INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH FUJIKAWA

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1995 Revised Edition © 2003 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv Outline of Topics vii Oral History 1 Selected References 31 Curriculum Vitæ 33 Index of Names and Buildings 35

iii PREFACE

Since its inception in 1981, the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago has engaged in presenting to the public and the profession diverse aspects of the history and process of architecture, with a special concentration on Chicago. The department has produced bold, innovative exhibitions, generated important scholarly publications, and sponsored public programming of major importance, while concurrently increasing its collection of holdings of architectural drawings and documentation. From the beginning, its purpose has been to raise the level of awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the built environment to an ever-widening audience.

In the same spirit of breaking new ground, an idea emerged from the department’s advisory committee in 1983 to conduct an oral history project on Chicago architects. Until that time, oral testimony had not been used frequently as a method of documentation in the field of architecture. Innumerable questions were raised: was the method of gathering information about the architect from the architect himself a reliable one? Although a vast amount of unrecorded information was known to older architects, would they be willing to share it? Would their stories have lasting research value to future scholars, or would they be disposable trivia? Was video-recording a viable option? How much would such a project cost? With a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we began a feasibility study to answer these questions.

Our study focused on older personalities who had first-hand knowledge of the people and events of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—decades that have had little attention in the literature of Chicago’s architectural history. For nine months in 1983, I contacted more than one hundred architects in Chicago and suburbs and visited most of them. I learned not only that they were ready, willing, and more than able to tell their stories, they were also impatient to do so. Many thought such a program was long overdue.

For each visit, I was armed with a brief biographical sketch of the architect and a tape- recorder with which I recorded our brief exchange. At that time, we considered these visits to be only a prelude to a more comprehensive, in-depth interview. Regretfully, this vision did not materialize because some narrators later became incapacitated or died before full

iv funding was secured. Slowly, however, we did begin an oral history project and now, more than twelve years later, our oral history collection has grown into a rich source of research data that is unique among oral history programs worldwide. With the completion of these interviews, our collection of memoirists now includes more than fifty and the collection continues to grow each year. This oral history text is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

This interview is one of several dozen short interviews that were recorded in 1983 during the feasibility study. Surely each one of these narrators could have spoken in greater depth and at greater length; each one deserves a full-scale oral history. Unfortunately, thirteen of these twenty architects have already died, which makes these short interviews especially valuable. These interviews were selected for transcription, despite their brevity, because each narrator brings to light significant and diverse aspects of the practice of architecture in Chicago. We were fortunate to receive an additional grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to process this group of interviews.

Thanks go to each interviewee and those families that provided releases for the recordings to be made public documents. Thanks also go to Joan Cameron of TapeWriter for her usual diligence and care in transcribing; to Robert V. Sharp of the Publications Department and Maureen A. Lasko of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago for the helpful suggestions that shaped the final form of this document; and, once again, to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for its continuing support, with special thanks to Carter Manny, its former director. Personally, I would like to thank John Zukowsky, Curator of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, for his courage in taking a chance on me as an interviewer in 1983, when I was a complete novice in the craft of interviewing. Since then, I have learned the art and the craft and, more importantly, I have learned that each architect’s story has its own very interesting and unique configuration, often filled with wonderful surprises. Each one reveals another essential strand in the dense and interlocking web of Chicago’s architectural history.

Betty J. Blum 1995

v The above preface remains unchanged since it was written. However the intervening years have brought change. Electronic communication has vastly increased in importance as a method by which information is transmitted. We are grateful to the Barker Trust for support to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on the Art Institute of Chicago’s website, www.artic.edu. We are grateful for this opportunity to make Joseph Fujikawa's oral history accessible for research worldwide. Annemarie van Roessel deserves our thanks for her skillful handling of the process.

Betty J. Blum Director, CAOHP November 2003

vi OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Architecture Study at IIT with Mies van der Rohe 1 Study at Illinois Institute of Technology and Study at University of Southern California 7 Working in Mies's Office 9 Promontory Apartments, Chicago 11 Federal Center, Chicago 13 More About Mies and His Office 17 Office of Mies van der Rohe and Beyond 23

vii Joseph Fujikawa

Blum: Today is September 13, 1983, and I am with Joseph Fujikawa in his office in Chicago. Why did you select architecture as a career?

Fujikawa: Well, I was always interested in working with my hands and making things—you know, what everyone goes through with model airplanes and this sort of thing. It was always a thrill to create something, to think of making something and then actually making it. It seems kind of a natural chain of events to go into architecture, because I said, "Well, someday I'd like to design and build my own house." That was my ambition.

Blum: Did you do that?

Fujikawa: Yes. It took me a while, but I did it about fifteen years ago; built a house, finally. What a traumatic experience!

Blum: Do you think it's easier to build a than an individual home?

Fujikawa: Exactly.

Blum: Did you come to Chicago to go to school?

Fujikawa: Yes. I was born in Los Angeles. Actually, I was attending the University of Southern California. I was a junior there, and then came the Second World war. Being of Japanese ancestry, along with a hundred thousand other people, we were removed from the West Coast, so, I went into a relocation center—that was a euphemism—in Colorado, and I was there for about three months until I was admitted to IIT [Illinois Institute of Technology]. I applied here because I'd heard that Mies was director, and I knew Mies only by

1 reputation and from a book that Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote called The International Style.

Blum: That was in the early thirties, and it was based on an exhibition at MoMA.

Fujikawa: That was probably the first book on modern architecture that I was aware of. It was basically a collection of what Johnson and Hitchcock thought were buildings reflecting a new direction in architecture—you know, mainly from the twenties on. The of Mies's was in there. That really impressed me, and so I remembered the name Mies van der Rohe. When I heard that Mies was in Chicago, I wrote him, and he graciously said, "Sure, come," and I was admitted. This was during the war, so the school was very small. I think there were six or seven of us in the senior class.

Blum: Can you recall who else was in school with you?

Fujikawa: I know Ed Olencki, who is currently teaching in Ann Arbor, was one. Then there was another man named Leonard Claridge. He's knocked around quite a bit. I know he went out to California for a while to work for Neutra, and he taught in Colorado as well as at IIT. Then I'm not quite sure. I've lost track of him since then. And then, I think, Marshall Rissman, who I think is dead now. There was another boy from southern Illinois, Arthur Bastian. I'm sorry, I can't remember who the other one was.

Blum: Are you the only architect from that class who is today practicing in Chicago?

Fujikawa: I guess that's quite possible, yes. As I said, Marshall passed away. I bumped into Arthur Bastian on the bus one day, and I think he's still here in Chicago. If I'm not mistaken, I think he was working in an office.

Blum: When you went to the University of Southern California, were you in an architecture program?

Fujikawa: Yes. It was a five-year program and I was registered in it.

2 Blum: And then you decided to continue on?

Fujikawa: Oh, yes. When the war came I was still a junior, and I wanted to finish and get my degree, so I was most interested in finding a school where I could get my bachelor's degree. That's how I came to IIT.

Blum: So you had one year left to go when you came to IIT in 1943?

Fujikawa: Yes, this was 1943. I got my degree in 1944, and then I went into the service, the army, for about a year and a half. Then I came back at Mies's invitation to work in his office, which was very small. When I came there, there was Ed Olencki—you know, I went to school with Ed—and Edward Duckett, who is retired now. He's in Kentucky. He left SOM the first of this year and went down there.

Blum: You had one year at IIT. What was that year like?

Fujikawa: It was great. As I said, it was a very small class, and so we had Mies, and Hilberseimer was there, the city planner, and Walter Peterhans. They were all there. As I said, the department was so small that there were really no formal lectures or other teaching of that kind. It was all informal, sitting around in a group. We would go out to dinner with Mies and Hilbs. There used to be a little place called Marx's over on Adams Street, right near the German restaurant…

Blum: The Berghoff?

Fujikawa: Berghoff, yes. Only they preferred Marx's over Berghoff because they had a good double lamb chop there. They went out of existence shortly after the war. But it was really a great time.

Blum: What an ideal learning situation!

3 Fujikawa: Yes. It was really just more question-and-answer kinds of things. You can learn a lot more that way than with so many lectures.

Blum: Did you learn more over the lamb chops or in the classroom?

Fujikawa: Yes, it was exactly that. So it was a great year.

Blum: Mies projects a rather stern, formidable image. What kind of person was he to you?

Fujikawa: On the contrary. He was very warm, concerned—a real human being. I think his aloofness to the public was just a basic shyness. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, he hated to get up and give a talk or do something in public. He constantly used to say, "Well, my buildings should speak for me, not me." A very unassuming guy, very modest. I think he knew what he was doing and the contributions that he was making.

Blum: Do you think he had a sense of his own history?

Fujikawa: Oh, very much so, but he kept it to himself. And so, reporters and writers would constantly want to interview him for this or that reason, and he would always kind of go into a shell and say, "Do I have to?" He was sort of that kind of a man.

Blum: Was there someone behind him pushing him, saying, "Yes, you have to"?

Fujikawa: No. Well, in many instances, he couldn't get out of something, being the director of the Department of Architecture. He had to represent the school, so it was something he had to do.

Blum: Did you get close to him when you worked in his office?

Fujikawa: Well, the office being as small as it was, yes, we were in very close contact. The office was maybe four or five people, and Mies's routine was that he

4 would go down to school in the mornings and he would come to the office in the afternoon. He would call each of us in turn to see what we were working on, and we would discuss things directly, one to one. It was really great.

Blum: When you were in school, was William Priestley Mies's interpreter for a while?

Fujikawa: No, but Alfred Mell was.

Blum: Was Mies, then, speaking directly to the students in English?

Fujikawa: Yes. When I came to the school in 1943, his English was a little rough, but you could understand. Basically, he was a man of few words anyhow and whatever he would say he would say in as brief a sentence as he possibly could. So you really got the gist of what he was trying to tell you in the few words of English that he knew. He writes well. He's written some things that have been published, and if you read it, it is like poetry. He just agonized over everything. It takes him an awfully long time. He says its like building a building, some of the these articles or things that he's had to present. Every word had to be precisely just so, and I think it was because of his German background. Primarily, I think he worked the thing out in German, because he was constantly complaining that there are no equivalencies in English for a German word. But he wrote very well. I think he wrote as well as he designed buildings.

Blum: He sounds like a very disciplined kind of man.

Fujikawa: Yes, completely. He lived for nothing but his work. At home, I'm sure that's all he thought about—the problems we were working on, either in the school or in the office.

Blum: Since Mies was so disciplined, was it easy to learn from a person like that if you differed in any way with his ideas? Was he willing to listen to you?

5 Fujikawa: Yes. As a matter of fact, in problem solving, Mies always took the approach of not jumping to a solution or an answer immediately. That would disturb him tremendously, because he'd say, "Well, what have I forgotten?" So his approach in problem solving, which we used so much, was to say, "well, what else is possible? Regardless of how bad you think it might be, put it down on paper. Don't talk about it, but put it down on paper." He constantly said, "We'll put them all down. If you have six possibilities, put them down. If you have ten, put them down. Whatever you think is possible, try it." If you had an idea, all he'd say was, "Try it." You know, he gave you that freedom. Then, by a process of elimination, we'd line them all up and say, "This one is better than this one because…," so that one goes out. Pretty soon you might end up, hopefully, with one or two good possibilities, and then he would say, "Well, let's take it another step and see which is better, this one or this one." So that was his whole process of working on his design problems in architecture.

Blum: It sounds very logical.

Fujikawa: It was completely rational, not subjective at all. He would constantly be afraid of an emotional decision, and that's why he was so disciplined and so ordered, because he didn't want to make something—like he says, "You don't have a new idea every Monday morning," or "You don't design the way you feel that day. Those things you have to try to overcome. Do it strictly as an intellectual exercise." That was his architecture, completely.

Blum: Did he ever run up against students—perhaps one of the six of you—who really did have a good idea every Monday morning? Maybe not a full-blown good idea, but one you wanted to pursue?

Fujikawa: Well, if we did, we soon abandoned them, because you'd learn. He would be very patient in explaining to you why he didn't think something was correct, and so you became trained in this way very quickly, to analyze things yourself and make your own decisions. To see that this is better than that and so let's not even show this, and this kind of thing.

6 Blum: Did your training with Mies, for the year, differ in any way from the three years you have had at Southern California?

Fujikawa: Oh, yes, very much so. At Southern California, I had three years, as I said, and as students do, we would constantly try to define what architecture should be.

Blum: You mean philosophically?

Fujikawa: Philosophically, and constant arguments, as all students do. But then I came to IIT, and it really shook me because the first thing Mies said to me was, "Well, I don't know what you did back there, but do you know about the brick?" I said, "Brick? Well, you lay up brick, you make walls out of brick," and such things, and I thought I did. "Well," he said, "can you lay up a good English bond in a brick wall?" Well, hell, I didn't know what an English bond was!

Blum: What is it?

Fujikawa: It's a pattern, and each of these patterns evolves out of a way of setting the brick. See, the whole idea in a brick wall is that you don't have joints that line up with the one below, so that if water gets in it will run all the way through the wall and the thing would freeze and break up. What you want to do is stagger joints, and all of these bonding methods are done just for that. They sort of knit and weave bricks together so that they make a stronger unit. Well, I learned about English bond, I learned about how you turn a corner with a brick wall, how you cut a door or a window in, and it was a real revelation. We never concerned ourselves with things like that back as USC. Mies said, "Well, before you could design, you have to know your materials," the same thing Frank Lloyd Wright said and the same things all good architects say. You've got to know your materials. I think IIT was a fantastic school, the curriculum that Mies set up, because you learned all these things—how wood goes together, how you build with steel, concrete, brick, masonry, all

7 these materials. With that as a foundation, then you can go out and design a proper building, a building that will hang together.

Blum: What are your classmates from Southern California designing, or are they still talking about what they should be doing?

Fujikawa: I don't want to fault the school because I'm not sure what's going on there today. But when I was there, we were given a problem at the beginning of a school year with half a semester to work on it—to design a hospital or a school or something. We just did the design. We didn't concern ourselves with how it was going to go together structurally.

Blum: Or if it would work?

Fujikawa: Yes. These things were just completely ignored. I don't think USC was any different from all the other schools in the country. No one was following the old Beaux-Arts system any longer, but they were groping for a new direction. We had a lot of visiting critics and people, and there were a lot of pretty good practicing architects in Southern California—you know, Neutra was there, Rafael Soriano, and these people.

Blum: Were they involved in the school itself?

Fujikawa: They would come in and give lectures and be critics and things like that.

Blum: Do you think that IIT was unique among schools at that time?

Fujikawa: I think there was no other school in the country that was comparable in the grounding of fundamentals. Students at the school—I didn't have to do this, but I know in their earlier years they would have to draw up a brick wall. They'd spend half a semester drawing up a brick wall, showing every joint and every brick in a wall. There used to be constant griping about "What good does this do?" but you know, Mies was teaching something more than just drafting. Of course, you had to be an excellent draftsman to be able to

8 draw this way convincingly, but he was teaching something else. He was teaching order, he was teaching discipline at the same time, and these kids were picking it up without realizing it.

Blum: Did students object to this system?

Fujikawa: They were complaining, sure, but we did that in the army, too, you know.

Blum: How was it what Mies selected you and another classmate to work in this office?

Fujikawa: Ed Olencki, who was a classmate of mine, was a student assistant, as I was before I went into service. We were paid fifty cents an hour or something from the school as student assistants in the department. Essentially at the time, Mies was working on the new campus at IIT, and he needed help. He didn't have a separate office. We were all in the Art Institute together—you know, east of the train tracks here; tracks used to be right outside, and the boxcars used to be banging. The whole building would shake.

Blum: Oh, it still does, and the conservation department worries a lot about the vibration.

Fujikawa: Well, he had a large office there, maybe about twenty by forty feet. He sat at one end, a receptionist was at the other end, and in the middle there was room for three or four drafting tables where we worked. We worked there as student assistants, and when I came back from service he had, by then, opened a separate office in the Champlain building at Monroe and Wabash, in an old Chicago School building—a nice building. I came back in 1945 and started to work in the office there. I said I wanted to do graduate work and work for my master's, and he said, "Well, that's all right. You can do that, too." Myron Goldsmith was in service, too, and he came back about the same time that I did, and we both started to work with Mies. Myron was invaluable to Mies because he was a good engineer. As a matter of fact, I think he worked for the Corps of Engineering during the war as a structural

9 engineer. Mies never had any formal education, and most of the engineering, which he utilized conceptually in the design of a building, was all intuitive.

Blum: That's remarkable.

Fujikawa: Yes, and so when Myron came in, he was a godsend to Mies because he could determine depth of beams and things for Mies. It was really great. Those were really great times because the office was still small.

Blum: How many is small?

Fujikawa: Well, there we had Ed Olencki, as I mentioned; Ed Duckett was there and Myron Goldsmith and myself. John Weese, Harry's brother, was in the office.

Blum: John Weese?

Fujikawa: Yes. He was there. Bill Dunlap, who's dead now, but was a general partner at Skidmore, was there for a while. Mies had very little work—next to nothing—and Mies was too chicken to say, "I'm sorry, I can't use you." I don't know whether it was his pride or softheartedness, but he would never fire anybody. John and I were just sitting around, and even though we were only being paid a dollar an hour, which were the wages for everybody, top to bottom, we said, "Gee, this doesn't make any sense."

Blum: It sounds like you’re talking about the thirties and not the late forties.

Fujikawa: Well, Mies didn’t have a good practice. He was living, basically, hand to mouth.

Blum: How is it that he had a private practice anyway?

Fujikawa: Mainly because in his work as director at IIT, I guess a part of the deal was that he would be given commissions for the new IIT campus and individual buildings that went up. That was really his only outside income, and there he

10 even had to split the fee with other associate architects. So not much came in there. Actually, his salary as director, which he told me at the time, I think was $10,000 a year or something like that, and he had to plow it back into the office to keep it going. Well, anyway, these were hard times in 1948, so one day John Weese and I said, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why don’t we tell Mies that we didn’t want to [quit], but since there was no work we felt that there was no sense in our continuing to draw a salary" I guess Mies was very relieved that we offered to leave. John and I both went to Skidmore and got jobs there.

Blum: What kind of work did Skidmore have?

Fujikawa: Bill Priestley was there at the time, and I went to work for Bill on a Veterans Administration hospital in Toledo, Ohio, which was a big job. It was a thousand-bed hospital or something. There was a little chapel there, and Bill said, “Joe, you do the chapel. Go off in a corner and design the chapel,” which I did for three months, and then after three months I got a call from Ed Olencki one day and he said, “Joe, would you like to come back and work for Mies?” So I said, “What’s up? Did he get a job?” He said, “Yes. He’s got a highrise apartment building in Hyde Park,” which was the Promontory. So I said, “Great! I’ll be there tomorrow.” I left as soon as I could, and I came back and worked on the Promontory for Mies. That’s when Skip Genther, Charles Genther, was with PACE Associates. He had been with Holabird and Root, who were associate architects with Mies on some of the campus buildings, like the Navy building. Skip worked on it, and then subsequently he and some other people from Holabird broke off and formed PACE Associates. The Promontory was for Herb Greenwald. He’s a developer. That’s another interesting story—why he asked Mies to do the building. He was a young guy just getting started in development, a product of the University of Chicago, very bright and full of enthusiasm for modern architecture. He said for this Promontory highrise building he wanted the best architect in the world to design it—you know, this youthful enthusiasm. He read whatever he could find about modern architecture, and the consensus seemed to be that Le Corbusier in France, Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, and Mies van

11 der Rohe in Chicago were generally recognized as in the forefront of modern architecture. And so, he said he checked further, and he said he dropped Le Corbusier because he was just too far away. He was in France. He said he gave serious thought to Frank Lloyd Wright, but he’d heard that he was a difficult man at times to work with, that he was very strong-willed and forced his wishes on the client. And he said he didn’t know. He said, “I really didn’t know. I knew Mies was in America, but I didn’t know he was in Chicago.” He said somebody at Harvard—Gropius—told him, “Why don’t you talk to Mies? He’s in Chicago, and since your job is in Chicago...,“ so he said he came to Mies. That’s the story that Herb tells anyway. Maybe its one of those things that’s been embellished over the years to make a good story, but it sounded reasonable.

Blum: It certainly does, yes.

Fujikawa: And that’s where his association with Mies first started. He said, “I’m going to build Mies buildings from New York to San Francisco,” and he was doing it. He was going to do it, but unfortunately, he died in that airplane crash in 1959.

Blum: Where else did Mies build for Greenwald?

Fujikawa: We did the Promontory, then 860 [Lake Shore Drive]. We were working on a project for Herb in Newark, New Jersey, in urban renewal. We did Detroit and we were looking at sites on Manhattan in the Battery Park area—Los Angeles, San Francisco. We analyzed sites for Herb out there, because he was really going to do it—build Mies buildings from coast to coast.

Blum: Incredible.

Fujikawa: And then, unfortunately, he crashed. He died in 1959, and that left us in a spot because of all this work Herb was bringing in. I was basically involved in this work for Herb Greenwald. From Promontory on, I was involved in all of the projects. We had just rented new office space on the fifth floor at 230

12 East Ohio Street—the whole fifth floor, all of 10,000 square feet. We were gearing up to handle all this work for Herb, and then the news came that Herb died in that plane crash, and we said, “Oh, my God, what are we going to do with all this space?” Those were frantic times, but Mies has always been lucky.

Blum: Well, by that time were there other people in Chicago—maybe not as flamboyant a developer as Greenwald, but other people in that position who appreciated Mies’s work?

Fujikawa: Yes. We still had work on campus. The campus development program was still going, so there was steady work there. But what really filled in another low point was the Federal Center, which was a joint venture with Mies and C. F. Murphy’s office, Schmidt, Garden and Erikson and A. Epstein and Sons. So that was another. GSA, at the time, said they wanted a good building, and they said that’s the reason they wanted Mies involved in the venture. Mies actually had done very little to go after that work. PACE Associates, primarily—Skip Genther—was really hot after it then.

Blum: Was PACE involved in that?

Fujikawa: No, they weren’t, but the original proposal was that PACE Associates and our office—Mies—were in as a joint venture. It was really a blow to Skip because they selected Mies, but not PACE, to be involved in it. But that really came at an opportune time because Mies had next to nothing.

Blum: Am I mistaken, or wasn’t that a project that got delayed midstream and continued over many years?

Fujikawa: Yes, well, in fact, like most public buildings it was subject to congressional appropriations. They had the funding for the design portion, so we did the master planning of the two blocks there—you know, the one where the courthouse is, the Dirksen building, and the other block with the post office and the other office building—so all of the conceptual design and the

13 preliminary design of the courthouse was done. Originally, they had told us the whole thing was to be a seven-year program, but I think before it ended, it was fifteen years or more. It just stretched on and on.

Blum: Is it true, as I have heard, that the Federal Center was originally conceived as one large building with all the functions in the one?

Fujikawa: Yes, in the early studies. Even though we had the two blocks on either side of Dearborn Street, one of the studies contemplated putting both office buildings into one big tower on the second block where the old post office building or the federal building used to be. The old stone federal building was a block square. Do you remember?

Blum: I’ve seen photographs of it, yes.

Fujikawa: One scheme had a very tall building there. Architecturally it was a nice concept, but GSA said, “No, we can’t do that. We’re the federal government. We want to keep a low profile. We don’t want to be the biggest building in town,” which is understandable, you know. We’re not a dictatorship where you could say, “The tallest building in town belongs to the federal government.” They didn’t want that.

Blum: There is another story that maybe is apocryphal, but maybe not. I have heard that the way the Federal Center buildings are arranged—and supposedly this comes right from Mies’s idea—that he placed the Kluczynski office building on Jackson to protect the and expose the Marquette building, thinking that the ground would become very valuable and anyone who owned the exposed building could want to tear it down and put up a taller building.

Fujikawa: You mean where the Marquette building is?

Blum: Whichever the exposed building was. Mies actually protected the Monadnock building in that way. Is there any truth to that?

14 Fujikawa: Well, we talk a lot today about contextualism and fitting into the urban fabric, and I think Mies was practicing all of this. He had the sensitivity to recognize the importance of the Monadnock and the Marquette. All of those buildings he really liked; he thought they were good buildings. But first and foremost, I think he wanted a group for the Federal Center, a strong group. In a sense, the Kluczynski federal office building kind of blocks the Monadnock building to the south, when you come down south on Dearborn. You would think, why wasn’t that tower offset so you would expose more of the Monadnock? It doesn’t. It comes right up there.

Blum: And do you think because of that maybe he was protecting the Monadnock?

Fujikawa: No, I don’t know if it’s really protecting the Monadnock. Like I say, I think first and foremost he wanted a good group, a significant group, of federal buildings, and the relationship of those three elements—the courthouse building and the general purpose office building and the post office.

Blum: Was the post office the only building that had to be sited right where it is because of the underground facilities?

Fujikawa: No, there was some flexibility in its location, but the siting was to try to create a grand plaza of the three buildings, and I think the surrounding perimeter buildings were pretty—I don’t think he would have sited these federal buildings any other way, because of what went around the perimeter there. I think he was more concerned with creating a nice plaza. Of course, this gave the Marquette building a beautiful outlook into the plaza.

Blum: Outlook and view as well as exposure to risk.

Fujikawa: Yes, and he was very conscious of that strong wall that the Marquette building gave there, because you need that to work against the low post office building.

15 Blum: So maybe what I’ve heard is apocryphal if you think there was no deliberate attempt to protect either building.

Fujikawa: No, I don’t think so. I think Mies is always conscious of an environment. You know, like the IBM building is pulled back from the river sufficiently to give a view east along the river. He did that there. In New York when Mies did the , he was sick at what the new development to the south and north of the Seagram block became, because he created this big plaza with that Racquet Club across Park Avenue. He made a nice space for Seagram, and what he wanted to do there was, this Astor site to the south, he wanted that new building to come right up to Park Avenue, to close the south side. But instead they held back just sort of a lick-and-a-promise of a plaza—twenty or thirty feet—which then made the Seagram plaza sort of dribble out that way and lose the strong definition. A similar thing was done on the north side. You know, plazas became popular about that time, and everybody wanted to do it even though it was only twenty or thirty feet. He said, “Gee, they should have built it right up on both sides, then it would have made a nice civic contribution.” As an urban space it would have been ideal, but no, they sort of held back timidly too so that that space kind of dribbles out now.

Blum: Do you think that was a very prominent feature when he was arranging the Federal Center grouping?

Fujikawa: Oh, yes, sure.

Blum: What did you actually do in the office?

Fujikawa: Basically, I was holding up the developer end of buildings, and so I performed that. I was pretty much involved in that end all the way through.

Blum: Do you mean dealing with the client?

16 Fujikawa: Well, yes. I managed to establish a very good rapport with Herb Greenwald, so Mies would look to me to go out and look at the site and see what’s possible and these kinds of things, so I was constantly on the road with Herb. As Mies said, “Joe, you’re really lucky that you weren’t on that airplane that went down into the East River.” He said, “You could have easily been with him,” and I said, “Yes, you’re right, Mies.” That was one trip I didn’t take.

Blum: That was a fortunate omission.

Fujikawa: So from Promontory on, we were constantly increasing the volume of work on Herb Greenwald’s speculative apartment projects and residential projects. When Seagram came along, the client told Mies that he would have to open an office in New York and work on it in New York. They didn’t want him to work in Chicago on this building. I wanted to go with Mies to work on it in New York, and Mies said, “Joe, if you go, who is going to look after the shop?” As much as I wanted to work on Seagram, I had to stay here in Chicago and hold the fort down.

Blum: It sounds like he had a much more active office at that time.

Fujikawa: By then, I guess it must have been fifteen or twenty people. It wasn’t that big, but it was growing. We were able to handle the volume. We had some good people. Over the years everyone thought that Mies did all these buildings by himself with maybe a secretary to answer the telephone, and in that sense we were losers because we really didn’t get known, except by people like Herb Greenwald and others who were intimately acquainted with Mies’s office.

Blum: Who really did design these projects; for instance, the Promontory? That’s a very early one. I have heard there were two designs. I read in a book about a concrete design and then a steel design, and one was selected over the other. Is that true?

Fujikawa: Yes. That was so, but I think from day one the Promontory had to be a competitive, economical building. In no way was it intended to be a

17 monument. Herb had a problem in the marketplace. It was a co-op building, and he couldn’t price himself out of the market, so we had to meet a construction budget that every other developer was using. We had to build Promontory for the same money, for the same construction costs, and so basically it was understood from the beginning what it would be.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: Was the actual look of the building itself a group decision?

Fujikawa: No, I think it’s primarily Mies’s design, although I did work on it. When I was a student in that year I spent at school, when I first came to the school, Mies had been studying the expression of highrise buildings. One of his students who had gone into service just before I came, Earl Bluestein, had done a highrise building in steel with steel columns—more like 860 with mullions expressed. He had done in working with Mies, and I’m sure Mies had tremendous input into that. But when I came to the school Mies said, “Why don’t you try a concrete building to go along with the steel expression that Earl Bluestein had done?” so I said okay. The concept of that building, I think, was primarily Mies’s. He said, “Concrete is a much more plastic material, and you could express the load on a tall building by having a heavier column expressed down below and having it reduce as you go up the tower.” So that expression was incorporated into Promontory. If you look at Promontory, the columns step back. That was one of Mies’s fundamental efforts in architecture, to express the structure of a building, and this did it very, very neatly. It’s kind of Gothic in its character, the way it’s stepped back; the buttresses reduce in size as it goes up. Promontory did follow this concept of stepped-back columns, but basically, that was Mies’s idea, which I just executed as a student of his for a project in school. During the course of building the Promontory, Mies said, “If you ever get the opportunity to do a steel building, what will it look like?” and so he did that so-called steel version of the Promontory. That one, basically, was an elaboration of the concept that he’d worked out with Earl Bluestein in school.

18 Blum: You mean he had these designs all ready to go?

Fujikawa: Yes, sure.

Blum: All he needed was a Mr. Greenwald to come in his life.

Fujikawa: Right. So he did the Promontory with a steel expression, and he said, “Gee, we’ll tuck it away, and I’m sure there is going to be a day when we could use that.” And lo and behold, 860 came along, which was a steel building, and so Mies had it all ready. His concept was down on paper.

Blum: That’s amazing!

Fujikawa: Yes, but I suppose that’s how things are done. It’s like Mies said, you don’t get a new idea every Monday morning. You have to work at it, and kind of evolve an idea concept, and you hope there will be an opportunity to do it. That’s why projects to Mies were so important.

Blum: From what you say, he did the Promontory in concrete, and then he did 860 in steel. Can I assume that he was much more satisfied with the steel solution?

Fujikawa: Yes. He liked that steel a lot more. Mies feels that architecture should really reflect its time, like the Gothic cathedrals were more a consequence of the religious movement of the Middle Ages that culminated in the Gothic. Similarly today in the twentieth century, Mies felt that buildings should be representative of our time. Well, we’re not religious anymore, and he often used to say, “Albert Kahn’s huge industrial plants are a twentieth century symbol”—you know, industrialization—“and with industrialization, our buildings should reflect that—steel and glass.”

Blum: Was Albert Kahn a person whose work Mies admired?

19 Fujikawa: Well, he admired his factories, yes. He said he wasn’t so good on office buildings, because with office buildings he could get a little more emotional and try to make it like an office building—you know, be a little more playful—because he used stone and brick. “But,” he says, “when you get an industrial plant and you have to have a 150-foot column-free space for airplane assembly, like the Glen Martin factory was, you can’t fool around.” It’s more engineering, and that to Mies was much more healthy. And so, you look at Albert Kahn’s work, and you’ll see it. Where he has freedom, as in an office building, he would put stone decorative elements on it—arches and brick and things—but comes an industrial plant, which is so huge and is primarily engineering and mass production involved, it has a completely different character. You don’t fool around with a 150-foot span. It was an efficient, economical way to do it, so you do it that way. Just as dams and bridges, which Mies thought were great structures. Mies said, “The engineers are in the forefront of design. The architect is in the past. It’s just a formalism that architects are practicing because they’re relying on their emotions to design. The engineer has no precedent. He is a pioneer. He’s really up there.”

Blum: That’s interesting that he admired that type of work so much, because, as you said, he had no engineering training or background.

Fujikawa: Yes, but he had appreciation and an understanding of how these things go together, and so he could appreciate the results in the way of bridges and huge, long-span industrial plants. To him that was twentieth century, so that’s why he liked 860 more. He said, “Promontory is kind of primitive. We’re still working with concrete, which the Romans used, and brick, which is also an ancient material.”

Blum: So is the Brunswick building. In your opinion is that primitive?

Fujikawa: Yes, compared to the Civic Center [now Richard J. Daley Center] across the street. The Civic Center, really, I think is the nicest building in the city.

Blum: Condit called it, “Mies’s greatest tower to date.”

20 Fujikawa: Well, Jack Brownson, a student of his, designed it, but Mies said, “I couldn’t do it better myself,” which is a real compliment to Jack.

Blum: Now, Mies’s office was called the Office of Mies van der Rohe?

Fujikawa: No. It was just called Mies van der Rohe, period. It was a proprietorship.

Blum: By that do you mean a sole ownership?

Fujikawa: Yes, it was a sole owner, and we were all employees of his. I would go out and I’d negotiate fees with clients, and work, and they’d say, “What’s your position?” I supposed they expected me to say, “I’m a vice-president” or something, and all I could say was, “I’m an employee.” “So why am I talking to you?”

Blum: Mies could have given you a title, if not more money.

Fujikawa: He gave me a phone later because I was getting so many calls. But we were all employees, and I think, in a sense, Mies was jealous of his place in history, you know, and I don’t blame him for that. I could appreciate that. I think he was conscious of his place in history. I don’t know what it was, but in the early sixties, we were asking for more pay. We said, “Gee, Mies, we can’t live on what we’re making.” Mies, at that time, had a business manager, so I remember we all went up to Mies’s apartment on Pearson Street, and somebody made the ill-advised statement of saying, “Well, if I were a partner...“ When Mies heard that, he really taught us all a lesson. He said, “If I want a partner, I’ll go out and get my partner. I wouldn’t have to rely on any of you for it.” Oh, he really put us in our place.

Blum: That doesn’t sound like the thoughtful, reflective, sensitive person you’ve described.

21 Fujikawa: Well, he had his moments. He could flare up, there’s no question. If he didn’t like something we had done or whatever, he’d blow up. After all, he was only a human being. But in 1969, I guess he knew his days were numbered.

Blum: Wasn’t that when he died?

Fujikawa: Yes, he died in 1969, so about a year before that, I guess, he knew he didn’t have much longer to live.

Blum: Was he ill?

Fujikawa: He was home for two or three years prior to that because of his arthritis, which he historically was always bothered with. He’d had a hip condition, and in his later years, when he did come to the office, he went around in a wheelchair because he couldn’t walk. That was one reason that we would do all the running around and looking at sites, because it was difficult for Mies to travel. About a year before his death, his grandson Dirk Lohan had joined the office.

Blum: When did he come?

Fujikawa: He came before that, in the early sixties. He came to IIT but he was, I think, going to school in Germany, and then he came to Chicago to study at IIT. Then, I think he went back to Germany and got his degree there, and then he came to Chicago to live and work in the office. This was in the early sixties.

Blum: Was Bruno Conterato in the office then?

Fujikawa: Yes. Bruno was in the office much longer. Bruno came in after the Second World War. I guess he got his degree in the late forties, about three or four years after I got my degree, and then he came to work in Mies’s office.

Blum: So you were there when he came?

22 Fujikawa: Yes, Dirk came back, and then he left. He was in the Air Force Reserves or something during the Korean War, and they called him up. Then he came back and also spent time at Skidmore, and then he came back. He worked on the Inland Steel building, I remember, and then he came back to Mies’s office. So, Bruno and I were really the old-timers in the office. Then Dirk came in, and then, I guess, when Mies felt that, well, that he had cancer—I didn’t know that he had cancer.

Blum: You mean he knew but he didn’t tell you.

Fujikawa: He didn’t tell anybody. He may have told Dirk, but none of the rest of us knew. I remember walking down the street with Stanley Tigerman one day towards the office, and Stanley said, “Say, Joe, the grapevine has it that Mies has cancer.” I said, “Oh, you’re crazy, Stanley. It must be another one of those rumors. If Mies had cancer, I’d know about it.” Well, I think, in fact, he had cancer, but I didn’t know.

Blum: It’s been said that Stanley is the Claudia Cassidy of the architectural profession.

Fujikawa: So I first learned about Mies’s cancer from Stanley, as it turned out. But anyway, because of that I guess Mies felt that, well, if he died the office would have just gone to pieces, so I guess he felt that he—and he had said that he hoped that in time—he would constantly say that he hoped that we would carry on the office and not let it die. He didn’t want it to die; he wanted it to go on, so he formed this partnership in 1969, and at that time it was called the Office of Mies van der Rohe. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have agreed to that name because it didn’t change the name at all. Up to then it was Mies van der Rohe, Architect; now it’s capital 0, Office of Mies van der Rohe, which was the same thing.

Blum: He must have felt that continuity was important.

23 Fujikawa: Yes. So then, about seven or eight months later, he passed away. We kept on as the Office of Mies van der Rohe for five years, and Mies’s will said that he wanted us to change the name after five years. I guess he didn’t want us to use his name in perpetuity because we’d probably screw it up or something.

Blum: Would you have wanted to change it immediately?

Fujikawa: We had some discussion about that, but certainly there was work under contract that Mies had started, and buildings from start to end take three or four years to finish, anyhow. That was the reason Mies wanted the name kept for five years, to be sure that we cleaned up all his work under the old office name. So after five years we changed it to Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan & Associates.

Blum: That was in 1974?

Fujikawa: Yes, exactly. But at that time it was still a partnership.

Blum: Who were the associates? I know who the three principals were, but who were the associates?

Fujikawa: There were eleven or twelve associates—people like Jerry Johnson, who stayed with me when we split up the office, and Arthur Salzman and Jack Bowman, who both went with Bruno and Dirk. In my office, Peyton Abbott, Ed Denson, Gary Bonikowski and a couple of others were all associates under the old firm.

Blum: Had any of these people actually worked with Mies as you had? Did any of them go back, say, to the late forties?

Fujikawa: I suppose by then we had to get organized, because we were about twenty or twenty-five people, and I think Mies channeled most of the work through Dirk, Bruno and myself. We each handled a portion of the work in the office. My portion was mostly having to do with speculative development, because

24 I’d started that with Herb Greenwald and continued with Metropolitan Structures. So it was natural to keep on with that portion.

Blum: What was Bruno Conterato’s sphere of responsibility?

Fujikawa: Bruno worked on the Federal Center buildings.

Blum: Were specific projects assigned to someone who followed it through from beginning to end?

Fujikawa: Pretty much, yes.

Blum: Or was it, say, someone was in charge of engineering all the time on all the projects?

Fujikawa: No, no. Mies’s office had always been set up, traditionally, that one—when we were a very small office of five people in the early days, there were five people because Mies had five jobs in the office, and so each of us started from conceptual design, working with Mies, all the way through the production of the documents, through construction, so it was quite a training. As an internship, you’re able to see a job from beginning to end. There was a real value to the client because there was continuity there. We didn’t shuffle around from one department to another. Basically, we kept that up after the partnership was formed, and subsequently when the three of us were running things, we each had our own clients, we had our own jobs, and we followed it through all the way. So basically we were running three different offices under the umbrella of the Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan partnership.

Blum: It’s now Fujikawa, Johnson and, in another office, Conterato and Lohan.

Fujikawa: Yes, well, okay. So in 1974 we had the name changed, but it was a partnership still. Then a couple years after that we formed a corporation. We became incorporated for tax purposes, like most other professionals. By then our office was really booming. When we finally split up in 1982 we were over

25 100 people. The practices kept growing and growing and growing, and things were getting to the point that I began feeling very uncomfortable. I’d see people whose names I didn’t know walking around, working in the office.

Blum: That’s a different kind of practice, then.

Fujikawa: It’s a different practice completely, and so I talked to Bruno and Dirk, and I said, “What kind of an office do we want?” They both said, “Frankly, we want to keep expanding and growing and getting big. We want the biggest office in town.”

Blum: Did they want to give SOM a run for their money?

Fujikawa: Yes. That wouldn’t bother them in the least. I said, “Well, I don’t think I like that very much. To me, the whole idea of a practice is a personal service. I’m a professional. I don’t want to run a factory here. I’m not interested in volume of buildings. I’m just interested in doing good buildings, and I want to be involved in every building that’s my responsibility. I can’t do that if we have a hundred people in the office.” Well, they disagreed completely, and they opened an office in Dallas, which I objected to. I said, “Gee, is one of you going to go down there to manage that office?” “No, we’ll send somebody down to take care of it.” I said, “No, this isn’t for me.” So, a year ago, as I said, I told them that I wanted to break up the office.

Blum: Is growth a built-in problem when you’re successful?

Fujikawa: I don’t know. I think if the principals are all of one mind on what they want the practice to consist of, if they’re in agreement on what that is, there will be no problem. But right from day one I was never interested in volume and obviously they were.

Blum: You are one of the very few people, I would think, that feels that way and runs such a successful office.

26 Fujikawa: In retrospect, it’s kind of an old fashioned concept.

Blum: Is it easy to get too big and anonymous and impersonal?

Fujikawa: Yes. I’ve seen what happens to these large offices. In a sense, our longtime bread-and-butter client, Metropolitan Structures downstairs, has used SOM. They used them on the Chestnut and DeWitt apartment house on the North Side, and their experience there after that one job was, “Well, we didn’t like our experience with them because it was such a big office that we got kind of thrown around from department to department.” They didn’t like that.

Blum: The advantage, as I understand it, with having a huge office is that there is a department for everything. They never have to farm out anything. Do you agree?

Fujikawa: No. There are many advantages to a large office, because with a hundred- man office here we were able to have a full-time librarian to handle our cataloging and magazines and such things. We had, certainly, a full-time accounting department of three people. We had a full-time specification writer and an assistant specification writer. I have none of those things now. We had a full-time estimator. So, all in-house, whereas our principals now, Jerry and myself—and we had two other associate principals—have to get involved in everything from specification writing to estimating and all this other.

Blum: Do you like that?

Fujikawa: Yes, I like it. Better control. You know what’s going on.

Blum: Are you unique in this way?

27 Fujikawa: No, I don’t think so. I’m sure there are other architects who feel as I do. I’ve talked to them, and I explained why I broke up, and they said, “Yeah… They understand that. So there are different kinds of people.

Blum: What do you think your most successful project has been?

Fujikawa: Gee, I don’t know if I could point to only one.

Blum: Or, what do you think some are?

Fujikawa: We’ve been very fortunate. I think when a project is built and it rents 100 percent—either an office building or an apartment house—once it fills up and people are happy in it, it’s a success.

Blum: What do you think was the most challenging project for you, even if it didn’t fully rent?

Fujikawa: Every one that comes along is a challenge. I guess the most difficult one so far has been the Mercantile Exchange, which is under construction now. It has huge trading floors, and the required number of exits in an emergency to evacuate 4,000 people out of the fifth floor of a building is really staggering, plus the engineering problems of that particular site. It’s a big site, one block south of the Civic Opera there. It has 80,000 square feet of land on the site. The Mercantile Exchange wanted a 40,000-foot floor for the trading floor without any columns in it—a clear span—because they had to be able to see the big boards all around. So, when you take an 80,000-foot site and take 40,000 feet out of it, it leaves 40,000 square feet of land, and the client wanted to put two office towers in—a south tower and a north tower—but he said that 20,000 feet was too small a footprint for an office building. He wanted a 30,000-foot floor. So, how do you put a 30,000-foot-floor building on a 20,000- foot piece of land?

Blum: You do what Walter Netsch did with that building on the Circle Campus.

28 Fujikawa: Which is what we had to do. The upper part of the building hangs over the trading floor by thirty feet. So that was an engineering problem, to get that corbelled tower to transfer this load all the way over to the 20,000-foot footprint. We had good engineers, and they solved the problem.

Blum: Do you have an engineering staff in your office?

Fujikawa: No, we’re all architects here. We’ve never had structural, mechanical or electrical. We’ve always consulted, starting from Mies’s days, because, like Mies always used to say, to get the best engineer to work on your building is barely good enough. He preferred it this way because, he said, “Depending on what the problem is, you want an engineer who’s suited to solve that problem.” If you have an on-staff engineer, you would use him. Whether it’s a highrise concrete building or a steel building or a long-span hangar or whatever you’d want, you’d use the same engineer. As Mies said, problems are different, and you want to basically get the best man suited to solve that kind of a problem—someone who’s had previous experience.

Blum: Do you work with the same firm all the time for engineering?

Fujikawa: Pretty much, we’d like to. Currently, we work with Alfred Benesch, who’s next door, and we’ve been working with him now for fifteen, twenty years. We like them. They’re thorough, conscientious, and they’re good engineers. They solved the problem for us to transfer the load back to this building, and it’s working out so far.

Blum: That certainly does sound like an interesting challenge and an interesting project as presented to them.

Fujikawa: It’s more engineering than architectural, but you know, it all has to knit together.

Blum: I really want to thank you for giving me your time and thoughts.

29 Fujikawa: It's almost time for lunch, but I still have another hour to go. That was another tradition that Mies has, but I think it's a very practical one. We start very late in the morning—nine o'clock, as you know, not eight or eight-thirty. We go to lunch at one o'clock and we work until six. We avoid all the peak hours of morning traffic, the noon lunch hour traffic and the evening rush hour.

Blum: I really do appreciate this. Thank you.

Fujikawa: I've enjoyed it.

30 SELECTED REFERENCES

Bussel, Abby. “Mies Protégé, Fujikawa, 1922-2004” Architecture 93 (March 2004):19. (obituary) Fairmont Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, USA.” Architecture and Urbanism, no.12:243 (December 1990):98-103. Gapp, Paul. “A Masterpiece of Engineering: The New Merc.” Chicago Tribune (25 March 1984):5. Gorman, John. “Loop to Get 3rd Federal Office Building in ’91.” Chicago Tribune (30 December 1988). Grube, Oswald W., Peter C. Pran and Franz Schulze. 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago. Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1973. Harriman, Marc S. “Government as Client.” Architecture: the AIA Journal 80 (April 1991):97- 101. Honey, Sandra. “The Office of Mies van der Rohe in America.” UIA International Architect 3 (1984):48-51. Hudnut, Joseph. “Hidden Talent Competition Report of the Jury.” Architectural Record 105 (March 1949):86-96. Kamin, Blair. “Disciple of Mies Designed the Mercantile Exchange.” Chicago Tribune (30 January 2004). Keegan, Edward. “White-Collar Crime.” Architecture 86 (May 1997):107. Lambert, Phyllis, editor. Mies in America. Montreal and New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Whitney Museum of Art, 2001. Grube, Oswald W.. Peter C. Pran and Franz Schulze. 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago. Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara, 1973. Patterson, Anne. “The Future of Mies’ Own Firm: New Emphasis on Society’s Needs.” Inland Architect 14 (August 1970):11-116. Schulze, Franz. Mies van Der Rohe: A Critical Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Shell, William S. Impressions of Mies. (interview with Edward A. Duckett and Joseph Y. Fujikawa, 1988. Smith, M.J.P. “O’Hare and the Feds Name Their Champs.” Inland Architect 33 (March/April 1989):12,16, 20.

31 Ziemba, Stanley. “U.S. Tries ‘Rent-to-Own’ Plan.” Chicago Tribune (13 March 1989):1-2. Zukowsky, John, editor. Chicago Architecture and Design 1923-1993. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1993. Zukowsky, John, organizer. Mies Reconsidered. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in association with Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1986.

32 JOSEPH YUSURU FUJIKAWA

Born: 15 June 1922, Los Angeles, California Died: 31 December 2003, Winnetka, Illinois

Education: University of Southern California, 1939 Illinois Institute of Technology, B. Sc. Architecture, 1943-1944 Illinois Institute of Technology, M. Sc. Architecture, 1945-1953

Military Service: United States Army, 1944-1945

Professional Experience: Mies van der Rohe, 1945-1969 Office of Mies van der Rohe, 1969-1975 Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan & Associates, 1975-1982 Fujikawa Johnson & Associates, 1982+

Educational Activities: Adjunct Professor, College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1995

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1979

Design and Planning Awards: Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center, Chicago, Illinois Colonnade Park Apartments, Newark, New Jersey Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartment Buildings, Chicago, Illinois Highfield House, , Lafayette Park Residential Development, Detroit, Michigan Metcalf Building, Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois One Office Building, Baltimore, Maryland Pavilion Apartments, Detroit, Michigan Promontory Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 2400 Lakeview, Chicago, Illinois Complex, Montreal, Canada

33 Service: Building Officials and Code Administrators International Chicago Committee on High Rise Buildings Japan-America Society of Chicago National Council of Architectural Registration Boards Zoning Board of Appeals, Winnetka, Illinois

34 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Abbott, Peyton 24 Inland Steel Building, Chicago, Illinois 23

Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 2 Johnson, Gerald L. (Jerry) 24, 27 Bastian, Arthur 2 Johnson, Philip 2 Benesch, Alfred 29 Bluestein, Earl 18 Kahn, Albert 19, 20 Bonikowski, Gary 24 Kluczynski Building, Chicago Federal Bowman, Jack 24 Center, Chicago, Illinois 14, 15 Brownson, Jacques C. (Jack) 21 Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 20 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret 11-12 Champlain Building, Chicago, Illinois 9 Lohan, Dirk 22, 23, 24, 26 Claridge, Leonard 2 Condit, Carl 20 Marina City, Chicago, Illinois 16 Conterato, Bruno 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Marquette Building, Chicago, Illinois 14, 15 Daley, Richard J., Civic Center and Plaza, Mell, Alfred 5 Chicago, Illinois 20 Mercantile Exchange, Chicago, Illinois 28 Denson, Edward 24 Metropolitan Structures 25, 27 Dirksen Building, Chicago Federal Center, Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 1-13, 15-25, Chicago, Illinois 13 29, 30 Duckett, Edward 3, 10 Monadnock Building, Chicago, Illinois Dunlap, William (Bill) 10 14, 15 Murphy, C.F., Associates 13 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 12, 18, 19, 20 Netsch, Walter 28 Epstein, A., & Sons 13 Neutra, Richard 2, 8

Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 13-16, 25 Olencki, Edward 2, 3, 9, 10 Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan & Associates 24, 25 PACE Associates 11, 13 Peterhans, Walter 3 Genther, Charles (Skip) 11, 13 Priestley, William (Bill) 5, 11 Glen L. Martin factory, Baltimore, Promontory Apartments, Chicago, Illinois Maryland 20 11, 12, 17-18, 19, 20 Goldsmith, Myron 9, 10 Greenwald, Herbert (Herb) 11-13, 17-18, Racquet Club, , New York 19, 25 16 Gropius, Walter 12 Rissman, Marshall 2

Hilberseimer, Ludwig 3 Salzman, Arthur 24 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 2 Schmidt, Garden & Erikson 13 Holabird & Root 11 Seagram Building, New York City, New York 16, 17 IBM Building, Chicago, Illinois 16 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 10, 11, 23, Illinois Institute of Technology, Navy 26, 27 Building, Chicago, Illinois 11 Soriano, Rafael 8

35 Tigerman, Stanley 23

Weese, John 10, 11 Wright, Frank Lloyd 4, 7, 11-12

36