The Stock Exchange Trading Room, 1977

“View looking southeast from [The Art Institute] gallery into reconstructed room.” Originally published in The Stock Exchange Trading Room, 1977. 80 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165476 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Stock Exchange: Standing Upright, Idle CATHERINE INGRAHAM It is clear, in any case, that mathematical order imposed upon stone is really the culmination of the evolution of earthly forms, whose direction is indicated within the biological order by the passage from the simian to the human form, the latter already displaying all the elements of architecture. Man would seem to represent merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development between monkey and building.1 One room, the second-floor Trading Room, of Louis Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building (1863) in Chicago, has been preserved (1977) in the Chicago Art Institute for museum visitors to see and for the museum to use for banquets and fund-raising events.2 Housing architecture, or parts of architecture, in a museum has always been odd. Short of leaving architectural fragments lying around where they fell—the scenic architectural ruin that becomes its own museum—architecture is typically brought into the museum in miniaturized or schematic or cinematic form; as a model, drawing, photograph, or film. On some occasions—the stock exchange trading room is one such occasion— architectural parts are brought into a museum context and completely reconstructed at the original scale. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin houses pilfered building fragments (gates, walls) from Babylon that seem almost plausible architecturally, perhaps because the museum building itself and the colossal fragments are in rooms whose scale is already so large that nothing but architectural remains can be imagined inside them. But even the reconstruction of Babylonian walls inside the Pergamon does not complete an architectural scene; the remains are artifactual, pieces of a larger, missing, whole. The Pergamon houses trophy architectural fragments collected during Alexander Schlemann’s colonialist adventures in the Middle East. It was not meant to be a naturalization of those architectures into another context; the Babylonian remains are not meant to be used or inhabited in any way. The Pergamon later became part of a “museum island” in East Berlin; maintained but stranded, in some sense, from the idea of museum culture that lay on the other side of the Berlin wall. These types of irony are not unusual in either art or architectural museums. Grey Room 15, Spring 2004, pp. 80–101. © 2004 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165476 by guest on 25 September 2021 Thus, the peculiar thing about Sullivan’s Trading Room in the Art Institute of Chicago is that it is not a ruin, nor does it act as a building fragment, nor does it act as a fully scaled built artifact in a larger system of cultural classi- fication. Its assimilation into the Art Institute is almost complete and the building from which it came, the Stock Exchange Building, is only inciden- tally present in archival photographs and a few other fragments; for example, the former entrance arch to the Exchange, which is now a free-standing arch outside the back of the Institute.3 Thus the question with respect to the restored Trading Room is, what is it? The history of stock exchanges, and stock exchange buildings, in America— particularly the Chicago Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange— is, as might be expected, largely a history of how money and architecture col- laborate to produce buildings, often highly ornamentalized buildings where cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, corn, wheat, soybeans, and countless other products of American agriculture and commerce are transmogrified into speculative capital that, in turn, fuels the building of public and private structures and infrastructures: office buildings, department stores, roads, schools, utility companies and so forth. The character of this exchange is both abstract and concrete,4 and symbolic and material aspects of architecture are often uniquely engaged by these building commissions. Certainly some of the usual questions—such as how to address questions of power and wealth architecturally—attend these projects. The Chicago Stock Exchange was built during the 1893 financial panic and was designed as a 13-floor office building with only one, albeit large room, the Trading Room, reserved for the Stock Exchange itself. The “Exchange was given a 15-year, rent-free lease,” partly in exchange for the use of its name as the name of the building. Sullivan’s extraordinary use of space and ornament in the design of the Trading Room—one of the most well-known examples of his use of decoration in architecture, which he saw as integral to the architectural structure and form—figure somewhat more prominently in accounts of the building than in theories of wealth and capital. The question of ornament will return, but I want to go back to the epigraph at the start of this essay before proceeding. Georges Bataille’s “theory of evolution,” which extends the reach of Darwinian evolution into the mineral realm (stone), places architecture at the end of the typical monkey-human evolutionary development. The human already displays “all the elements of architecture.”5 This ladder of development by which, as Denis Hollier remarks in Against Architecture, human beings are imprisoned in their own form (breaking with the monkey line) and then imprisoned in exterior forms (architecture) is a matter of social and 82 Grey Room 15 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165476 by guest on 25 September 2021 “The Stock Exchange Building nearing completion in 1894.” Originally published in The Stock Exchange Trading Room, 1977. “Photograph taken shortly after the opening of the Trading Room.” Originally published in The Stock Exchange Trading Room. political, but also architectural, interest to Bataille. In the same book, Hollier remarks on the evolution of the slaughterhouse from a place where time and money are in a kind of equilibrium, to the art museum, where time and money are “wasted.” This succes- sion illustrates a single “economic continuum” in which Bataille’s theory of dépense (loss, expenditure) plays a significant part. The question [Hollier writes] thus is one of knowing whether a theory of dépense can work without the difference between high and low, between dirty [slaughterhouse] and clean [museum]; whether a theory of dépense is not, first of all, a theory of the difference between two expenditures, a proper clean one and an improper dirty one.6 The Stock Exchange, as a system of expenditure that brokers the dirty to make it clean and is tied to repos- itories of wealth and culture, might be placed somewhere between the slaughterhouse and the museum. The slaughterhouse/museum “system” of spending and expending time and money—application and suspension of work, different attitudes toward offal—is also a system that brings animals, human beings, buildings, and the coalescence of buildings and infrastructures into cities, into entan- gled relations with one another. Animals are, in effect, spent in the slaughterhouse in order to fuel the economic and biological transfer of energy from animal to human. This could also be understood as a symbolic and concep- tual transfer of “natural” energy from the rural sector to “cultural” energy that revitalizes the city on a rhythmic basis, a food chain transfer that returns vitality to the rural in the form of work and finished products. This is not, however, a perpetual-motion machine. In capitalist terms, it is also an oppor- tunity for speculation and an increase of wealth that tends to accrue to the city, returning, over time, less and less energy (and energy of a lower quality) to the country. The slaughterhouse building, like other industrial building types, is spatially adaptable to other purposes once the smells and residues of butchering have been erased. A slaughterhouse that becomes a park, as happened in the case of Parc de la Villette in Paris, is still residually engaged with this energy transference, although now it is the romantic ideal of the “open fields” of the country—where the whole animal supposedly grazes in Ingraham | The Stock Exchange: Standing Upright, Idle 83 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165476 by guest on 25 September 2021 open pastures—that is recovered or revamped in the form of a park. As Siegfried Giedion’s chapter on “Mechanization and Death: Meat” in Mechanization Takes Command articulates, the La Villette slaughterhouse, built over three years beginning in 1863, the same year as Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building, was the “first central slaughterhouse to cater to a popu- lation of millions.”7 George Eugène Haussmann’s masterplan for Paris included this central slaughterhouse, located on the outermost limit of Paris. Abattoirs— sites of technological innovation and horror—have been, traditionally, unof- ficial indicators of city limits. La Villette, according to Giedion, became “the abattoir, a prototype for the rest of the century.”8 The slaughterhouse was notable for the “care with which the individual animal was treated . each ox had a stall to itself . in which it was felled.”9 Giedion notes this survival of “handicraft” techniques in the midst of the centralized killing of animals at La Villette; techniques that were almost immediately superseded by automation and mass slaughter, the first examples of which were the slaughterhouse assem- bly lines developed in Chicago between 1860 and 1885. “It may well be,” he writes, “that this treatment in separate booths expresses the deeply rooted [largely European] experience that the beasts can be raised only at the cost of constant care and attention to the individual animal.”10 By contrast, the “Great Plains” of the American midwest seem to suggest to Giedion a different sort of animal-raising experience; the almost carefree existence of cattle on open ranges.

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