgate, the building I did was called 1 Fleet Square because the street goes all the way through to Fleet Street. The hill is called Ludgate but the street faces Fleet Street, the famous street for banking and money in London. In that building I worked with the young architect Michelle Mossessian, as I did with Brigitte Peterhans on Exchange Square. I'm reminded of that because we have a few details in Exchange House that I call "Homage to Mies."

Blum: What are they?

Graham: The whole Exchange House has this kind of derivative vocabulary from Mies. But it's very computerized. For example, the elevators are hung and

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they don't go down to a pit because the trains are running below. You have escalators to take you up and the air is taken to each room by these glass tubes. It's a very high-tech building.

Blum: Mies's furnishings look very well in that environment.

Graham: We hung the fire stair on the outside because you can't have a fire stair that goes all the way through to the railroad tracks. Of course, the whole building is hung from this arch. These columns that you see below are smaller than the ones above because they're hanging this piece.

Blum: You had other projects in England, no wonder the critics said that the Americans had invaded.

Graham: But our London office was full of Brits.

Blum: But the design didn't come from British sensibilities.

[Tape 10: Side 2]

Blum: One of the other projects in England was Stockley Industrial Park. Was it different than your earlier projects because it was an industrial park?

Graham: Well, they were all office buildings. The whole area was called Stockley Industrial Park. It was near Heathrow Airport. We didn't do all the buildings there, at all. The ones we did were really minuscule compared to the whole area. In fact, Richard Rogers did some buildings there as well. We did three buildings at Stockley Park which are, again, the high-tech kind of design, but simpler. They were simpler for many reasons, one being that you're in a lower-rent district. The people in downtown London pay much higher rents than they would pay out near the airport. But Stockley Park was extremely successful and they rented immediately. A very curious thing was that we did all the mechanical systems for all the buildings and then a

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British architect who was employed by one firm that ran one whole building and he changed their mechanical system, not for the better. I'm not sure why he did that but it may be that there was a feeling of resentment toward SOM being there. Our engineer, Ray Clark, who was a terrific mechanical engineer, had developed a system that was unique and one that the mechanical contractor in London thought was terrific. The ducts were all the same size, so that you didn't have to keep shaping each one of them. It was a very simple idea to keep the air in all the ducts at the same pressure, then you just varied the outlet. It cost the tenant a lot of money to change our system and then operate it.

Blum: Aren't there a lot of rules regulating the design of mechanical systems in England?

Graham: Yes, and there are rules here in the United States, too.

Blum: Did you find that the rules were more difficult to conform to in England?

Graham: No, in fact, I'd say that there was more flexibility there. The unions are not involved in the decision, where in Chicago they are.

Blum: Did you use mostly British contractors? How were they to work with?

Graham: The contractors were all British. The quality varied from the time we did Boots to the time we did the last building, there was a huge improvement. By the end, the higher-tech workers became trained and available. At the first time, they were not there. By the end, in England, they had done a lot of modern buildings and have continued to build them.

Blum: How would British construction workers compare to American ones today?

Graham: They're cheaper.

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Blum: Are they as good?

Graham: In certain fields, yes. In other fields, not yet. Particularly steelworkers in the United States are still better than the Europeans, but that has gotten better. The difference was not great enough to affect any design decisions.

Blum: What was it that you actually designed for Stockley Industrial Park?

Graham: I did three buildings, each one with an atrium, and the landscaping.

Blum: Were these low-rise buildings?

Graham: Yes. They were three-story buildings, very simple. But the structure was exposed and the glass stepped back. I would say that they were a building type not unknown in Europe. Richard Rogers could have designed them, but I had a little more taste for setting back and making the structure a little stronger than Richard would have done.

Blum: You had also had the experience of thirty years earlier working on Boots.

Graham: In square feet, I have done as much in England as many British architects. I am a member of the RIBA. Ludgate won a national architectural prize in England.

Blum: Didn't Broadgate also take more than a few awards?

Graham: Yes, but Ludgate was almost hidden from view and it still won a prize. I got along very well with British architects. The complaints that you've talked about were non-existent as far I knew. It could be because they just had good manners. The only British architect that I didn't get along with was Norman Foster, for reasons which we shall not dwell on.

Blum: Were they competitive reasons? He thought he should have had the jobs?

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Graham: There was a project for a competition that we worked on together, the King's Cross competition. I asked them to work on it with me. In fact, I got Stanley Tigerman and Frank Gehry and someone else who had worked for Foster before. We submitted these competition entries and Foster, unbeknownst to us, had made a different design and submitted it separately, without letting us know. We even went to his office and he worked on our project and that's why I don't like him. That is really, really, low-class.

Blum: So what was the outcome of the project?

Graham: The whole King's Cross thing never happened. There was just the master plan and nothing ever happened. It hit the skids with the economy.

Blum: So there's still work left to be done?

Graham: They'll probably start all over again. Actually, Stuart Lipton went broke because even though he always thought that Canary Wharf was not a good idea he was finally attracted by Olympia and York to join them. He joined in a big piece and he took a bath. It was too bad.

Blum: Another project that you did in London but was ill-fated—the National Gallery extension competition. Was that by invitation only?

Graham: Oh yes. That was a wonderful opportunity to be asked to do it. So we submitted. Part of the scheme was to extend the National Gallery and to use the lower level for commercial space in the museum, like the restaurant and bookstore, and so on.

Blum: And you were to use the space under Trafalgar Square?

Graham: Yes, they had very high specifications for the competition, including the quality of the light. I had an edge on that because Edison Price—I've mentioned him before because he did the lighting for the Inland Steel

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building, and he has done the lighting for most American museums since he was such a fantastic inventor of lighting—he was the only one that could meet the specifications. They actually then waived the specifications for the quality of the lighting, because only Edison could have done it. Then they had a jury and the museum decided that they liked my scheme best. But then the Minister of the Interior, who always hated Americans and still does, canceled the competition because the museum had to report to him. Then a British family, a very wealthy Jewish family who owned department stores, bought the site. Then the museum created a new competition, which they asked me to enter. By the way, the royal representative of the museum, who was another uncle of Prince Charles's, loved my scheme. So he told me about entering the second competition, and I said, "Forget it."

Blum: Were you offended because they canceled the results of the first competition?

Graham: As I told you before, I normally do not like to enter unpaid competitions. I think that architects do not make enough and I think that to sponsor it is a bad idea. In fact, I turned down entering the competition in Chicago to design the International Terminal at O'Hare. We were supposed to do it, according to previous arrangements with the city, but then Elizabeth Hollander decided to have an unpaid competition. I think that it's ridiculous to ask architects to pay for the great amount of work they do to enter that kind of competition. There were six or eight architectural firms that entered that airport competition. One won and the rest of them lost their shirts. So I refused to do that. My partners were mad, but I said that it was unfair to ask SOM, even if we had a lot more money than these other architects. The funny part is that in the second competition for the National Gallery, Bob Venturi entered it and won it. He was the second American to have won the museum expansion. So I said to myself, "There, Lord So-and-So, I hope you're happy." This Minister had actually awarded the first competition to British architect friends of mine that were in the same office building as him. He had actually awarded it to them, but had them make a different scheme,

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which was terrible. That's when the Prince of Wales used the competition to say that the building was an insult to society.

Blum: Didn't he like the British architect's design?

Graham: Yes. When they canceled the first competition that's when he made that statement. In that case, Prince Charles was right.

Blum: Having seen the extension that Venturi did, it seems to me that his design was very sympathetic to the existing building. Was your scheme also sympathetic?

Graham: Yes, the massing was almost identical. In fact, I sent my plans and stuff to Bob Venturi and I told him to use Edison Price and he did.

Blum: I suppose that you can take secondary pleasure that an American won the competition.

Graham: I've known Bob since the University of Pennsylvania, for years. He's a nice guy. His wife, Denise Scott Brown, is very outspoken, but he isn't.

Blum: He is credited with being the father of Postmodernism.

Graham: He emphatically denies it. He has been totally misinterpreted by Philip Johnson and Charles Jencks. Jencks is really the father of Postmodernism. He was a terrible architect in his own right, but he writes a lot about it and he's a good friend of Philip Johnson's. Bob wrote Learning from Las Vegas. What he meant, if you read the book, is that you have to take the typical American vernacular and make it beautiful. You can't deny the McDonald's. You just need to make them beautiful. That's why he used Las Vegas. He didn't know Las Vegas from a hole in the wall.

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Blum: He wrote a book prior to that called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. I have the sense that he was saying some of what you're talking about, but he was also saying that there was room for everything to exist.

Graham: Room for everything is what Las Vegas is. See what I'm trying to say? There's room for everything to exist, but Venturi, above everybody else, wants it to fit together. He admired the early work by Frank Gehry because it did just that—it took the ticky-tacky of California and made it beautiful. He's got other architects who did it differently and he approved of it. It was their interpretations, but it all fit together. Have you ever been to see Frank's area in Venice, California? It's worth a trip to see what those architects have achieved. Unfortunately, one of the young ones, Frank Israel died recently. If you see it, you'll see exactly what Bob was talking about.

Blum: Was that a good solution, in your opinion?

Graham: It was a lot better that what there is now. At least it wasn't another kind of Disney World.

Blum: Have you ever used such an underlying concept in your own work?

Graham: No, but what I say doesn't conflict with what they're saying. This is my work. Bob was talking about McDonald's and the little shops that, here in Florida, are so ugly and don't have any sympathy to their own neighborhood.

Blum: By your own definition, does that really qualify as architecture?

Graham: Sure. Look at the cathedrals of Europe; they're all built by non-architects, but they're architecture. You don't have to have a license from the King of England to be an architect. Mies didn't and he wasn't the only one. Corbusier didn't either.

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Blum: Some of your London plans involved doing master plans. Do you consider that to be urban planning?

Graham: Yes. The problem in the United States is that in the schools, they're split when they teach urban planning from architecture. That's a mistake. The great urban planning in the United States has all been done by architects, if you think about it. In New York, Olmsted did Central Park. They don't even teach urban planning in the landscape architecture schools now. Urban planning has almost become the enemy in-house and a lot of planners go on to work in the government. Some graduates with an urban planning degree haven't studied any architecture at all. That's the mentality of it; they study the laws and the government, not the structure and the architecture of it. I think that the greatest visions of buildings, even imperial ones, were from architects, not urban planners.

Blum: You mean the visions of whole areas?

Graham: Yes, like in Washington and Paris. They were all done by architects. The same thing is obvious in Chicago. I think that they should look at I. M. Pei's work; no matter where it is, he's done the urban planning. Eliel Saarinen did a lot of his own planning. Alvar Aalto did lots of it and all the cities in Finland are planned the way he thought of them.

Blum: How much urban planning did you study in school and in your training?

Graham: None. You can't teach it in school. But you do it as an architect. You teach architecture and architecture includes exterior spaces. You can't think of a building without thinking of where it fits or the spaces it creates—I was telling you about these corners in Barcelona and Chicago—that was part and parcel of architecture, and it has been, historically. The Parthenon wasn't casually done by a graduate of urban planning of the University of Pennsylvania, it was done by architects. Think of Egypt, the planning of the pyramids was urban planning.

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Blum: When did urban planning become a separate field?

Graham: That's a terrible distinction that started at the University of California to separate architecture into all these separate fields. You can't teach real urban planning in school, you can only teach the rules.

Blum: Do you think that siting the building and deciding which facade will face which direction is part of urban planning?

Graham: Absolutely.

Blum: So every architect really does that, even if they're doing just a single building?

Graham: Yes, they either do it badly or they do it well. Certainly in Barcelona the whole damn city was planned by an architect and built that way. Corbu was doing urban planning—he just got to build examples of it—but that's what he was doing. He wasn't just concerned with the object, that's a sculptor's job. An architect's job is space—it's the relationship of outside spaces to inside spaces. Burnham thought he was an architect, but he designed the whole lakefront of Chicago. His buildings are not great buildings, but his planning was terrific because as an architect he had a great sense of space.

Blum: In spite of the fact that you really had no training in urban planning...

Graham: Neither did Burnham, neither did Mies, neither did Hilberseimer.

Blum: Somehow they just had a broader vision.

Graham: When architects go to Rome to study architecture, they study the urban planning system as part of architecture. I don't separate it any more than I separate a building from its steel. When Aalto puts a good cathedral on one

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hill and Saarinen puts one on the other, that's good urban planning. They absolutely thought about it.

Blum: Was this a realization that came to you immediately, or did you develop it over time as you did larger and larger projects?

Graham: As I told you before, it started as I was walking through a little slum in Puerto Rico.

Blum: It was always part of your concept.

Graham: Yes, for me and for any real architect.

Blum: You're on the Board of Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. And you're on the Board of Overseers of the School of Architecture. Do they teach urban planning along with architecture?

Graham: They teach urban planning, but all the schools separate it, which is a mistake. They should not do that. It's all architecture.

Blum: What have you done to help change that distinction?

Graham: I've worked like hell to destroy that, and I'm succeeding. It took many years. It was started, as I told you before, by Berkeley. It was divided up into parcels and everybody took a little piece. It's like taking a School of Medicine and deciding that each person takes a little piece and some people only study monkeys and someone else only studies bones, and nothing else. It's ridiculous. But it makes more jobs for professors. That's a mistake. Mies was asked how many architects it would take to rebuild Chicago and he said, "Oh, only five or six." This was a long time ago that he was asked. I agree. You don't need a thousand architects.

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Blum: During your career, you had the idea to update Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, although it didn't work out quite the way you envisioned it.

Graham: I didn't want so much to update it as I wanted to take care of some unfinished details. The structure of the city was an excellent structure—the grid structure. It is a democratic structure, as opposed to the strong diagonals in Washington that head to the capitol building. That's imperial. All these non-grid roads are a thing of the past. Savannah, Georgia, was actually the first grid city in the United States. It's a beautiful city and the beauty of it is that you go on these streets and a little square appears or a little plaza and then maybe a church. You keep going and find houses and then maybe the next square is city hall. The church and the houses and city hall are all equal because they're part of this grid.

Blum: The grid certainly makes it easy to explain to a stranger how the Chicago street system works. The numbering system follows the grid.

Graham: The Chinese, by the way, always thought that these big open avenues were deadly, because evil spirits could come in and your gold could go out. In Paris, you could go straight down the avenue and attack the royals.

Blum: Throughout the many hours that we have spoken, you occasionally have mentioned one or another woman as having worked on certain projects. What has been the acceptance of women at SOM from the time that you started in around 1950 until the time that you retired in around 1990?

Graham: Very few women studied architecture when I was a student. When I was in school, there were only three women in the program. Now there are a lot. We had three partners that were women in SOM. They were younger. You know there was one in Boston who's in charge of planning and there's a Chinese manager in New York, Carolina Woo, and there was Diane Legge Lohan in Chicago, at that time.

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Blum: Was Natalie de Blois a partner?

Graham: No. There were a lot of other women architects.

Blum: So there were three women architects who made it to the partner level out of how many men?

Graham: The question should be out of how many women. There were very few that came to the office to work. We didn't turn them away. Jane certainly would have become a partner if she hadn't married me. There was another woman who was very good in the New York office, but she's retired now. She was very close to Roy Allen.

Blum: Was it as easy for a woman to rise in the ranks as for a man?

Graham: As far as the design and manager partners, it was just as easy. As far as the bigotry among the employees, it wasn't.

Blum: There were people at SOM who resented women in upper management?

Graham: People in general even resented them in the studio.

Blum: Why?

Graham: I don't know why. I knew one guy who was a bigot and I became a bigot against him and he left the firm.

Blum: Do incoming partners have to be sponsored by other current partners?

Graham: They have to be promoted by partners and then approved.

Blum: Did you ever sponsor a woman?

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Graham: Yes, I sponsored Diane. I was afraid she would leave. I also had Briggita Peterhans, who worked very closely with me.

Blum: Was she a partner?

Graham: No, she was an associate. If you know Brigitte, whom I love, she would have been tough as a partner. She's Jane's best friend, but as Jane can tell you, she's very difficult—not with me, but she's very difficult.

Blum: Was she difficult to work with?

Graham: No, she does crazy things—it was very annoying. Clients had trouble because she'd just go right out and say what she thought, right in the middle of a meeting with the chairman of the board and she'd virtually insult them.

Blum: Were you more tactful?

Graham: Much more. I never made decisions at a meeting, never. You discuss everything, blah, blah, blah, and then you go back and think about it and write a memorandum. Then you meet privately with the chairman of the board and have everything approved.

Blum: What was the situation for women when you left?

Graham: It was already growing. It's changed drastically. When I gave a lecture at Harvard, and that was already some time ago, the majority of the students were women.

Blum: Did that surprise you?

Graham: I was aware that it was happening. As you know, some women have won national prizes. Maya Lin won the competition for the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. Another one won a national AIA award last year. These are all

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fairly young women. There's a growing interest by women in architecture. I think that they're putting a lot of the men to shame.

Blum: Do you think that there's a better pool of women to select from?

Graham: Yes, to make good architects. The women are more dedicated to the art of architecture—at least that was my impression—and they give almost no interest to income.

Blum: Maybe that's because they're supported largely by their husbands or live on two incomes.

Graham: No, I don't agree with that. Then you're insulting every musician and artist. The men, the brighter ones, tend to go where the money is: law, business, medicine. Women don't tend to go to law school or business school as much. There are very few women in the Wharton Business School for many reasons: women are closer to life, and art is closer to life. Business is abstract and the women's world is not as abstract. They tend to go into medicine for the right reasons. Men tend to go into medicine because their mothers said they had to make a lot of money. Because of that, women have an advantage in architecture and they're getting places. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is no spring chicken, she's one tough lady.

Blum: As you think back about the forty years that you devoted to your career at SOM, what do you think has been the greatest change that you witnessed or caused at SOM?

Graham: I don't think that there was a single prime mover. There was more than one partner that moved the firm.

Blum: What has been the greatest change at SOM?

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Graham: I'm not sure that I could answer that question. I know that there has been a change in the people who went to schools of architecture. It made it more difficult to practice architecture because of their lack of a sense of history.

Blum: Today?

Graham: Not the ones going to school now. It was in the gap area during Vietnam. Vietnam changed Americans, not just architects. Americans became totally changed people, they became cynical. The universities became cynical. You could see it in politics very clearly. The people who should be running for president are not running for president. There's a kind of disillusionment among Americans.

Blum: Do you think that that reflected itself in architecture also?

Graham: Of course. I think that the young generation will take over from this cynical one, including the woman Republican who just quit Congress, Susan Molinari, to take a job on television. You're beginning to see people like that, these very strong people, who are looking forward and beyond this period. I think that the quality of the people who are running the House of Representatives and the Senate reflects the quality of the architects. They all come from the same generation, except for Bob Dole, who changed and adopted that generation.

Blum: You witnessed this pre-Vietnam mindset and now you're witnessing another change.

Graham: Yes, and now people are finally looking at the chairman of the board when he's getting big bonuses while the company is firing people. Finally you're seeing that people who buy stock objecting to the way companies run. It all started in the Middle West, by the way.

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Blum: Are you saying that this middle generation, this group that followed the Vietnam War, was more mercenary in their motivations?

Graham: They were much more cynical.

Blum: How did that manifest itself in architecture?

Graham: You can't be cynical and be an architect.

Blum: You worked through that period. You had people working with you.

Graham: Yes, but once you're fifteen years old, you're formed. There's nothing that can happen after that that can really change you. Jane was just saying today that if you don't teach kids good manners by the time they're seven, they'll never have good manners. An ill-mannered kid will not be successful in business or in any field. Right? I think she's right.

[Tape 11: Side 1]

Graham: Are we going to talk about the Spanish project I had? It was the Hotel d'Arts for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

Blum: How did that happen?

Graham: It happened first because in my adventures with Miró and Artigas, I had already gotten to know a lot of people in Spain. I had also gotten to know Pascual Maragal, the mayor of Barcelona, in Chicago before the Olympics. He called me about participating in this project for the Olympics. The Olympics were just kind of an excuse to do something that he had always had in mind, to improve the spirit of the people of Barcelona. As you know, Franco had really cursed Barcelona, he hated Barcelona. On the south, towards the airport, he put all the industry on the beaches. On the north, there was a railroad track that went all the way to France. So the mayor

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wanted to undo all of that. He used the Olympics as a vehicle that would raise the sprits of the people there and which he used as an excuse to do major replanning of that city. He hired Oriol Bohigas, a well-known Spanish architect, to lead that master planning effort. Then he invited architects and artists from all over the world—in contrast to the objections of the British against American architects, he was the opposite—and he asked me to come to Barcelona and told me about two projects. One project, for an insurance company that I got to know pretty well, never went ahead. The other one was for the Olympics, which was part of this plan on the north part of the city, a major part, where Bohigas had shown two identical towers and also a new boat basin. Boaters and fishermen of Barcelona had to go almost an hour and a half to go out to sea and people who owned yachts or even little fishing boats thought it was just terrible. He wanted to make that all just a beautiful lakefront park. So he asked me to come and participate. The first thing that I did, of course, was to meet Bohigas and go over the plan. Then they both asked me if I would comment on it. I did and then we made some different schemes. One thing that Bohigas didn't give in on was that there had to be two towers.

Blum: Did you think that there should be only one?

Graham: Yes, but nevertheless, I think that he was in love with the idea of the twin towers in New York—maybe the mayor not so much as Bohigas. Bohigas was an old socialist architect who really hadn't done much work for years because Barcelona and Spain were in such bad condition during the war and after. But they did in fact do a big master plan, of which he was not the only architect involved. Part of that plan had included building city parks. I guess they had already built over one hundred city parks.

Blum: Were these the parks that the residents worked on?

Graham: Yes, the city supplied the plants and the materials that the residents used, but the residents built them, which was a wonderful idea because it put

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them to work and gave them pride of ownership in each park. Every park had been made for a piece of sculpture. When you go from the Sagrada Familia—Gaudí's cathedral—to the sea you see the two towers are located there, on the same street. Another project that he started, that a lot of architects objected to, including Philip Johnson, was to finish the Sagrada Familia.

Blum: Do you think that it should have been finished?

Graham: Now that they've done it, yes. It may not be exactly how Gaudí would have finished it, but to have tourists visiting a room that wasn't really a room is not right either. It's a great celebration of Gaudí, one of the greatest architects of all time. He had done the Guell Park and the apartment buildings on the main street, just beautiful apartments. Everybody knew exactly how Gaudí was going to do it because he always built models. The only problem is that he would change his mind from time to time, which was very expensive and eventually broke some of his clients. Then the mayor asked me to find a developer to do the towers, because he didn't know anything about that. I asked a number of developers about it and they were not interested, including Jerry Hines and Tishman Speyer. Now they're sorry, but nevertheless, I should have asked one more, but I didn't know them well enough, they were a big French developer.

Blum: What was in it for a developer?

Graham: Ownership of the building. They would get the land and develop the building.

Blum: If it was built for the Olympics, what was the residual use for these buildings after the Olympics?

Graham: They were hotels and office buildings. They desperately needed office buildings. Both were full and fully occupied. So I asked Ware Travelstead,

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and Ware sent a Cuban man to help run it. Actually, I had introduced Ware to the chairman of the number-one insurance company in Spain, who had been involved in this other project that I was going to do in Spain, but that project collapsed. Somehow this Cuban really offended the chairman of the insurance company so they asked the bids committee for the project, and they bid for one tower. Ware got the other tower. I had met the son of the chairman of the bank, and he was an architect and he did one of the towers and I did the other one. Again, we associated with a local architect, who was recommended. The laws are very different in Spain and the risk to the architect is minimized because the architects who become the construction superintendent and make sure the building is built right carry all the insurance and take most of the risk. It's a strange system, but that's the way it works. The mayor was a wonderful man to work with—he was unbelievable, in fact. As I said before, his father was poet laureate of Spain, but Maragal, himself, was a poet and was an unbelievable person. He was so in love with the arts that Ware decided to call the hotel the Hotel d'Arts. It incorporated sculpture and we also got Laurie Olin involved in the project. It was to be more than one building, there was a tower and an office building and a sports center, which was integrated. I got Frank Gehry to do part of it—the athletic area and the front of the building along the beach. Then I did the tower and the courtyard and the office building.

Blum: Why Frank Gehry?

Graham: Because the mayor had heard of Frank, a lot from me, but he knew that he was a modern architect from California. The mayor had already met a lot of sculptors and artists and they also talked about Frank. So the mayor was delighted. Maybe I mentioned this before but I did a model of the whole thing. I showed a goldfish in the model and the mayor thought it was a great idea—I knew that Frank had done a similar fish in Japan.

Blum: You were guessing at what Frank might design as his part of the project?

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Graham: Right. Then I showed the mayor and chickened out and asked the mayor not to tell Frank that I had done this. So we didn't. Then Frank tried two or three schemes and he was very unhappy with every one of them, and I was unhappy with one that one of his people had done. Finally, one day he said, "I've got it!" He sent me this sketch that had this goldfish on it. They were big goldfish. So we went to Barcelona to present it and we showed the mayor and he reached into his cabinet and pulled out the fish that I had done and put it in Frank's model. The beauty of the project was how well we collaborated. Frank's building looks like it was part of my building and my building was steel and totally exposed and looks like it relates to his fish.

Blum: You didn't design anything together, as such. How is it that your work was so sympathetic?

Graham: I did that once more when we submitted for the American pavilion in Seville. I was invited, so it was Frank, myself, Bob Venturi, and Barnardo Fort-Brescia, and we split up the parcel. I divided it by sites into corner sites and two middle sites. I drew a diagram of how they should link. The theme for each one of the buildings was selected by each one of us, and then everybody worked on their sites separately. We sent it all to the computer and the computer put it all together. It was fantastic. I went beyond that, I got Tishman Speyer to sponsor us—the United States government was only willing to spend about ten million dollars for everything and there has never been a pavilion built for ten million dollars in any world's fair—and we also got major tenants to occupy the space and Tishman would own it after it was finished. It turned out beautifully, because I had one corner and I had put an eagle in it; Frank had another corner and he had put a fish in it. Then the two middle ones, Venturi and Fort-Brescia, both set back, so you had this middle with the courtyard and it looked terrific. Essentially what we did was tell the government, "We'll build it, we'll pay for it. It will cost about $110 million." They turned it down. So they had a competition, which we entered this in, and we each got paid our $10,000. Then they awarded it and it went way over budget—I think it was over $60 million—so they

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abandoned the American architect and hired a British architect who had a lousy scheme and they got no tenants. They complained about the lousy American businesses not cooperating to the press, while neglecting to point out that IBM and Baxter—there were four sponsors for each one of the buildings, and Tishman would pay for the whole thing—were not going to exhibit just their products but they were going to exhibit the entire field of their products. There wasn't going to be an "IBM section"; one area was going to be about the arts, another about science, another was the environment. That's the opposite of what the mayor of Barcelona was doing; he was getting the people actually building the buildings, which they did. I'm delighted with the Hotel d'Arts. It's managed by the Ritz group, but they can't name the hotel the "Ritz" because of the Ritz in Paris and in Madrid. It's a chain and they have the rights to the name. Ware eventually did all right with the place. He was involved in the whole complex.

Blum: How successful are the office buildings?

Graham: They're totally rented

Blum: It sounds like it was a wonderful experience working with such an enlightened mayor.

Graham: The best experience for me was that as a tall building, it does better what I have been trying to do for a hell of a long time.

Blum: What was that?

Graham: The steel structure is out there, all painted white and without any coverings of aluminum, and when you're in an apartment you see through these diagonals out to the sea and that's what I've always dreamt of doing in a tall building. There's no other statement I need to make in architecture.

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Blum: I can't believe that you feel that you've done it all and that you're depleted of ideas.

Graham: I'm not, but doing projects in America now is more difficult, because they're too many people involved. It used to be very simple, but it's not anymore.

Blum: Doing a project such as this, what kind of juries or committees, or approvals, or commissions, did you have to submit to before you got an OK to go build?

Graham: Just the mayor of Barcelona.

Blum: That's a much smaller overlay of people.

Graham: He had a very good team of people working with him. But we worked with him, we didn't just present, all along. They knew where we were coming from, from day one. I think that's the right way to do it. I felt that way in Chicago. I didn't go in and shove a building at them to approve. I would come in with schemes and go to the building commission. Sometimes there were alternate schemes, but also just as ideas were developing to get their comments. The Plan Commission was the same way. It's much better to do it that way than to do it and have to change it all because we missed something that they would have known about.

Blum: What was the biggest difference working with English projects or this one in Barcelona, in terms of the workers and the authorities?

Graham: Obviously, if I was asked by the mayor to do the building, it was much easier. I started from the top. The ambiance was easier in Spain, but England was not that difficult, at least I didn't find it that way.

Blum: For the Barcelona project, you spoke Spanish. Does Frank Gehry speak Spanish?

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Graham: No, he doesn't speak a word of it. He actually comes from the East, not from California.

Blum: Were you his spokesman in a way, when it came to presenting things, or did he bring his own translator?

Graham: I was there most of the time. Most of the Spanish people spoke English. Certainly the mayor spoke fluent English.

Blum: Everything was conducted in English?

Graham: No, not everything. When Frank was there, we spoke English. If I was there with the mayor, we spoke Spanish. One thing that happened to me a lot was that we would start in Spanish and then they would quickly start moving into Catalán, which is a separate language. I don't know Catalán.

Blum: Is it just a different dialect?

Graham: It's a different language and a different vocabulary. Some words are similar, but by and large, it's a different language. The pronunciation is also quite different. There are people who settled in that part of Spain that were very different. That's why the people of Catalán have always wanted to be separate from Spain.

Blum: Getting back to SOM and the changes you've observed, what do you think your most lasting contribution has been during your forty years there?

Graham: The buildings I've done.

Blum: That was broader than just for SOM, that was your contribution to cities.

Graham: Yes, but that was also my contribution to the reputation of the firm. If you do lousy buildings, you're not contributing to the firm.

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Blum: Do you have any regrets about what was done or anything you did?

Graham: I have some for the sake of the firm, that certain people who would have contributed a lot have left the firm. That is a regret.

Blum: You mean that it could have been better?

Graham: It could have been better and we could have left a better legacy. There were very unique people, like Bill Hartmann. There's no Hartmann there today.

Blum: How did you and Hartmann, who to me seems so different from you, come together and find such sympathy for one another?

Graham: We had a lot of goals in common. He approached them from one direction and I approached them from another. If we both had been the same, we would have been very boring.

Blum: Being so different, how did you work out differences?

Graham: We didn't have to work out differences. There was no conflict between Hartmann and I. On the contrary, we got through it all. Hartmann was searching for more designers, as I was, but he should have searched for more managers. Then we would have had the power to continue. Without Skidmore, and Hartmann, and Owings, the firm would have gone nowhere.

Blum: You mean that it would have gone nowhere right from the beginning?

Graham: Yes, if Bunshaft or I would have had to do the management as well, Bunshaft would have tried to impose his will, as I may have done too. With Hartmann and Owings there was a power from the managers' side. The managers were equally as powerful as the design partners. That inequality is hurting the firm now, I think. There's no visionary management like that. That's a flaw in all American businesses.

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Blum: With all these American business schools graduating so many MBAs, you'd think there'd be an over-supply.

Graham: But they're not running the firms yet.

Blum: Maybe in the future.

Graham: Yes, that's why I say I have a lot of hope for the future. There's a billion young people waiting in the wings. I think that you are getting some bright people coming into the world of power. Some of them have already created some great companies, and these people don't come from the 1960s, they're younger.

Blum: What was the greatest opportunity that helped you the most in your career?

Graham: Going to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. That was my greatest opportunity.

Blum: But that wasn't so difficult for you.

Graham: No, but it was still my great opportunity. An opportunity means that it came to you, not you to it. You have to work for it, you have to battle for it.

Blum: Where do you imagine the opportunities to be in architecture in the future?

Graham: I think that the major cities are in such disaster that the great opportunity is for visionaries to repair them. The solution is not going to be office buildings alone. It's got to be in residential communities and rearranging the cities visually and structurally. Chicago is an easy one because you still have the transit system. But you must destroy things like the Taylor Homes.

Blum: I have the sense that you could have said this in 1950 as well.

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Graham: No, in 1950 it wasn't as bad as it got. It just went downhill after that. It's just a terrible mistake to put all the poor in one area, it just makes a ghetto. You have to destroy that and make it possible for the poor to move to any part of the city. In Puerto Rico, I lived next to a poor family and it didn't bother me at all. I used to climb the wall between us and hide from my big brother with them.

Blum: The city is beginning to remove some public housing projects. Cabrini Green has begun to come down.

Graham: Cabrini Green is a pee-wee compared to Taylor Homes. Have you been there? It's a sea. They closed the regular grid of Chicago to make superblocks. It's terrible. The first thing they should do is remake the street grid and in the process tear down fifty percent of the goddamned buildings. And they should make a wonderful park there and put in middle-income housing and put poor housing somewhere else, near where jobs are. Right now, you see all this traffic going out to O'Hare in the morning and vice- versa. It's ridiculous. Why don't poor people have housing out near where the industry is? I consider Chicago not just to be the city proper but to include outlying areas too.

Blum: If Cabrini Green is coming down, maybe the mindset is beginning to change. Maybe one day the Taylor Homes will come down.

Graham: Well, the wealthy around Cabrini Green want Cabrini to come down. But there are no wealthy around Taylor Homes. At least if you reduce Cabrini and just make it smaller, some of the kids will still be able to go to middle- class schools. That means a lot.

Blum: Do you think that architecture can help right some of the social problems that we have in urban centers?

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Graham: By having decent plans, visions of how it would work, and working with the community in establishing those visions. You have to work with the school board and the medical profession and the businessmen. If you take out some of these slum, move jobs in.

Blum: It sounds like you have a big agenda.

Graham: It didn't take long to destroy Chicago's South Side, but it will take a lot longer to fix it.

Blum: In 1989 you retired from SOM. You moved to Florida. Does retirement agree with you?

Graham: Yes and no. First, I miss doing buildings and working with a team. On the other hand, it's going to take a different kind of person to deal with the complexities that have developed in our community. I mean that it's much more difficult to get something done now than it was before. That's why I say that you have to work with others.

Blum: Are you active on any committees in Florida?

Graham: I'm on the board of the Florida AIA Foundation.

Blum: Are you on any local committees to improve things here?

Graham: I haven't figured out how to wake them up, that's the problem. Architects here are paid very little. The fees here are ridiculous. There's no way that they can do a complete set of drawings. That is because the architectural society here has allowed contractors to call the shots. People don't hire architects, they hire a contractor and he has some guy do three sheets of drawings and goes out and builds it. Houses are all done by contractors, there's never an architect involved, except for the one we saw yesterday by Hugh Jacobson.

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Blum: Would you say that you're in the process of defining your next career?

Graham: I'm too old to do that now. It has to be somebody else to do that. It's just like Mies told me that I had to do these other kind of buildings, now it's up to somebody else to address these other problems. First, the architectural schools, they have to change the schools and the training of architects. That's happening a little bit here at the University of Miami because they have a very good school of architecture. The people that live in Miami are a very strong Latino community. I can't become involved in that, because I don't know the community and it's not my community. I'm a Chicagoan. Really, in the end, I'm a Chicago architect. Therefore, people here are afraid to let me do their home when they find out I did the Sears Tower. I did our home, and Jane and I did one for John Richman in Palm Beach as well as St. Christopher's Church in Hobe Sound. I'm going to do another one up in Jacksonville. There's no way that I could be involved here the way I was in Chicago. It takes another group and they have to get over looking at buildings as buildings, which you keep emphasizing. It's not just the building, it's the whole thing. Before Sears came, I did a little plan for Chicago. I had a little tower where the Standard Oil building is and one where the Sears Tower is and one more on the South Side, as point towers that would define the city. I got two of them built, and one more on the South Side would have been perfect, probably near where the R.R. Donnelley building is.

Blum: For what would you like best to be remembered?

Graham: I'd like to be remembered as an architect.

Blum: Thank you Bruce, speaking with you in these past few days has been a pleasure for me.

Graham: You're quite welcome.

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APPENDIX I: POSTSCRIPT

After reviewing this oral history I realized that we omitted a number of projects which were rather important in my career with SOM and deserve mention.

I had the wonderful pleasure to design the Fourth Financial Center Bank and Office Building in Wichita, Kansas, an exciting event. The chairman asked me to build a thirty- story building. We offered two schemes: one, thirty stories which would be the tallest building in town, and another, a nine-story building with an atrium 160-by-160-feet, so as to create an interior plaza, the kind of open space missing in the city center. The board outvoted the chair twelve to one in favor of the atrium scheme. Sandy Calder was then commissioned by the Fourth Financial Bank to design a huge mobile for the space. Calder brought ten schemes and obviously we picked the one he preferred. Typical of Calder, he generously donated these five-by-six-inch maquettes to the university, giving them an invaluable collection for their museum.

My design for the National Life Insurance building in Nashville, Tennessee, another great experience, was a simple tube structure in concrete sheathed in travertine next to the state capitol building. Bill Weaver, a very sophisticated chairman, revealed and introduced me to the elegance of the city and to that part of the country. He was typical of the clients I was blessed with and made a point of opening my eyes to the wonderful beauty and dignity of their life.

I was able to design more towers continuing my search for an appropriate vocabulary for each city such as the Shell building in New Orleans for Gerald Hines and 60 State Street in Boston; the former in travertine, the latter in red granite for Cabot, Cabot and Forbes.

Since I had done the addition to the Ritz Carlton Hotel, also in Boston, I was delighted to design the Business Club on the top floor to be operated by the Ritz. It turned out very well and, incidentally, the food is excellent. Views of the harbor as well as the neighborhood are exciting which obviously made the project all the more exciting. The

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structure in this case is not a rectangle but rather two enmeshed sextagons. The red granite reflects the color of the city.

I also designed a stadium in Minneapolis and the Spectrum arena in Philadelphia. The latter cost about six million dollars, so I find the ridiculously high prices of today frightening. However, working with Jerry Wolman and his associates was a pleasure since they not only owned the Philadelphia basketball team but the Eagles as well, where we met at various times. In Minneapolis, the budget for the covered, heated and air conditioned facility was forty-five million dollars which we met because of the tenacity of the stadium project manager who kept the politicians out of the project thus earning their ire for which he thought it best to move to Florida.

While I do not propose to write about all my very memorable experiences and buildings such as Baxter Travenol in Deerfield, Illinois, the Hyatt Hotel in Surabaya, Indonesia, the Shell Pension Fund Facility in Rotterdam, Holland, and a small museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, they all helped strengthen my convictions. The civility of all the leaders was extremely gratifying.

Bruce Graham Hobe Sound, Florida May 1998

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APPENDIX II BRUCE JOHN GRAHAM, FAIA

Born: 1 December 1925, La Cumbre, Columbia

Education: University of Pennsylvania, B. Architecture, 1948

Military Service: United States Navy, 1943-45

Experience: Holabird, Root and Burgee, 1949-51 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1951-89 Graham and Graham, 1990

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1966 Honorary Member, Royal Institute of British Architects Honorary Member, Royal Architects Institute of Canada Honorary Member, Institute of Urbanism and Planning of Peru Chicago International Gold Medal, International Visitors Center of Chicago

Service: Trustee, University of Pennsylvania Trustee, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Trustee, Urban Land Institute President, Chicago Central Area Committee President, Society of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago Member, Commercial Club of Chicago

Award-winning Projects: Inland Steel Company Headquarters, Chicago, Illinois 1958 Hartford Building, Chicago, Illinois 1959 Upjohn Company Headquarters, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1961 United Air Lines, Elk Grove Village, Illinois, 1962 Business Men's Assurance Company of America, Kansas City, Missouri, 1964 Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 1965 Equitable Life Assurance Society, Chicago, Illinois 1965 Connecticut Mutual Insurance Company, Chicago, Illinois 1967 Boots Pure Drug Company Headquarters, Nottingham, England, 1968 Gateway Office Buildings I and II, Chicago, Illinois 1968 John Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois 1970 First Wisconsin Center Bank, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1974

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Fourth Financial Center, Wichita, Kansas, 1974 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 1974 W.D and W.O. Wills Corporation, Bristol, England, 1974 Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Deerfield, Illinois, 1975 Banco de Occidente, Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1977 Sixty State Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 1977 Three First National Plaza, Chicago, Illinois, 1981 Madison Plaza, Chicago, Illinois, 1982 One Magnificent Mile, Chicago, Illinois, 1982 Citicorp Plaza, Los Angeles, California, 1985 Huntington Center, Columbus, Ohio, 1985 McCormick Place II Exposition Center, Chicago, Illinois, 1986 One Financial Place, Chicago, Illinois, 1986 The Terraces at Perimeter Center, Atlanta, Georgia, 1986 Morgan Stanley International, London, England, 1987 Broadgate, Phases 5-14, London, England, 1988-92 Canary Wharf, London, England, 1988 Holy Angels Parish Church, Chicago, Illinois, 1990

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SELECTED REFERENCES

"17th P/A Annual Design Awards." Progressive Architecture 51 (January 1970):76-135. "19 Office Floors Without Columns." Architectural Forum 102 (May 1955):114-18. "A Tower In the Spirit of the Chicago School Articulates Its Concrete Frame." Architectural Record 169 (Mid August 1981):78-81. "A Trio of Banks in Guatemala Reflects Indigenous Idioms." AIA Journal 70 (Mid-May 1981):226-30. Aldersey-Williams, Hugh. "Americans in London Docklands." Progressive Architecture 69 (June 1988):27-29. "Architecture Is Alive and Well." Architectural Review 162 (October 1977):231-36. Boles, Daralice D. "From House to HQ." Progressive Architecture 70 (April 1989):76-81. "Broadgate - The City in the City " Architectural Design 61 (May/June 1991):46-47. Bruce Graham of SOM. Introduction by Stanley Tigerman. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1989. Bush-Brown, Albert. Skidmore, Owing & Merrill Architecture and Urbanism 1973-1983. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983. C., S. "Mecca Academe." Architectural Review 165 (January 1979):5-7. Clarke, Jane H., Saliga, Pauline A., and Zukowsky, John. The Sky's the Limit. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1990. Crump, Joseph. "Less is Skidmore." Chicago (February 1991):74-81, 114. Danz, Ernst. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1950-1962. Introduction by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963. Davey, Peter. "Big Business." Architectural Review 184 (August 1988):15-19. Davidson-Powers, Cynthia. "An Interview with Bruce Graham." Inland Architect 31 (March/April 1987):30-35. Davidson-Powers, Cynthia. "An Unconventional Tribute." Inland Architect 32 (September/October 1988):42-46. Davidson-Powers, Cynthia. "One Magnificent Mile." Inland Architect 28 (May/June 1984):25-29. Davidson-Powers, Cynthia. "SOM 50 and Counting." Inland Architect 31 (March/April 1987):29.

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Dean, Andrea O. "Evaluation: Trussed Tube Towering Over Chicago." AIA Journal 69 (October 1980):68-73. Diamondstein, Barbaralee. American Architecture Now II. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1985. Dixon, John Morris. "The Tall One." Architectural Forum 133 (July /August 1970):36-45. "Eastern Promise." The Architects" Journal 195 (11, 18 December 1991):56-63. Fischer, Robert E. "Optimizing the Structure of the Skyscraper." Architectural Record 152 (October 1972):97-104. Fisher, Thomas. "Arid Extra Dry." Progressive Architecture 63 (October 1982):113-18. Forrey, Roy. "Inland Steel Building." Preliminary Staff Summary of Information Submitted to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, 1991. Graham, Bruce J. "Architecture's Impact on the City." Progress (January-February 1986):12-15. _____. "Architecture, Fashion and Advertising." Inland Architect 22 (July 1978):11. _____. "Commercialization and the Demise of the Human Spirit." Crit 4 (Fall 1978):15. _____. "The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill." RIBA Transactions 2 (1983):76- 84. _____. "Towers for the People." Inland Architect 23 (August 1979):21. Greer, Nora Richter. "Huge Roof Hung from Pylon-Ducts." Architecture 77 (March 1988):100-105. Hanson, Donald D. "Structuring the Loop." Progressive Architecture 47 (August 1966): 194-97. Heyer, Paul. Architects on Architecture. New York: Walker and Company, 1966. Hornbeck, James S. "Chicago's Multi-use Giant." Architectural Record 141 (January 1967):137-44,167-68. "Interview with Bruce Graham." University of Illinois School of Architecture Newsletter. 17 November 1988. "Interview: Bruce Graham." Progressive Architecture 72 (April 1991):104-5 Kent, Cheryl. "Interview: Bruce Graham." Progressive Architecture 72 (April 1991):104-105. Khan, Fazlur R. "The Future of Highrise Structures." Progressive Architecture 53 (October 1972):78-85. "King Size in Bristol." Architectural Review 158 (October 1975):197-212. Marlin, William. "Sears Tower." Architectural Forum 140 (January/February 1974):25-31.

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Menges, Axel. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 1963-1973. Introduction by Arthur Drexler. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1974. Miller, Nory. "Staying On Top, or Just Staying Alive?" Chicago (May 1982):156-57. "Monster Emerges from London Docks." Architectural Review 183 (May 1988):4,9. Nairn, Janet. "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's New Directions in High-Rise Design." Architectural Record 169 (March 1981):114-129. Newman, M. W. "Giantism in the City: Its Triumphs, Its Dangers." Inland Architect 13 (January 1969):7-12. "Office Blocks with Stacked Atriums Save Owners Construction and Energy Costs." Architectural Record 169 (November 1981):120-27. "Ordered Openness for Corporate Offices." Architectural Record 145 (April 1969):141-48. Owings, Nathaniel Alexander. The Spaces In Between. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973. Pearman, Hugh. "U.S. Architects in Britain." The Architects' Journal 186 (16 September 1987):2-4. R., J. "Bruce Graham's Search for Civility." GSD News (January/February 1987):11. Rabenek, Andrew. "Broadgate and the Beaux-Arts." The Architects' Journal 192 (October 1990):38-51. Rottenberg, Dan. "SOM: The Big, The Bad." Chicago (May 1982):151-55,196-202. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Selected and Current Works. Introduction by Joan Ockman. Victoria, Australia: Images Publishing Group, 1995. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Representative Projects of SOM. Chicago: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1979. Smith, C. Ray. "Greenhouse for Greenbacks." Interiors 135 (September 1975):104-109. Smithson, Alison and Peter. Without Rhetoric. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974. "SOM's Computer Approach." Architectural Record 167 (Mid-August 1980):84-91. Stephens, Suzanne. "SOM at Midlife." Progressive Architecture 62 (May 1981):138-49. "The Architects from 'Skid's Row'." Fortune, January 1958, pp. 3-10. The Chicago Tapes. Introduction by Stanley Tigerman. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987. "The John Hancock Center Chicago, Illinois." Design Book Review 15 (Fall 1988):15-34. "Tower In A New Kind of Urban Space." Architectural Record 138 (October 1965):161-68.

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Weese, Harry. "The Chicago Civic Center as Public Architecture." AIA Journal 52 (September 1969):88-92. Woodward, Christopher. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

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INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

1 Fleet Street, London, England 283 Bofill, Ricardo 52 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Bohigas, Oriol 206, 301 19, 86, 146, 158 Booth, Lawrence 189 Boots Pure Drug Company, Nottingham, Aalto, Alvar 50, 58, 281, 292, 293 England 160-164 Adami, Valerio 196 Botero, Fernando 195 Adler, Dankmar 117 Broadgate Center, London, England 265- Adler, David 183-84 267, 274, 277, 282, 287 Allen David 85, 102-103, 106, 116 Brown, Andrew 102 Allen, Roy 63, 112, 113, 121, 250, 252 Brownson, Jacques C. 87, 88, 89, 90, 138 American Institute of Architects (AIA) 77- Brunel, Isambard 164 78, 171-174, 182, 261-262, 264 Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 89- Anderson, Arthur 236 93, 96, 149, 150, 151 Ando, Tadao 45 Buck, John 74-75, 79 Arab International Bank, Cairo, Egypt 213, Bunshaft, Gordon 34, 39, 48, 55, 63, 90, 97, 214, 231 98, 101-102, 103, 109, 113, 115, 117, 120- Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 122, 126, 128, 129, 135, 139, 141, 151, 168, 96, 199 191, 195, 199, 213, 216-217, 245, 253, 308 Artigas, Joanet Gardy 97, 192, 194, 195, Burcher, John 244, 247, 250, 282 212, 213 Burgee, John 31 Artigas, Josep Llorens (Joan) 96-97, 194, Burnham, Daniel H. 29, 76, 118, 184, 293 212, 213 Business Men's Assurance, Kansas, City, Arts Club, Chicago, Illinois 74-75 Kansas 191 Ayres, Thomas 220, 221, 222 Byrne, Jane 218

Baker, Hollis 116 Cabrini Green, Chicago, Illinois 188, 218, Banco de Occidente, Guatemala City, 310 Guatemala 231 Calder, Alexander 60, 199-200, 313 Bank Lambert, Brussels, Belgium 98 Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, England 264, Banque Lambert, Brussels, Belgium 199 275, 276, 278, 280, 282 Barràgan, Luis 173, 178, 210-11 Candilis, Georges 127 Bartsch, Helmuth 29-30, 31, 32 Carlson, David 29-30 Bassett, Charles (Chuck) 89, 101, 112, 121, Carson Pirie Scott 11, 24, 71, 267 127, 155, 247, 253 Central Area Committee 61, 144, 187, 204, Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Deerfield, 217-225, 226 Illinois 314 Cerdá, Ildefonso 238 Beeby, Thomas 53, 189, 260, 271, 283 Charles, Prince of Wales 53, 266-267, 283, Beitler, Paul 240 290 Belaunde, Fransico 180 Charnley, James (house), Chicago, Illinois Bennett, Richard M. 89 47, 259, 263 Bertoia, Harry 101, 107, 195 Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France 23, Bishops Gate, Broadgate Center, London, 57-58, 80 England 269-271, 274 Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, New Block, Joseph 104 York 231, 259 Block, Leigh 96, 104, 105 Chicago Civic Center (now Richard J. Block, Mary 101, 105, 107 Daley Center), Chicago, Illinois 89, 203

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Chicago Place, Chicago, Illinois 271, 273 Equitable Building, Chicago, Illinois 116- Chicago Seven 172 17, 122-25, 130 Childs, David 249, 260 Exchange House and Square, Broadgate Clark, Ray 256, 286 Center, London, England 266, 268, 284- Clements, Father George 254-257 285 Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, Illinois 46 Eyerman, Thomas 170, 174, 238, 240, 247, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, England 248, 249, 250 165 Cobb, Harry 82, 251, 260, 276, 279 Fair Store, Chicago, Illinois 71 Commercial Club 61, 174, 217-220, 220, Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 89 Connecticut General, Bloomfield, Ferris, James 89, 98 Connecticut 55 First National Bank of Chicago, Chicago, Container Corporation of America, Carol Illinois 203 Stream, Illinois 170, 191 First Wisconsin Bank, Milwaukee, Crosstown Expressway (project) 76 Wisconsin 197 Crown Hall (Illinois Institute of Fort-Brescia, Barnardo 178, 304 Technology), Chicago, Illinois 55 Foster, Norman 267, 270, 287, 288 Crown Zellerbach, San Francisco, Fourth Financial Center, Wichita, Kansas California 97, 101 313 Cunningham, Charles 105 Freehling, Stanley 96

D'Angelo, Vando 152, 256 Gapp, Paul 133 Daley, Richard J. 60, 65, 77, 78, 187, 217, Gaudí, Antoni 301 218-219, 253 Gehry, Frank 73-74, 206, 260, 288, 291, 303- Dalí, Salvador 212 304, 306-307 Dart, Edward 47 Giacometti, Alberto 97 Davis, Lewis 26 Giedion, Sigfried 17, 105-106 Dawson, Stuart 276 Goldberg, Bertrand 188 De Armas, Raul 251 Goldberger, Paul 59, 69 de Blois, Natalie 117-118, 296 Goldsmith, Myron 87, 88, 89, 90, 92-93, 98, De Stefano, James 74, 282 118, 121, 136, 137, 142-143, 145-148, 242, Deam, Arthur 25 249 Dearborn Park, Chicago, Illinois 144, 187- Goldstein, Marc 249, 252, 253, 260 190, 218, 220 Graham Foundation For Advanced Studies DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments, Chicago, in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois 264 Illinois 145, 147-148 Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 118 Dimant, Robert 30, 32, 33, 153, 252 Graham, Charles (brother of Bruce) 5 Downs, Anthony 227 Graham, George (brother of Bruce) 4, 5, 13 Draper & Kramer 236 Graham, Jane Johnson (wife of Bruce) 24, Duckett, Edward 40 27, 69, 84, 85, 87, 100, 106, 112, 113, 115- Dunlap, William (Bill) 111, 113, 137, 230 116, 132, 136, 199, 202, 281, 296, 300, 312 Graham, Lisa (daughter of Bruce) 139-40 Eames, Charles 21, 127 Graham, Mara (daughter of Bruce) 139, Egan, Father John J. 253, 254 211, 241 Eiffel Tower, Paris, France 55 Graham, William (Bill) 198, 219 Eisenman, Peter 260 Graves, Michael 82 Empire State Building, New York, New Greenwald, Herbert 85, 98 York 64 Griffith, Gerry 39-40, 115 Gropius, Walter 16, 17, 20, 87

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Grupo Industrial Alfa Corporate Imperial Hotel (demolished), Tokyo, Japan Headquarters, Monterey, Mexico 210 46 Inland Steel, Chicago, Illinois 90, 97, 100- Hajj Terminal, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 217 108, 116, 133, 268 Hallas, George 187 Isozaki, Arata 45 Hammond, James W. 100, 128 Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 64, 71, Jackson Park, Chicago, Illinois 220 72-73, 81, 91, 144, 145, 152-158, 160, 231, Jahn, Helmut 74, 82, 182, 271 273 Jefferson, Thomas 185 Harold Washington Library, Chicago, Jencks, Charles 290 Illinois 225 John Deere Building, Moline, Illinois 90 Harrison & Abramovitz 119 Johnson, Lyndon 122 Hartford Insurance, Chicago, Illinois 104, Johnson, Philip 59, 119, 120, 290, 301 106, 190 Josep Lorens Artigas Foundation Studios, Hartmann, Benta (wife of William) 136 Gillifa, Spain 212 Hartmann, William (Bill) 35, 36, 37, 41, 55, 83, 89, 90, 95, 99, 105, 107, 111, 113, 124, Kahn, Albert 167 128, 129, 130, 133, 136, 139, 154, 161, 170, Kahn, Louis 20, 22-23, 174 174, 187, 199, 219, 225, 227, 248, 249, 250, Khan, Fazlur 62-63, 72, 84, 86, 88, 92, 93, 252, 308 102, 140-145, 146-148, 152, 153, 154, 157, Hedrich-Blessing 246 162, 165, 217, 244 Henderson, Brian 161, 163, 164, 166, 186, Kiley, Daniel 115 281 Kimberly, Jack 38, 55, 84, 198 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 19, 85, 86, 167, 265, Kimberly-Clark (project), Neenah, 293 Wisconsin 41, 44, 54-56, 57, 84 Hines, Gerald (Jerry) 141-142, 148, 183, King's Cross, London, England (project) 198, 199, 214, 227, 265, 275, 313 288 Holabird & Root 18, 29, 33, 68, 118, 134, Klutznick, Philip 145 237 Kraft, Fred 114, 128 Holabird, John A. (father of John Auger) Kramer, Ferd 187, 190 30 Krier, Leon 260 Holabird, John Auger (son of John A.) 31 Hollander, Elizabeth (Liz) 205, 222, 289 Lake Meadows, Chicago, Illinois 36, 38, Holy Angels Church, Chicago, Illinois 252, 188 254, 257 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret Horizon House, Fort Lee, New Jersey 207 17, 21, 55, 83, 85, 126, 128, 188, 241, 291, Hotel d'Arts, Barcelona, Spain 206, 300, 293 303, 305 Legge Lohan, Diane (now Kemp) 295, 297 Howe & Lescaze 20 Legorreta, Ricardo 210 Howe, George 20 Lever House, New York, New York 34, 97, Hughes, Charles 121 100, 103, 117, 126, 191, 231 Hughes, David 250, 252 Lin, Maya 297 Hunt, Richard 256 Lippold, Richard 101, 107, 195 Huntington Center, Columbus, Ohio 236 Lipton, Seymour 107 Huxtable, Ada Louise 60, 133 Lipton, Stuart 264-265, 269, 275, 283, 288 Lockett, Albert 250 Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett 89 Chicago, Illinois 17, 52, 86, 87, 158 Lubin, Donald 256

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Ludgate, London, England 244, 264, 282- Naess, Sigurd 135 284, 287 Nagle, James 189 Lustron House 48-49 Naslund, Kenneth 84, 191 Nassar, Ali 215 Machado, Rodolfo 242 National Commercial Bank, Jeddah, Saudi Machado & Silvetti 242 Arabia 216 Macsai, John 30, 33 National Gallery, London, England 288-89 Madison Plaza, Chicago, Illinois 237-239 National Life & Accident Insurance Maillart, Robert 190 Headquarters, Nashville, Tennessee 313 Maki, Fumihiko 45 NBC Tower, Chicago, Illinois 234 Manny, Carter H. 90 Neiman Marcus 272, 273 Manufacturers Hanover Trust, New York, Nervi, Pier Luigi 141 New York 101 Netsch, Walter 34, 100-102, 103, 104, 107, Maragal, Pascual 300-204, 306-7 112, 113, 121, 126, 135, 136, 137, 155, 251, Mariotti, Carlo 151, 152, 256 253 Mayer, Robert 153 Neutra, Richard 29, 127 McCarthy, Michael 251, 252 Nevelson, Louise 195, 240 McConnell, Patrick 235 New World Centre, Hong Kong, China McCurry, Paul 78 208 McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Niemeyer, Oscar 126, 127 Arizona 137 Noguchi, Isamu 97, 115, 195 McNulty, Monroe 66, 96 Nowicki, Matthew 128 Meigs Field, Chicago, Illinois 220 Merrill, John (son of John, Sr.) 252 Oak Ridge, Tennessee 34 Merrill, John, Sr. 84, 128, 249-50 Obata, Gyo 30, 33 Metcalf, Gordon 62, 76 Oldenburg, Claes 204, 205 Mies, van der Rohe, Ludwig 16, 17, 18, 19- Olgivie, Richard 77 20, 29, 33, 34, 39-40, 47, 52, 55, 63, 74, 83, Olin, Lawrence 276, 280, 303 85-86, 87, 99, 116, 117, 126, 127, 146, 185, Oltmans, Lawrence 271 242, 243, 253, 266, 270, 284-285, 291, 293, Olympia & York 80, 278, 279, 282 294, 312 One Shell Plaza, Houston, Texas 142, 147- Miglin-Beitler 238-40 151 Miró, Joan 94-96, 194, 195, 200, 205, 212 One Shell Square, New Orleans, Louisiana Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 99 313 Monadnock Building, Chicago, Illinois 92 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 5, 12, 28, 34, 35, Moore, Charles 260 36-37, 38, 40, 44, 99, 121-122, 128, 129, Moore, Henry 95-96, 195, 199-200 174, 228-29, 246, 247, 248-249, 250, 251, Morgan Stanley Headquarters, London, 253, 254, 258, 308 England 264, 275, 279, 280 Morse, Carl 104 Pan Am Building New York, New York Moses, Robert 130 280 Mossessian, Michel 244, 250, 284 Park Forest, Illinois 188 Moynahan, Partick 258 Passonneau, Joseph 30, 32, 34, 36, 77, 99 Murphy, C.F., Associates 89 Pei, Ieoh Ming 25, 89, 93, 131, 171, 204, 251, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), 262, 292 Chicago, Illinois 281 Pelli, Cesar 238, 279, 280, 282, 284 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). New Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong, China 208- York, New York 34 210 Perkins, G. Holmes 21, 22

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Persky, Seymour 263 Sasaki, Hideo 114 Peterhans, Brigitte 99, 282, 284, 297 Schiff, Harold 260 Peterhans, Walter 19, 98-99, Schneider, Botho 113 Philadelphia Savings & Fund Society, Schweikher, Paul 18-19, 45 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 119 Seagram Building, New York, New York Picardi, Alfred 152, 153, 157 63, 103 Picasso, Pablo 94-95, 96, 107, 200, 204 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 59-79, 91, Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 298 144, 254, 312 Pompidou Center, Paris, France 100-101 Seitz, Roger 250 Price, Edison 106, 288-289, 290 Serra, Richard 205 Priestley, William (Bill) 34, 37-38, 41, 88, Sert, José Luis 127 112 Severinghaus, Walter 252 Shaw, Alfred 124, 135 Randall, Clarence 104, 268 Shaw, Charles 227 Reynolds, Thomas 256 Silvetti, Jorge 242 Richardson, Ambrose 33, 36, 39, 112 Sixty State Street, Boston, Massachusetts Richardson, Henry Hobson 119 313 Richman, John (house), Palm Beach, Skidmore, Louis 35, 129, 130, 308 Florida 313 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 12, 32- Ritz Carleton Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts 35, 37, 44, 68, 97, 106, 108, 124-126, 171, 313 172, 182, 230-231, 248, 261, 262, 263, 264 Robb, David 15, 17, 184 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Illinois 258-264 188, 309, 310 Smith, Adrian 234-235, 272-273, 283-284 Roche, Kevin 134, 251 Smith, Donald 247 Rockefeller Center, New York, New York Smith Steven 258 63 Smith, Tony 115 Rockefeller, David 97 Smithson, Alison and Peter 167 Rodgers, John Barney (Jack) 34, 44 Soltan, Jerzy 128, 241 Rogers, Richard 168, 267, 268, 270, 285, 287 Soulages, Pierre 107 Root, John 31 Speyer, A. James 88 Rosehaugh Stanhope 265 St. Christopher's Church, Hobe Sound, Rosenberg, Eugene 161 Florida 313 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada St. Paul's Cathedral, London, England 277, 175 278, 282 Royal Fine Arts Commission, London, Stirling, James 168, 270 England 274, 277, 283-284 Stockley Park, London, England 264, 285, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 287 161, 264, 287 Stoller, Ezra 245-246 Rubloff, Arthur 90 Stonorov, Oskar 20, 22-23 Sullivan, Louis 29, 46, 67, 117, 118, 119, Saarinen, Aline Louchheim 39 184, 185, 243, 259-260, 272 Saarinen, Eero 127, 131, 134, 135, 251 Saarinen, Eliel 50, 127, 237, 292 Takeuchi, Arthur 87, 88, 89, 90, 191 Sacks, Sam 232 Tamayo, Rufino 211 Sanders, William (Bill) 248 Tatulio, Peter 213-214 Sagrada Familia Church, Barcelona, Spain Temporary Contemporary Museum, Los 302 Angeles, California 173 Sasaki & Walker 114 Terrace Plaza Hotel, Cincinnati, Ohio 129

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Terraces at Perimeter Center, Atlanta, Wisconsin Plaza, Madison, Wisconsin 196, Georgia 192-195, 235-236 197, 238 Thatcher, Margaret 276 Wolman, Jerry 152, 156-160, 206, 314 33 West Monroe, Chicago, Illinois 235-237, Woo, Carolina 295 239 Wood, Arthur 105 Three First National, Chicago, Illinois 96, Worley, Raymond 65 199-200 Wright, Frank Lloyd 24, 29, 46, 67, 243, Tigerman, Stanley 221, 260, 271, 288 259-260 Tishman Speyer 304, 305 Tishman, John 207 Yorke, Kaye 128, 161 Torre, Susanna 271 Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardall (YRM) 161, Travelstead, Ware 206, 275, 277-278, 281, 163, 165, 169, 186, 276, 277, 281 302-3 Turner, Robert 250, 282 Zukowsky, John 103

United Airlines Executive Office Building and Training Center, Elk Grove, Illinois 89 United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado 231 United States Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California 42 University of Minnesota Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota 173 Upjohn, Kalamazoo, Michigan 109-111, 113-116

Valario, Adami 196 Venturi, Robert 226, 289-291, 304

Walker, Daniel 77 Walker, Peter 114 Wardwell, Alan 201 Warren Petroleum, Tulsa, Oklahoma 81- 85, 125, 133 Warren, W. K. 84 Washington, George 185 Washington, Harold 205, 222 Water Tower Place, Chicago, Illinois 271, 273 Weaver, William 313 Weese, Harry 34, 37, 60 Weese, John 38 Weissbourd, Barney 146-147 Whiteman, John 260, 261 Wildermuth, Gordon 282 Wiley, Charles (Chuck) 38 Wills Tobacco, Bristol, England 164-167, 169

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