ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN AUGUR HOLABIRD

Interviewed by Susan S. Benjamin

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 © 1993 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 vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 194

Appendix: Curriculum Vitæ 195

Index of Names and Buildings 196

iii PREFACE

Surrounded by four generations of memorabilia, John Holabird and I recorded his recollections in six sessions from October 29 to December 3, 1992. We sat in the library of his home of forty years, a wonderful 1872 house in Chicago filled with books, family photos and drawings. The overwhelming sense was one of continuity. And this is appropriate, for John, who retired from the firm in 1987, is the last in the line of Holabirds at Holabird and Root. With warmth and humility he shared his family memories, his love of the theater and many stories that reveal the persona of the office. In discussing the firm’s beginnings in the 1890s as Holabird and Roche through his own handsome design for the pavilion at Ravinia Park, one hundred years of history came alive during our sessions.

This oral history will augment the fine work of Robert Bruegmann who, in 1991, published a three-volume illustrated catalog of the work of Holabird and Roche and Holabird and Root up to 1940. Until this publication, only journal articles and book chapters had been written about one of Chicago’s oldest, most significant, prolific and widely respected firms. But research continues, and through the availability of the firm’s archives at the Chicago Historical Society, information will continue to be uncovered. John’s memoirs will provide information on recent years and form an important personal component to the growing body of knowledge on the firm.

Our sessions were taped on six ninety-minute cassettes which have been transcribed, edited and reviewed to maintain the flow, tone and spirit of the narrative. Selected references that I found particularly helpful in preparing this oral history are included. John Holabird’s oral history was sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago and funded through the generous support of Harold Schiff of Schal Associates. This oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

My special thanks for assistance on the project goes to Marcia Fergestad Holabird for her gracious hospitality, to Betty Blum, the Department of Architecture, for her sound advice and constant encouragement and to Diane Richard and Lorraine Dezik of the Tavern Club of Chicago for the invaluable background material they provided me. For their intelligent and thoughtful care in transcribing, my thanks go to TapeWriter, Inc., whose attention and

iv skill helped shape this document. Most of all, I thank John Holabird, as will future historians, for generously sharing his recollections.

Susan S. Benjamin December 1993

In 2003, funding allowed us to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on The Art Institute of Chicago's website, www.artic.edu. Annemarie van Roessel deserves our thanks for her masterful handling of this phase of the process.

Betty J. Blum Director, CAOHP Chicago, 2003

v OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Family Background 1 At the Tavern Club 13 Chicago Buildings 16 About Carl Milles 18 More About Family 19 The Office of Holabird & Root 21 Art Work and Architecture 27 Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 33 At the Century of Progress International Exposition 35 John Fugard 37 Designing Stage Sets 40 At Harvard 42 In the United States Army 50 Following Military Service 56 Teaching 58 Back to Holabird & Root 62 During the Depression 67 Century of Progress International Exposition Revisited 68 More About the Depression 70 Public Housing and Other Jobs 73 Working with Helen Geraghty 76 More About Holabird & Root 82 The Army and Harvard 83 American Institute of Architects Activities 85 About Mies van der Rohe 86 Holabird & Root Revisited 91 About Helmuth Bartsch 92 About Bernard Bradley 95 Holabird & Root Collection at the Chicago Historical Society 96 Francis Parker School 99 About Other Jobs 105

vi Madison-Canal Long Lines Telephone Building 111 Clients 120 Preservation 123 Holabird & Root Buildings Worldwide 125 Tavern Club Remodelings 129 Personal and Professional Changes 132 About William Holabird 133 Obtaining Jobs 135 Liability 141 Starchitects 144 Restoration, Renovation and Additions 147 Office Staff at Holabird & Root 152 Opinions About the Good and the Not So Good 155 Cultural and Civic Activities 158 On Becoming a Fellow and Fellowship Activities 170 More About Civic Activities and Issues 175 The Future of Holabird & Root 180 Chicago’s Architectural Future 182 John Holabird’s Contribution 184 John Holabird’s Future 185 Crusade for Chicago River Development 187

vii John Augur Holabird

Benjamin: Today is October 29, 1992, and I’m with John Augur Holabird, Jr., in his home at 2715 North Pine Grove in Chicago. Now retired, Mr. Holabird is the sole surviving family member of the firm of Holabird and Root, and before that Holabird and Roche, recognized worldwide for not only the significant role it played in the development of the skyscraper but for the breadth of its achievements in the firm’s hundred-plus-year history. John, you have had a long and fascinating career with memories that reach farther back than your lifetime. Your memories touch on the world of your grandfather, William Holabird, founder of the firm of Holabird and Roche, and his colleagues. I have read a great deal and heard you speak about your father and your work, so I know there are many wonderful stories to tell about the development of the incredible firm of Holabird and Root, the successor firm to Holabird and Roche. There is considerable information to be learned about you and your contributions in theater as well as in architecture. What I’ve read is basically the skeleton of information. What we would all like to know is the flesh that fits on the skeleton—your impressions and feelings, the information often not found in books; the hows and whys as well as the whos, whats, whens and wheres. May we go back to the beginning and your childhood and talk about those people and places that shaped your growth as a person and as an architect?

Holabird: My grandfather, William, died when I was barely three, I think, so my recollections of him as a person are just that he was absolutely huge. He was six-foot-five, and I think must have weighed close to 300 pounds, although when he went to West Point he was six-foot-five and had a twenty-inch waist, or something like that. People used to swell up in middle age. I don’t know how their wives or tailors kept up with them. Anyway, he scared me to death because he was so big. He called me Starry Eyes. According to my mother, when Grandfather Holabird looked at me as a baby, he said, “Well, there’s no

1 Hackett in him, thank goodness.” That was my mother’s maiden name. My younger sister was brunette and very much Hackett. His father was a quartermaster officer in the army. He had been in the Quartermaster Corps in the Civil War in New Orleans under the notorious General Butler, who had gotten so angry with the southern belles at New Orleans that he said if they weren’t off the street by seven o’clock they would consider them whores. That upset the South immeasurably. Anyway, Great-grandfather was in the Quartermaster Corps, and New Orleans was in charge of the cotton market because the Union Army had captured it. I have a feeling that part of the family fortune—or at least they got started in—came from side-betting on cotton futures, which I don’t really understand, but he must have. Later on he became quartermaster general, and Camp Holabird in Maryland, close to Baltimore, is named for him. He was one of the first people who got proper specifications for army goods that were submitted to the quartermaster. There is a book out on that, and very interesting. My father said he was responsible for the campaign hat and the pup tent, among other great things. Anyway, Grandfather was an army brat. He went to West Point from St. Paul. He told my father he’d been a brilliant cadet. Evidently they keep all the records at West Point, and when my father was a cadet, he checked it out, and he said yes, he was. He was really top-drawer, but he rode across the river from West Point to Garrison, where I guess there were bars, and somebody found out and tossed him out. I guess he was not a yearling but a second-classman by that time. But since his father was a West Point graduate, and the then-president, I think, was either Grant or Hayes and they were both West Point, he got back in. That’s what West Point does for you, I hear. But meanwhile, he met my grandmother, who was one of eleven Augur children of General Augur of the Civil War, and he decided that he was so much in love that even though he was back at West Point, he then resigned. So at least this time he went out with a certain dignity. I always thought he came to Chicago to be an architect because of the fire, but it turned out his father at that time was colonel in the Quartermaster Corps in Chicago, and gave him a job. It was pure nepotism.

Benjamin: That was an important job, too.

2 Holabird: He came to Chicago in 1877, six years after the fire, worked part-time for the quartermaster, and then at night in the office of William LeBaron Jenney, who had more work than he could do. He was really the first great architect in Chicago, and he had in his office, at one time or another, my grandfather and Burnham, and Roche, and I think Sullivan worked for Jenney, too, and various other people. He must have been a great teacher. There was enough work, so all these bright young men, as soon as they’d had a couple of years, started their own office. Grandfather died in 1880—he and Ossian Simonds, who was a landscape man—and they did houses on the South Side and in Evanston.

Benjamin: Ossian Simonds was very significant in the naturalist tradition.

Holabird: Yes. They didn’t either have enough work for Ossian, or what-not, but the next year Martin Roche came from Jenney, and he and Grandfather were both architects. Ossian Simonds resigned and became a great landscape architect. They worked together on Graceland Cemetery. Simonds did the landscape work, and Holabird and Roche did the main building there and some of the other stuff. Anyway, Grandfather was an engineer from West Point, and Roche was a tiny, little Irish—I don’t know if he went to college or anything, but he drew like an angel and they made a good pair: Roche the designer, and Grandfather, who was a designer, too, but also a businessman. His hair turned white when he was about thirty, so for years he looked a lot older than he was, and then stayed young after that because people got accustomed to it. I think it’s probably a good business trade-off, white hair early on so that people think that you’re experienced.

Benjamin: What kind of work did they do?

Holabird: The firm did houses, like most smaller architectural firms do, for a while, and then they got more experienced and people came to depend upon them and they did the Tacoma building, which was one of the first curtain-wall—or so- called curtain-walled—things, in the fact that the floors were supported by columns and the outside enclosing walls were really just to keep the wind out rather than to hold up the floor above.

3 Benjamin: How did they get that commission?

Holabird: I have no idea. In 1887, when the firm was only six or seven years old, they got the commission of Fort Sheridan, and it turned out my great-grandfather, the quartermaster, was in charge of giving out commissions for architectural work, and he just happened to select his son’s firm in Chicago. I guess it was a good choice because they did a good job.

Benjamin: It’s a beautiful complex.

Holabird: But they didn’t have to go through all that nonsense like now, with interviews and bids and this, that and the other. At about that time, too, they got the Marquette building, which was one of the first kind of higher-class buildings, in a way. There was a letter—I think it’s in the Holabird and Roche/Root Collection at the Chicago Historical Society—that I put there from Great- grandfather to his son William telling him, “This is a marvelous new commission that you have, and don’t let it go to your head, but show people that this is the kind of thing you can do anytime. Don’t blow your horn too much, but look as if this is coming just perfectly naturally and that you’re capable of doing it,” which they did. And then there are all kinds of other downtown buildings. Many of them have been torn down.

Benjamin: It just occurred to me, the Marquette building has such beautiful Tiffany mosaics, and so on. How did that linkage with artists occur in the Marquette building?

Holabird: Again, it’s hard to find out who the various artists and art things were. This happens all the time. Lots of times they don’t show up in the architectural drawings unless you have kept a record or diary. Often they appear in the first brochure that the building puts out, and Mr. Cabeen, an old Holabird and Roche employee for seventy years, had an absolutely fantastic collection of these preliminary brochures when the buildings were first looking for tenants.

4 Benjamin: What has happened to that collection?

Holabird: I have no idea.

Benjamin: They’re valuable for documentation.

Holabird: I should have given that to the Chicago Historical Society. The collection had the first brochure of the Palmolive building and the first brochure of 333 North Michigan, and it discussed all the little features: the sculpture on the stone and the elevator cabs and things like that, which don’t appear on the drawings. It just says, “Art by others,” and they were to be selected later on. Actually, many of the buildings of the late twenties and thirties had little heads sculpted in the limestone, and I noticed on the drawing it would say, “Sculpture by limestone contractors,” so presumably when they got the job they had a collection of artists or sculptors who worked for them, and they submitted designs and the architects approved them. But they are nameless as far as I know.

Benjamin: And they’re so well done.

Holabird: Yes, they’re very good. The Board of Trade—the Indians and the whatnot over the front—I don’t think those are identified. The Ceres on the top is. Anyway, the other interesting thing about Great-grandfather is that, in addition to William, he had a daughter named Agnes who married a n’er-do-well, or at least he appears to be a n’er-do-well, Polish nobleman named Paul von Kurowsky. There is a record in the stuff I gave the Chicago Historical Society that he worked for the Quartermaster Corps, too. Grandfather evidently gave his son-in-law a job to keep him out of trouble. They had a daughter, Agnes von Kurowsky, who was roughly my father’s age, and she turned out to be the nurse in Milan who took care of Hemingway and was the prototype for A Farewell to Arms. Nobody spoke much about it in the family. My father spoke about Aunt Agnes and Agnes, but we never saw them. I don’t know why this happened.

Benjamin: That is the most wonderful, romantic story.

5 Holabird: My daughter is very proud to have a romantic aunt who was Hemingway’s girlfriend, although there is a book written about their love affair that certainly is not terribly romantic or passionate. Evidently she was older than Hemingway and told him to go home and grow up, so he wrote the book and killed her off in the end, which isn’t much better. Grandfather died when I was three, and Mr. Roche died when I was seven. He was just an absolutely sweet older man. He never married. He was hunchbacked and kind of crept around then, but he had a marvelous circle of friends and was very kind to my family. He loved Grandfather and after Grandfather died, he helped Grandmother through the thing. He gave them both a beautiful painting by Winslow Homer, which my mother later gave to the Art Institute. We had it on our mantel for thirty or forty years. He was always giving presents to people because he just liked people, and he was a great Gothic man. He did the Rosenwald buildings at the University of Chicago and Garrett Theological Seminary at Northwestern, and he’s responsible for the University Club with the magnificent cathedral room and the LaSalle Hotel, which had some marvelous old ballrooms and meeting rooms and lobby.

Benjamin: I’ve seen pictures of that.

Holabird: I think he helped in the tradition. After their preliminary office buildings in the nineties, in the early 1900s they became the hotel builders of the country. They went all over, especially the Midwest.

Benjamin: How did that happen?

Holabird: I have no idea. I think it turned out they could do it quickly and well. There are reports that a team from Holabird and Roche would arrive on the train at night, and during the day take a look at the site and tell the people what it would cost and how long it would take to build and give them a sketch of the number of rooms they could produce, and then they’d do it if they were selected. But, I say, they went to almost every medium-sized town in the Midwest—Wausau, Green Bay, Battle Creek, Champaign-Urbana, Springfield.

6 They’re all over. I think there must be fifty or sixty. They are not things of great beauty, but they knew how to put together a hotel kitchen and the public rooms, and they knew how the other rooms should go. They had a pat system of limestone up the first two or three floors, and then brick, and then a little limestone coping at the top, and that was it.

Benjamin: Everybody liked them.

Holabird: It was not one of the great, classic, artistic periods of the firm, but I’m sure they enjoyed it because they were making money and doing it easily. One of my theories is architects shouldn’t be too successful early on because they get accustomed to doing what they can do easily and well, and I think it’s happened to everybody—or everybody partially, anyway—even Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. They got so they could whack out a Miesian building so easily that they just did it again and again. It’s hard to believe they’re not doing it anymore.

Benjamin: Would you continue with your family, your father?

Holabird: My father and his brother were going to go to Yale. They went to the Hill School, and they were inseparable. They were a year apart, and the Hill School had a typhoid epidemic. Evidently, sewage got into the wells, and they closed down the school and they lost twenty kids. My father and his brother both got typhoid. My father was spindly, six-foot-three and weighed 120 pounds. He got over it, and his brother, who was the great athlete of the family, died. Then my father, for some reason, decided to go to West Point, and he graduated in 1907.

Benjamin: Was it the family tradition?

Holabird: Well, partly family tradition, and he didn’t have his brother. He was going to be a career army officer, but Grandfather evidently convinced my father to resign from the army and go to Paris because that’s where you went to study architecture in those days. So in 1909 he left the army and went to Paris for

7 three years and evidently did very well. According to Root, he got through the Ecole de Beaux-Arts probably faster than anybody. In Paris you didn’t have to put in time. You had to pass a certain number of medals, which I think makes sense in all colleges. I think you shouldn’t have to sit in any college for one year or two years or three years or four years. I think you ought to prove that you can pass something and then get out and do something else.

Benjamin: He was quite an artist, too, wasn’t he?

Holabird: The Beaux-Arts required that you often submit and do watercolors of famous buildings, and much to my surprise, my father did perfectly beautiful things. He’d been to the Hill School and West Point, which certainly couldn’t have encouraged being very artistic, especially in those days. It probably does more so now. At any rate, I gave some twenty-five watercolors to the Chicago Historical Society and another twenty-five to the Art Institute. We still have a few in the family. He was very prolific. He never thought very much about them, and I found them kind of hidden in the basement years ago, along with his diary of life at the Beaux-Arts, which is marvelous to read.

Benjamin: Where is that now?

Holabird: That’s at the Chicago Historical Society, too. It’s worth reading. He was horrified when he found me going through it years ago when I was in high school. I found it in the basement.

Benjamin: But what better way to learn your family history than to find your father’s diary.

Holabird: It wasn’t terribly revealing. It was very tame sexually, I must say. He just talked about going off to a party or a dance and how smashing the ladies’ dresses were, or something like that. It wasn’t really anything that I think you could be embarrassed about now, no. But it’s interesting when he talks about going to crits.

8 Benjamin: I imagine just being in Paris was probably pretty significant to him, too.

Holabird: Well, it was just a marvelous period—1910, 1911, 1912., with the opera, the ballet and everything else, and he was at the Beaux-Arts, which was great. He had a little apartment somewhere, and he went to the studio. As I say, he never forgot it. He went back several times. My mother was always embarrassed because he kept speaking the French slang of 1910 when he was back, fifty years old, or something like that. But he thought it was smart, and she couldn’t do anything about it. He met Raymond Hood in Paris, and he met Paul Cret in Paris, and lots of people who remained friends all his life.

Benjamin: Did Holabird and Roche do the drawings for Hood when...

Holabird: Yes, when Raymond Hood won the Tribune Tower competition. Holabird and Roche was third, I guess, and Saarinen was second. Anyway, Hood gave the working drawings to Holabird and Roche because he felt confident that they would do a good job. Father and Hood saw each other often. When he went to New York he used to see Hood.

Benjamin: Were they friends from the school?

Holabird: Yes. It seems to me, in my father’s day, architects were a lot friendlier to each other than they are now. I can remember my father borrowing architects from other offices and lending architects to other offices, and I don’t think this would happen now in a million years, or if you did it was because you were either trying to get rid of the guy or he quit or did something. So anyway, Father got home from Paris in 1912 and started working at the office.

Benjamin: In Paris he met John Root and Gilbert Hall. That’s an interesting story. After Root’s father died, did his mother live in Europe, John Wellborn Root’s mother?

Holabird: Yes. His father died just before the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. I think it would have been a great deal different fair and a different world if John

9 Root, Sr., had survived because he was really the best educated of all those early Chicago architects and was more cultured, in a way. He’d lived abroad, he’d gone to MIT, and he did all kinds of things.

Benjamin: Maybe more Chicago architects would have had jobs at the fair.

Holabird: Anyway, I think Burnham needed Root and was a different man without Root, but evidently his widow went to Paris and lived there so that the three Root children were born and raised in Paris. Mr. Root spoke perfect French—Mr. Root the younger—and then he and his friend Gilbert Hall from Cornell went to Paris after their graduation, and that’s where he met Father. When Root graduated there was nothing left of his father’s firm, and he decided to join John Holabird and come to Holabird and Roche, which was marvelous for Holabird and Roche because Root was a very gifted, bright designer.

Benjamin: That proved to be a great move.

Holabird: My father always talked about—evidently when you had your initiation to the Beaux-Arts, you were given terrible stunts to do, and at the Beaux-Arts ball, John Root, Jr., was initiated. He came in completely naked on roller skates and went through the ball. It’s hard to believe something like that being tolerated in 1912 or 1913. Later on when my father and Root became partners, they were a little bit like my grandfather and Roche. Root was much more interested in design, and my father had had the engineering from West Point, though he was a designer, too. During the war he went back into the army and became a lieutenant colonel, and he knew how to run a regiment, I guess. So he could run an architectural office. He was a very good director of people—firm and tough and kindly and strict.

Benjamin: Well regarded, I know, from what I’ve read.

Holabird: A marvelous person. He was a good father. He got both my sister and me to start painting at an early age. We were in the era before radio and before television and there were even very few movies. We went occasionally to the

10 Field Museum and saw nature films.

Benjamin: So he helped you to develop your own talents?

Holabird: We had to do it, so we spent a long time with good poster paints. He not only provided us with good paints and good paper, so our results were better, and he also made us clean up after ourselves. We had to keep our colors clear and wash our brushes and put them away. Sometimes he checked to be sure. I feel the same way. That’s the way you keep things going.

Benjamin: Did you live over in Lincoln Park?

Holabird: We lived next to it—evidently my mother and my sister lived with my grandparents in Evanston until I was born, and then they moved out of the Evanston house to an apartment on Lincoln Park West, next to the Webster Hotel, which has been torn down for many years. My mother moved there because she heard about Flora Cooke and the principal at Parker School, and she decided she would like to send her children to the Parker School.

Benjamin: Did it have the reputation then of being very progressive?

Holabird: Oh, yes, I think more so then than now—really progressive, but with a very strong faculty. When I eventually went there, all the teachers looked like my grandparents. The lady in first grade, Miss Walker, was seventy-five, and the two sisters in second grade, the Enoch sisters, were seventy and seventy-five. The third grade teacher was a mature woman, and the fourth grade teachers were old and the fifth grade teacher had a white beard, and whatnot. It was like having your grandparents teach. But they were, I think, progressive in what they taught, but not the way they taught it.

Benjamin: Is that the best of all worlds?

Holabird: You were supposed to shut up and listen and do your homework, and then you could do the fun things, too. This is a little far from architecture, but we

11 did a lot of painting and drawing, and my father started me thinking of walls. I’d paint the mirror in our living room, and then I was sent around to friends’ houses to paint the mirrors.

Benjamin: Did you make money doing that?

Holabird: No. The question of money—they never raised the subject.

Benjamin: Children are very different today.

Holabird: I should say. No, I considered it fun, and they considered it beneficial. Nobody ever suggested that we were doing this to be mercenary. I painted the hall in our apartment in Chicago when we moved farther down the street. It was about a fifty-foot hall on both sides with the history of the horse, and finally it was removed. The wallpaper started falling off, and my mother refused to have it changed. But the apartment’s now been sold and the horse… Later on at Parker School, I painted the history of education on the third floor, and I don’t know what’s happened to that. They were going to roll it up when we built a new school, but nobody knows where they put it. Someday, years from now, they will find it, my mural of 1937 and 1938, and do something with it.

Benjamin: Please tell me about your mother and her family, too, because she obviously influenced you.

Holabird: My mother became, in some ways, really much stronger after the early death of my father in 1945. Mother’s family was all literature and music, so I guess it was a good relationship of having an engineer and architectural and drawing father, and a musical mother. Her family all came from New England. Her grandfather had been an alcoholic. I think everybody drank in the nineteenth century. I think they had a lot of cheap liquor. Anyway, her grandmother got tired of the alcoholic husband and took herself off to Florence, Italy, where she could live more cheaply and took her son and daughter. Her son was by that time in Harvard, and took him off to Italy and he studied music. That’s my grandfather Hackett. He came to Chicago in the nineties on a concert tour. He

12 was a concert basso, and his accompanist was Florence Castle, and she turned out to be my grandmother. My mother was born in 1897 in Chicago. They lived on the South Side—Hyde Park Boulevard, I think—at that time, in an apartment. Grandfather decided that he was not cut out for the opera or singing, so he taught voice for the next fifty years at the American Conservatory of Music and later became president. He was also music critic for the Chicago Evening Post. They sent him alternate summers to Europe to cover the great festivals—Beyreuth, and this, that and the other—and he stopped to see his mother in Florence each time. So Mother had a marvelous youth. She was an only daughter, and going to all these concerts and operas and visiting her grandmother in the pensioni in Florence. Grandfather was a marvelous, marvelous man. I knew him better than my other grandfather because he lived until I was fifteen or so. He knew all the stories—the Latin myths and Greeks myths—which he used to tell me as a little boy. And he also liked taking his grandson off to bad movies and the baseball games, so it was marvelous. Sometimes there would be three older men and me. I was their excuse to go to Sox Park or Wrigley Field. They could say they were taking young John off to the ball game. Sometimes he’d take me on his critic seats to the opera. I went to see Lohengrin, who comes in on the swan boat—anyway, the seats at the Civic Opera House were so close I never did see the swan boat. I thought it was a great sell-out, but I wasn’t able to really see. He was a lovely man. He was the first president of the Tavern Club.

Benjamin: Was he a founder of the Tavern Club?

Holabird: Yes. He was also at the Cliff Dwellers.

Benjamin: Why did the founders of the Tavern Club break away from the Cliff Dwellers?

Holabird: I think partly because the Cliff Dwellers was being very holy about the Eighteenth Amendment.

Benjamin: Oh, yes, the liquor thing.

13 Holabird: …and the Tavern Club had to be holy about it, but they also had a room on the early drawing called the locker room. There is a locker room, and evidently the members kept their bottled goods in their own lockers. It’s now the library, or something. There was no bar, but later they cut a hole in the John Norton mural so that the bar could stick its head through. My first wife and I had a twenty-fifth anniversary party there, and I put her across on the roof of the London Guaranty building with a beach commander’s horn, and she and Emmett Dedmond talked back and forth.

Benjamin: That’s the most wonderful story.

Holabird: But she was the John Norton nymph who had been cut out of the mural and was therefore doomed to roam the buildings nearby.

Benjamin: So she started in that tempietto on the top of the Stone Container building.

Holabird: That’s right. When I got into the Tavern Club, there were lots of artists and architects and musicians in the early days there, and they also were open at lunch. Most offices worked Saturday morning, but Saturday noon this marvelous collection of architects and people came there. It was just great.

Benjamin: Who were some of the people there?

Holabird: My father and Root; John Cromelin and Dave Carlson, who worked in the office; Ernest Grunsfeld, who had done the planetarium and some other things; Charlie Dornbusch, who worked for Benjamin Marshall; Al Shaw, who was the bright, young man in those days at Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, and also Sam Marx and his assistant. I can’t remember Sam Marx’s alter ego who was at the office. Phil Maher was there, too. But anyway, they were all sitting around at various tables to eat and fraternize, I don’t know. There weren’t many people from Graham, Anderson there. I guess they considered the Tavern Club too risqué for them, except for Al Shaw.

Benjamin: What kind of a guy was he?

14 Holabird: Al Shaw was marvelous, they say—very bright and attractive. He was married to Rue Winterbotham, the lady who ran the Arts Club for many, many years after his death. John Winterbotham, her brother, was one of the founders of the Tavern Club. It was kind of a combination of men of goodwill and art. My grandfather was a musician, and John Norton, the second president, was a painter-illustrator.

Benjamin: There must have been a great interchange of…

Holabird: All the critics were in the club at that time—my grandfather and Charlie Collins, who was a Tribune drama critic, and Ashton Stevens, who was the Herald-American drama critic, and Edward Moore, the Tribune music critic.

Benjamin: It must have been so much fun for you. Did you know you were in the midst of important people?

Holabird: No, I didn’t realize that. And there were lots of people from the University of Chicago—Robert Maynard Hutchins was a member and James Weber Linn and Quincy Wright—all kinds of people who were legendary later on, and relatively few businessmen. But eventually they needed the businessmen to pay for the thing.

Benjamin: So even if there was competition out in the world, in the club everybody was friendly.

Holabird: There weren’t many clubs at that time, and the Tavern Club had Jewish members. They had a fancy word for it in those days. They called it their special membership, or something, but the fact that they had that was something because so many clubs at that time just did not. I had my falling out with the Tavern Club admissions policy a few years ago because I thought by that time they could have had minority business people, black and female, as well as male, and good sculptors and good musicians. I thought the club was making a terrible mistake. It’s not a club with a locker room that they have to

15 worry a lot about, this, that and the other, to make adjustments. But they still have it, so, and I think that’s too bad. Anyway, the Tavern Club was good camaraderie. I’d go on Saturdays. My father would take me to lunch with all these nice people, and then I’d either go read or go to the movies. They had a poker game in the afternoon, Holabird and Root. Holabird and Roche had had it, and Holabird and Root had it for years and years. They turned one of the conference tables upside down, and it was covered with green felt on the other side. It had little trays for chips, and they used to play on Saturday afternoons for four hours.

Benjamin: Morning was work time and then lunch and then play?

Holabird: That’s right. That went on until I was about sixteen or seventeen, but by that time, the forty-hour week came through and they didn’t work Saturday morning. My brother became interested in birds, and my mother said we had to go out and sit. We had a little house out in the McGinnis Slough at the Morton Arboretum, a chicken house that Holabird and Root had designed, and my father and mother and brother would go out. He’d look at birds and my mother would fuss around and my father would drink beer, listen to the ball game, and look out on the beautiful woods. I would occasionally, but I thought this was beneath me by that time. I was in high school with boyfriends and girlfriends, and to hell with sitting out there, looking at birds and mud.

Benjamin: Later on the firm did a building for the Morton Arboretum—much later.

Holabird: Father knew Mrs. Freds. The thing I was aware of when I was a little boy was all the great buildings they were doing. After Holabird and Roche had had this kind of lull—I talked about all the hotels, but the office buildings they built were pretty much the same, too. There are still some downtown now.

Benjamin: How do you account for that change?

Holabird: As I said, they got successful and, according to Mr. Root, one reason why the buildings changed is that the early Chicago buildings had been gorgeous, with

16 the large window areas that everybody thought was so great, but he said it wasn’t so great living in them.

Benjamin: Not so functional?

Holabird: They got cold as could be in the wintertime and hot as hell in the summer.

Benjamin: Because of the glass area?

Holabird: They didn’t have air conditioning then. The windows were presumably to provide more light for the dark places inside, but when electric light bulbs got better and when people realized how uncomfortable they were, they cut down the windows and put in much more wall space to provide insulation. When I first joined the office, it was standard that walls were thirteen inches thick—four inches of stone on the outside and eight inches of brick plus plaster. That was a standing wall. Now in the new buildings, the walls are I don’t know what—two inches, four inches? Those early buildings had walls that even were thirteen inches, and when you drew these on your drawings, it made a big band around the outside. But Root said, “That’s one reason why I changed them.” They liked the buildings that way, and it was standard, and they went around just that way. For years you did a kind of Miesian building, it seems to me. You built a grid of certain kinds—a curtain wall, a top and a bottom, and hopefully, a glassy lobby, and that was it—and then count however many floors of apartments or offices you were going to do, and something on the top, either a cooling tower or something or other.

Benjamin: Back to a formula?

Holabird: I think that’s the reason why Stanley Tigerman and some of the other architects kind of rebelled against it—because it was getting to be a pretty standardized thing, and if you didn’t do it, people thought you were pretty dumb or something like that. When they were doing the Daley Center, in the first meeting of the architects when discussing what kind of building, Jacques Brownson just said, “We’re thinking about an eighty-foot wide span, no-

17 column interior, metal grid on the ten-foot module.” That’s the way you started out. There wasn’t much room for artistic expression in that. I think it’s a handsome, tough, strong building, and the Cor-ten makes it even more interesting, but it was not soft and not really very romantic. Anyway, I don’t think those other buildings were very romantic. But that’s what buildings looked like until after World War I, and I think that’s when some of this younger generation—my father at that time was in his late thirties or early forties—began to use what they knew. They’d seen some of the Swedish developments—the Saarinens and the things in Stockholm—and the fact that you could do things with the decorative arts and they were coming back in again, and good things in wood and stone and marble. Also, limestone was available. The whole Midwest is built on limestone, and the Indiana quarries were producing it.

Benjamin: During that period particularly, it seems that all of a sudden, every building was built in limestone.

Holabird: As I say, it was a marvelous thing, and it was handy.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Holabird: We were talking a little bit about prevalence of limestone towers. It was marvelous material. It was a marvelous exterior material for Chicago because the temperature in Chicago goes from 110 degrees in the summer to 10 below in the winter, and the material has to be flexible. Lots of materials are not. Brick is a good material and granite is okay. Marble, as proven by the Standard Oil building is not. Anybody could have told Edward Durell Stone that that was a dumb thing to do, and his architects in Chicago should have, too. Perkins and Will did the working drawings, but maybe Mr. Stone was so adamant in wanting the thing, he went ahead and did it. The limestone was great, though, and you could carve it easily and do all kinds of things with it. Lots of the little pinnacles became sculpture, and there was lots of decoration on the lower floors. And they used marble and travertine in the lobbies. My father helped get Carl Milles, whose work he had seen in Sweden, to this country and gave

18 him a job on the Diana Court building on Michigan Avenue. It was one of the handsomest interior spaces ever.

Benjamin: Who designed that space?

Holabird: Holabird and Root. A lot of people seem to have taken credit for it. Helmuth Bartsch said he laid out all the travertine. Bartsch was a young German who arrived in Chicago about 1926 to 1927, who was a master at interior design. Later on he became the partner in charge of all design, and I think that was a mistake, because he was more at ease with interiors. But he worked on the travertine and the stair details, and it was a maze of shops and stairways and fountains and railings. It could have been a year’s worth just detailing that. I’m sure it was. He had Milles on that, and Milles did an Indian [View of a Peace Memorial] for the St. Paul City Hall/Ramsey County Courthouse in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Benjamin: I know that one.

Holabird: I don’t know if Bartsch encouraged Milles. For the St. Louis railroad station he did the Meeting of the Waters—the meeting of the Missouri and the Ohio and the Mississippi—the reason why St. Louis is where it is. Anyway, my father who liked military orders arranged either a private train or a private car and he got all the architects in Chicago to have a very wet trip down to the opening of the Miles fountain in St. Louis. He got out a troop order telling them when to leave, what to wear, and this, that and the other.

Benjamin: So he got people to come to the inauguration?

Holabird: Yes. He was a friend of Milles’s, and he knew the elder Saarinen. As a matter of fact, I was supposed to go to Cranbrook at one point, but I told him I was better off at Parker. He didn’t usually believe me, but he believed me then and let me stay at Parker where I was having a marvelous time.

Benjamin: When you were growing up, who were your parents’ social friends? Were they

19 architects?

Holabird: Two of my father’s best friends were Sylvia Shaw Judson, the sculptor, and Clay Judson.

Benjamin: Oh. Is that why you’re on the board of Ragdale?

Holabird: Well, yes. I think I was supposed to marry their daughter, Alice, all my life. My mother and Sylvia grew up in the University of Chicago High School on the South Side, and she used to go to Ragdale when she was a little girl. I always called Mrs. Judson “Aunt Sylvia,” and they called my mother and father “Aunt Dorothy” and “Uncle John.” Anyway, during the First World War my mother said she wanted to write to a soldier, and Sylvia said, “I know a soldier you can write to,” so Mother started writing to my father.

Benjamin: Is that how they met?

Holabird: In French. I have the letters downstairs. I have never gone through them. That’s one of my life’s works to go through the love letters of my father and Dorothy Hackett. Anyway, my father came up from the border and they met and they got married and had a little baby and then he went off to war. When he got back two years later, I was one of the first things he thought about. My sister and I were two years and three months apart. She was just marvelous. In 1929 my grandfather Hackett and my mother took my sister to Italy to see Grandmother, and she got polio on the boat coming home and they buried her at sea. My mother never really got over it. There’s a picture of her over there, the one with the long hair.

Benjamin: Who were the other people they were friendly with?

Holabird: Sylvia and Clay Judson and Professor Quincy Wright and Louise Wright were another group that they used to see often. Professor Quincy Wright was a professor of international law at the University of Chicago for about thirty years. They used to see the Hutchinses. They used to see Root and friends of

20 his. My father was friends with a lot of people. Mother didn’t like to entertain very much. About once a year, we had a big party, and my mother went through all kinds of hell, but she enjoyed it. Usually the head of the Sixth or Fifth Area Command, who was an old army friend of Father’s, would come, and people like that. They didn’t have many intimate friends except the ones he knew at work.

Benjamin: Was he friendly and close with people in the office?

Holabird: As I say, on these Saturday things Root and Cromelin. John Cromelin, who was an architect—his wife and child are still alive. But at any rate, he was a young Princeton graduate and was a lieutenant in my father’s unit during the war. He came back after the war and used to come to our house every Sunday night, and they’d play bridge or something. Later he had his own firm, but he was one of the bright, young men of the twenties. My father sent him and J. A. Sutherland, a mechanical engineer, to Russia. They spent two years in Russia building soup kitchens for one of the early five-year plans—1925 or 1926 or something like that.

Benjamin: Did your parents travel much?

Holabird: Father used to go to Europe every couple of years. He and Root would go. They went once, when the Palmer House was coming up, to buy chandeliers. I think it was just a good excuse to get to Paris. The chandelier in the dining room he bought for himself while he was buying for others, or else they gave it to him. And they went to Sweden once and came home full of all the Swedish arts and crafts and wood stuff. I think he and Mother went once, but after 1929 my mother didn’t travel for about 20 years. My father still did. Travel used to be very easy in this country. You took the afternoon train to New York, and it was very fast. You got there at 8 o’clock in the morning, you did your business and got back on the train and got home the following morning with a good sleep and a good roadbed and everything else.

Benjamin: Was there much connection between Chicago and New York architects?

21 Holabird: Lots of times there were clients in New York—I think that’s why he went—and clients in Washington. We were doing work in Washington on public housing, and we did a couple of buildings there. I can’t remember the names of the buildings. After the war when Father was dead, we did four union buildings in Washington, much to everybody’s surprise, because the office was firmly Republican, or at least my father and cousin were. Oh, I know the other person I wanted to mention is Joseph Burgee. Burgee was a seventeen-year-old cavalryman in the Illinois cavalry when Father was in command and he thought he was such a bright person.

Benjamin: Is that how they met?

Holabird: Yes. He said he was so bright, and when Burgee came back after graduating from the University of Illinois in 1922 or 1923, Father hired him immediately. He became very, very much a part of the office. He was a field man, a superintendent, and a driving, ambitious, capable person. It was just marvelous. When Father died in 1945 suddenly, Joseph Burgee really became the top personnel director because Mr. Root was just not prepared to undertake it. Bill Holabird, my cousin, was kind of young and he really hadn’t had much experience. He’d been an outside superintendent, and Burgee had been in the office for years.

Benjamin: Was Mr. Root sick?

Holabird: No, Root was fine. Either my father had taken over or he just hadn’t taken or didn’t want that kind of responsibility. He wasn’t good at it. Mr. Root had been drinking heavily for a long time. As a matter of fact, Mr. Root said when he came to the office in the 1917 period, my grandfather would come to the office and go down to the bar in the Monroe building and spend the morning. The poor old family has drinkers back and forth. The result was my father never drank anything at all except beer and an occasional wine.

Benjamin: The office was in the Monroe building before it moved?

22 Holabird: Yes. First of all, they were in the Monadnock building—the southern part of the Monadnock that they built—and then they moved into the Monroe building, which they’d built also. Then they moved into 333 North Michigan, which they’d built. That’s the last time that they’d been in a building that they built. From 333 they moved to the Le Moyne building or something. It’s at the corner of Randolph and Lake.

Benjamin: Why did they move out of 333?

Holabird: 333 really wasn’t a very good office building for a large architectural office.

Benjamin: Why?

Holabird: It was long and skinny, and they were on three floors and had one office across the street, across Michigan Avenue. They used to have office boys who carried drawings across, and it sometimes took them two hours because there were two bars below and it took them forever to get across Michigan Avenue and get up to the other building.

Benjamin: That’s a tough crossing, Michigan Avenue.

Holabird: It’s much easier at lower-level Wacker. They moved to this other building, and even then they were on two floors—at one point three. Architectural offices function best with big areas on one floor, kind of like cars are best parked on big areas. Architects work better that way.

Benjamin: I found in some of the early journals a wonderful photograph of the office and the conference room. Is any of that material left?

Holabird: No. One of the partners, Gerry Pook, decided the photographs were taking up too much space, and why don’t we just keep a few out and put the rest in the basement, which we did. Then we had an explosion in the sewer alongside of us, and water pipes burst and we had eighteen inches of water in the basement.

23 Our great collection of photographs was just nothing but a big glob. Mr. Burgee came at that period and was very bright and strong. If he had lived, I’m sure he would have kept his two sons in the office and it would have been a whole other dynasty, maybe. One son, John, when his father died, quit the office and went to work for C.F. Murphy. The other one was loyal and stayed with the firm, but one of the other partners, I think, resented his father so that he kind of rubbed this boy’s nose in the dirt for a couple of years and he actually had a breakdown. He went to Menninger’s for a year or two, and I think he died probably of a broken heart and disappointment because in those families you didn’t believe in psychiatrists. If you got sick in the head, that was something terrible but you didn’t tell about it. I would have gone to a psychiatrist.

Benjamin: And John Burgee made his own way?

Holabird: John Burgee went to Murphy. He was very bright and very capable, and he ran the O’Hare job. Anybody could do that. And then when Philip Johnson needed somebody to run his office, he borrowed him from Carter Manny at the Murphy office, and the rest is history.

Benjamin: His recent history is really unfortunate.

Holabird: Yes. Well, prima donna architects like Philip Johnson either have to get another prima donna in with them early enough to develop a reputation or else they have to manage to sign themselves out at a certain time. One or the other should happen, and Philip is never going to sign himself off. He’s going to die with his boots on.

Benjamin: He’ll probably start some other movement when he’s 106 years old.

Holabird: Well, he’s terribly facile, and he’s always had lots of bright people to draw for him. That’s all. I don’t know how much Philip actually does these days, but I’m sure enough so that his influence is still passionately felt by everybody. Father and I—in addition to the limestone towers Holabird and Root did some very innovative buildings for the times. I remember being taken to the office to see

24 the model of the A.O. Smith building, this all-glass, with kind of triangular- shaped flutes of glass all around the building. It was their research and office wing. It looks as if it was done yesterday, and it was 1926 or 1927.

Benjamin: That must have been really an incredible building for that period.

Holabird: I think so, too, and I think they were scared to death. Then they also built the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, with vertical sunscreens which antedated the Oscar Niemeyer buildings in Brazil by about thirty years.

Benjamin: Whose ideas were these?

Holabird: Again, they were probably a combination of people.

Benjamin: Was there camaraderie within the design department?

Holabird: As I say, there was a whole group of bright young men in the office. Cromelin was one, Bartsch was another. I used to go down on saturdays and go around from desk to desk. They didn’t mind me, and I suppose they had to be nice to me. I was the boss’s son. It was kind of interesting to see what they were doing. At that time the office had a huge library and a librarian in case you wanted to look up something. The library was in case you were doing a hotel ballroom and you needed some detail on Versailles or something. You looked that up. Or if you were doing the University Club Cathedral Room, you looked up Gothic detail in some beautiful Gothic building.

Benjamin: Well, that accounts for the Chicago Temple building?

Holabird: Yes. Have you been in the Temple?

Benjamin: No.

Holabird: There’s a marvelous, marvelous church on the first floor, and it’s just great. It looks as if the whole building was a church. I haven’t been in for years. We

25 built a manse for the minister in the spire years ago. I only went up there once, but it must have been a fantastic place to live. You took the elevators up, and then walked up a couple of flights of stairs. They were funny looking drawings, though, because the drawings were in the funny shape of the tower, and you could see the spires coming up on the side of the drawing.

Benjamin: Oh, that would be great to see.

Holabird: My father was very much impressed with the double-ramp Vatican museum in Rome, and so when they built the memorial stadium in Champaign-Urbana they built two ramp towers—four ramp towers, two at each end of the stadium—and the idea was from the Vatican ramps where you came up in circles inside each other. I think it still works, and is a very good way to get people in and out. What else did they do? You talked about the Temple building where they built the old tower of Chartres Cathedral on an office building. They built a very nice church on the ground floor, and then the steeple was up twenty floors, separated by offices. After the Depression, during the war, one of the big clients after the Depression was the Statler hotel chain. They built the Washington Statler and the Los Angeles Statler. In the Washington Statler, Mr. Root had the great idea that hotel rooms should look like—at least during the daytime—studies, so he put the beds along the side and put a table in the corner so that you could really picture this as a room that you could sleep in.

Benjamin: Many hotel rooms are like that now.

Holabird: Well, the only problem was that it is awfully hard to make the beds when they’re up against the wall unless they swing out easily.

Benjamin: Was this to keep the room small?

Holabird: No, the rooms were reasonable size, but I’m sure for the maid to reach across to make the bed was tough, unless the beds were pivoted in some way. Then I think they went back to a more traditional thing. Now they just build huge

26 hotel rooms, and you could put a family in them. Another thing in the way of innovation, I think using artwork was something that the office went back to. I think they learned that from the Scandinavians, putting kind of a temple roof on the Board of Trade, and then putting a statue of Ceres on top and getting a first-class person to do it, and putting the murals in the Tavern Club and in the Daily News building on the bridge going across to the North Western Station.

Benjamin: Were other firms active in incorporating the work of artists?

Holabird: The only other people who were doing rather big things at the time were Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. Of course, in the Civic Opera House they got marvelous people to do the curtains and everything else, but I can’t remember the same kind of thing happening in other buildings. In the Chicago Motor Club, they had John Norton paint a huge map in there.

Benjamin: That has been restored, and the restoration is really nice.

Holabird: In the Board of Trade, Norton painted great murals in the trading room, and he painted pictures of the Mississippi and Mississippi pilots in the Ramsey County Courthouse. It was a notion of trying to work art and decoration into the building.

Benjamin: Did the firm have a big interiors department then?

Holabird: Yes.

Benjamin: Was that unusual?

Holabird: I don’t think there were as many outside interior design firms as there are now. At any rate, they picked the furniture for the hotel. Edgar Miller—I’d forgotten about Edgar—when they did the Statler in Washington, he and his wife spent about six weeks there just painting up a storm. They painted the lobbies and they painted the little bar ceilings and walls.

27 Benjamin: His wife, too?

Holabird: Yes. I can’t remember what her name is. I don’t think she was as gifted as Edgar, but he may have let her fill in the colors. She was a funny lady. In the Diana Court building, Edgar Miller did all the beautiful etched glass panels around the clerestory. Some of those are at Arnie’s Restaurant now, and someplace else.

Benjamin: I feel very lucky that I moved to Chicago in time to know that building, before it was demolished.

Holabird: Edgar Miller—when they did the Northwestern University Technological building—he had about ten kinds of tympanums over the doorways of science, kind of bas-reliefs.

Benjamin: Are they still there?

Holabird: Yes. They’re very nice. Edgar didn’t chop them out. That summer—my one and only summer as a superintendent, a fifth-assistant superintendent, I should say...

Benjamin: What year was this?

Holabird: 1941, just before the war. At any rate, Edgar provided the designs, and somebody else had an air hammer and was whacking them out. I guess you did it the way sculptors had their work enlarged or done, you hired somebody to do some of the dirty work. Sylvia Shaw Judson did it. She could use a mallet and chisel, but [with] lots of her limestone work they’d take measurements off and then she wasn’t strong enough, really, to use a hammer, so her limestone work was done by a studio, and then she’d sometimes go and supervise the finishing or do some touch-up.

Benjamin: That’s very interesting.

28 Holabird: That’s the way most of these things were done; at any rate, that’s the way Edgar Miller’s stuff was done there. What else should I say about Holabird and Root? My father was a very good critic, too, and they put him on the National Fine Arts Commission in Washington.

Benjamin: What did he do on the commission?

Holabird: I don’t know. He was there in the late thirties, and he was on the jury for the new Smithsonian building, which Eero Saarinen won. He seemed to have known the dean at Harvard and the dean at Yale and some of the other people, and he had been instrumental in picking Mies for Armour Institute (now IIT). He was instrumental in sending me instead to Harvard, where he thought there was going to be more variety for a young man, which was true.

Benjamin: Was that a good choice?

Holabird: Well, sure it was a good choice because in the Harvard architectural school there were people doing everything. In our class we had a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts and some Mies enthusiasts and some traditionalists, and others of us who didn’t know much of anything but were trying to learn.

Benjamin: What role did Frank Lloyd Wright play in the life of your father?

Holabird: Well, my father and Root had known him all his life and thought he was a big pain in the neck just because he was so insolent and rude to everybody. But he also would call up Father and Root and ask them what fees to charge and ask them questions about things in the early days. He wanted to know what it would cost to do this, that and the other, and what he ought to charge. I guess Root and my father did what he asked and were polite and didn’t call him anything. Evidently, the culmination of my father’s distaste came when Mies came to Chicago and they had the welcoming dinner and all the architects came and Wright came reluctantly and stood up and said, “I’m so happy that there is now one other architect in Chicago,” and then went out and sat at the bar and didn’t listen to the others. He was there at the end of the meeting, still

29 sitting at the bar. He said he hadn’t meant it as a gesture, but what do you think?

Benjamin: What accounts for that transformation that took place in the twenties in the firm, from the historical revival buildings to the wonderful Art Deco buildings?

Holabird: Well, I think partly being aware of what was happening in the Scandinavian countries where there were ships like the Kungsholm that my father took a couple of times. He said that the woodwork and the interiors had broken with tradition but had lots of ornament and design. I think that was it. I don’t know how they decided that limestone was the thing to use, but terra cotta and brick had been the big materials up until this time. I think there was partly this feeling—Mr. Root used to call it moderne—and it was a simplified version of what they had been doing all of this time. They still had the first two or three floors usually in a different material. The office used black polished granite for lots of them, and then for as many floors as they could afford, they used limestone. The tops of the buildings were more interesting than they became later. One of the things that made these buildings the shape they were was a zoning ordinance. Evidently you could go to a certain height and then you had to cut back. I guess it was harder to do this in brick, maybe, than in cut stone. Evidently when a commission came to the office, Mr. Cabeen would analyze the program and the plot of land and then make an outline or a three- dimensional sketch of what you could put in that space—how many floors and where you had to start setting back to comply with the code. And then Gilbert Hall, who was this distinguished draftsman/perspective creator would try and take that same information and translate it into a solid, instead of just an outline, to show what it might look like as a building. Then he would exaggerate some of the ins and outs to comply with what they thought so that the Palmolive building and the Board of Trade and 333 and LaSalle-Wacker and old Daily News building are all kind of in that spirit. The limestone gave them a unified look, and you could cut into that and carve decoration and everything else. I don’t know what thing would have been the prototype, but all of them were doing it by that time. Graham, Anderson essentially did the same thing with the buildings on LaSalle Street.

30 Benjamin: Were the firms rivals?

Holabird: Oh, sure, they were rivals. My father was always overwhelmed because they seemed to have more people and more jobs. He said he went to one interview, and Graham, Anderson came with four men and with so big a prospectus that they could hardly get in the door. He felt very small, and he thought they were taking advantage of their size and ability. But I don’t know. They were a big business firm, and some big business firms feel more comfortable with big business architects. I’m sure like Skidmore today, they had built a number of these highrise office buildings. Anybody that was going to do it would go to them because they figured by this time they knew how. And Graham, Anderson had built Union Station in Chicago and the Union Station in Washington and the one in Cleveland, so I presume if anybody was going to do a railroad station, they would have gone to Graham, Anderson just like Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum are now the big stadium people. They did Comiskey Park, and they’re doing the Chicago Stadium. Other people can do it, or you hire one of these bright guys from the office, or you go to look at the things and you know how. But from the point of view of the client, they think this office already knows it and so he goes with it. That’s why I’m sure our office was hired for hotels for years and years.

Benjamin: Did Holabird and Root become the experts in hotels?

Holabird: We did, as I said, we designed the Statler in Washington and the Statler in Los Angeles, but a terrible thing happened. William Tabler, a bright young man within the office, got a job and was in the field on the Statler in Washington. Statler liked him, so after the war he became an associate architect on the Los Angeles Statler. After that, he did the Statler buildings. He is known as the Benedict Arnold of Holabird and Root because you’re not supposed to walk off with the best client. You can walk off with a lower client. He was perfectly competent, and he did some good things, but still, my father and Root had cultivated the Statlers and had done a good job for them.

31 Benjamin: The telephone company was a loyal client. Would you speak about that work?

Holabird: We did an awful lot of telephone building work in those days, and it continued in the 1920s. There are some very good buildings. I think the one in Springfield was considered the princess of the fleet of telephone buildings. It’s a limestone building, very much like the ones in Chicago, only it’s low.

Benjamin: I know very early on the firm had all this telephone work. How did this come about?

Holabird: Our firm was in Chicago. They were capable and I guess the telephone company selected them in the early 1900s and they continue to work now. Our biggest period of phone work was right after World War II when all the suburban townships opened up and each one needed a telephone switching center and dialing center and everything else. At one time there must have been twenty or thirty buildings each year.

Benjamin: Did Holabird and Root design the main long lines building?

Holabird: Mr. Bradley, one of the partners, did the 225 building, the headquarters for Illinois Bell. The phone company had to be design conscious, and they were afraid they were giving too much to Holabird and Root so they had a competition for the long lines building, and lo and behold, we won that. Mr. Bradley turned it over to the younger group, Mr. Pook and I and a couple of others, and our design won against Perkins and Will, Graham, Anderson, and C.F. Murphy, who were the other three. Skidmore decided not to enter that competition. If the telephone company couldn’t select them right away, they weren’t going to go in. Anyway, that was good for us because we did. The phone company doesn’t build very much anymore because their equipment gets smaller and smaller each year. The growth has slowed down. What we’ve done now is gone into buildings that we did before and the equipment is so much smaller that the buildings are half empty when we’re done, which is too bad from the point of view of an architect but probably good from the point of view of telephone service. They now use microchips and computerized things.

32 In all the old telephone buildings the first floor had to be fourteen-feet high because the cable racks where all the incoming stuff came were ten-and-a-half feet, and then you had to reach over it for a foot and a half, and then you had to have structure and ventilation, so by the time you got done the first floor was sixteen feet high. You could always tell an old-style telephone building from the outside—well, I can because it has this ungainly first floor. Now the whole thing is put seven feet high so it can fit in your living room, practically.

Benjamin: Al Shaw was the designer at Graham, Anderson, Probst and White and you said what a fine designer he was.

Holabird: I said he was their fair-haired young man, and he was very nice and attractive and married to a socially prominent woman. It was just great. He supposedly did the Merchandise Mart, or a good bit of it. Supposedly he and Ernie Graham and Mrs. Graham and a couple of stage hands cruised Europe in a Rolls Royce, stopping at La Scala and the Paris Opera, looking at the great opera houses of the world, and then came back and did the Civic Opera House. My father couldn’t understand if they’d seen all those other places how they came up with that. It makes a good movie house. It’s kind of like Radio City Music Hall.

Benjamin: How does an opera house differ?

Holabird: It had not the slightest feeling of intimacy or anything. All the ladies in their beautiful gowns who used to sit in the Paris Opera or La Scala could sweat it out in Chicago and nobody could see them or do anything. So part of the fun of the opera house is sitting and looking at the audience. I don’t think you can build an opera house that big anyhow. McCormick Place has proven it over and over again that when you try to put five or six thousand people into a place, it’s just no longer fun to be in the audience. And I told you, when I went with my grandfather to the Civic Opera House I couldn’t see the boat in Lohengrin. Lohengrin comes in on a beautiful boat pulled by white swans and sat there through a lot of windy singing that I didn’t understand. Years ago I went with my girlfriend in high school to Tristan und Isolde, and it was one of these great things with Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstaff. We sat at the

33 second balcony, and I could just barely see these people—they were both fatties, so we could see them, otherwise we wouldn’t have known where we were. My girlfriend fell asleep, but at least we could report to the music teacher that we had seen Tristan und Isolde.

Benjamin: Do you think that Graham, Anderson, Probst and White got these clients largely because of their social contacts?

Holabird: Oh, I think so. Mr. Burnham himself and Graham were very well connected. They were very conservative businessmen with the bankers and all, and you could rely on Graham, Anderson to do a marvelous job.

Benjamin: How about Holabird and Root?

Holabird: They had the same. With 333 and the Board of Trade, I don’t know whether Graham, Anderson was considered for those or not. We did a lot of work for the Northern Trust, and that was probably because my father went to the Hill School with Solomon A. Smith, and he used to stop in every time he went to the bank to see Solomon Smith. Later on when my father died we continued to do Northern Trust work, but we didn’t stop in to see Solomon anymore. Later on they selected Murphy to do some work for them, which is, again a classic lesson in the fact that if you have clients you ought to keep reminding them—say hello and see if there’s anything you can do to help.

Benjamin: How did Holabird and Root look for clients? Did the firm, in those days, actively market?

Holabird: I don’t think they had to for a long time. Even when I came in the forties and fifties, people were not marketing. You came to Holabird and Root because of its reputation, in the sense that Saarinen didn’t market and Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t market. They just told people which jobs they could take on and which they were too busy to take on.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

34 Benjamin: John, chronologically, we have made it all the way to the thirties, which makes you ten years old.

Holabird: That’s right. I was just ten. One name that I forgot to mention when we were talking about the Tavern Club was Andy Rebori. Andy Rebori figured mightily in all the architects, but especially with Holabird and Root because together when the Century of Progress of 1933 came along they figured out the Streets of Paris. I don’t know if Rebori was the impresario of it, but Holabird and Root made the drawings. They both invested in it, and it was a marvelous success. Sally Rand didn’t hurt them any because they got notoriety. My uncle, Gibs Hall, the famous draftsman, owned the concession for the nude lady falling out of bed. If you threw a baseball and hit the right thing, the lady rolled out of bed. That was a very successful concession.

Benjamin: That’s an interesting variation on the theme of architecture.

Holabird: And they made a lot of money. Rebori made supposedly a million dollars out of the fair, and that was big money in 1933. I suppose that would be fifteen or twenty times that today. And then he decided instead of being an architect he was going to be an impresario in the theater, and he said the Shuberts took him off of it in about three months.

Benjamin: Did he really abandon architecture?

Holabird: No. He put on a revue in the Auditorium Theater, or something, and lost all of the money that he’d made at the fair. Anyway, Rebori was a marvelous raconteur. He was a red-haired, freckled Italian—I suppose northern Italian. I don’t know if he was Milanesi or something like that. At any rate, he was outspoken about everybody in the world. He said when Louis Sullivan was sitting all alone in the tower in the Auditorium, he was one of the few architects who used to go and talk to him.

Benjamin: Sitting alone? Wasn’t that in his later years?

35 Holabird: Yes, he sat alone with his bottle, or something. He was very sad. I don’t know why. Nobody did more than Louis Sullivan, but he didn’t die until 1926 or 1927 or something like that.

Benjamin: There was a story about Sullivan where Holabird and Roche gave him work. Is that fact or fiction?

Holabird: Well, that’s one of the Gage buildings. Supposedly, at least according to one of the partners, they felt sorry for Sullivan and gave him the job of designing the facade of the third Gage building downtown, and it’s very handsome and very pretty. It has crowns of big floral ornaments on the columns that go out. It was Sullivan. He did it himself. I don’t know if that’s apocryphal or whatnot. Usually when they talk of the three Gage buildings, they said the two red brick ones are kind of nice loft buildings, but the Sullivan one is artistic.

Benjamin: That’s a pretty straightforward description.

Holabird: And Rebori brought the LaSalle-Wacker building in for Holabird. He and Holabird and Root did that at the corner of Wacker and LaSalle. It had a beacon on it, too, like the Lindbergh beacon on the Palmolive building. It wasn’t a revolving beacon. It shot rays in three or four different ways. In those days, I guess, airplanes really used the beacons as a homing-in thing at night before all this electronic and sonar came in.

Benjamin: Some of Rebori’s work was really very unusual. He was very innovative.

Holabird: He worked with Jarvis Hunt and did many things with him, and he worked on the Racquet Club and several apartment buildings. But on his own he did the cute little building [the Fisher Apartments] on State Street just north of Division. They are white painted brick with glass block. He really understood that glass block should be used as a building material, not as just a substitute for a window, and they’re just great. Anyway, he was a funny man. At the end of his life he was very cross about “all the cruds in the world.” He didn’t like

36 black people, he didn’t like Jewish people, and he said, “This is the society of the unfit.” I used to sit with him at the bar at the Tavern Club, and he was happy because I represented something of his past to him by this time. He just rambled on and on about the terrible state of the world. He had a daughter who married a Christian Scientist, and he couldn’t stand that either. He couldn’t stand Christian Scientists, and that added to his woes. He couldn’t stand rich Jewish developers, and he couldn’t stand up-and-coming blacks. It was just terrible. He and Shaw and Bartsch used to sit. Bartsch was from our office, and Al Shaw had gone from Graham, Anderson to Shaw, Naess and Murphy, and then it was Shaw, Metz and Dolio, and then it was Shaw and Associates, which I guess it is now with his son, Pat. But the three of them, each with their own terrible biases, sat together and grumbled about the world—Bartsch, Rebori and Shaw.

Benjamin: When was this?

Holabird: This was in the 1950s and early sixties. Finally, I guess Shaw died first and then Rebori, and then finally Bartsch quit the office because he said he hadn’t liked working as an architect all his life. Meanwhile, he’d made it so insufferable for so many of us and his own clients, I wondered why it took him forty years to make up his mind to leave. He could have done it much sooner. As I told you before, it seemed to me in my childhood, and this was after I was back in the office after the war and everything else, that architects had a good deal more camaraderie.

Benjamin: Do you think they like to fight with each other?

Holabird: They had camaraderie even if it was in finding fellow grumblers. The other people who I used to see at the Tavern Club were the architects Fugard—John Fugard, Sr., and John Fugard, Jr. Fugard had been involved with what was called the Pure Oil building—I think it was formerly the Jewelers’ Building—and he built half the buildings on East Lake Shore Drive—those very handsome buildings. Benny Marshall, who did the Drake Hotel, did half of them and Fugard did the others.

37 Benjamin: Did the Pure Oil building have some really odd kind of garage in it?

Holabird: It was one of the first buildings that had a drive-up garage. You drove in from Lower Level Wacker and you went up I don’t know how many floors—four or five floors.

Benjamin: Wasn’t that really early for that?

Holabird: As I say, that had not been thought of. First of all, there hadn’t been that many cars until the twenties. Parking was not a problem. It only became a problem probably after World War II. You could park anywhere on the street. Then they began to get parking garages downtown, and then more and more, and multilevel. And then all apartment buildings finally had to have garages.

Benjamin: How do you remember John Fugard?

Holabird: He’s not famous for innovations, but he did some fine buildings. When we did Stateway Garden Apartments he was the head of the Public Housing in Chicago and he thought we made a contribution in design. I worked on that one summer. I was still teaching at Francis Parker School, but I began to see the writing on the wall and I went back and worked at Holabird and Root one summer. They gave me the plan of public housing, which was very interesting. I learned a great deal. We built quite good units. There was an awful lot of government—not interference, but government dictation on what you did. Part of public housing in Chicago and all over the country was they wanted it to look like public housing, I really think. They wanted the private taxpayer to see that it looked kind of cheap. I’m serious. I asked somebody, “Why do we have to make all the buildings the same height?” It was twenty-two stories; no higher, no lower. They didn’t say “two cheap elevators,” but they said, “Two workable elevators can handle that tall of a building.” So the reason why you drive down State Street and you see row upon row of all twenty-two-story buildings, somebody decided that’s what two elevators could handle.

38 Benjamin: You mentioned fly-casting. Would you please elaborate?

Holabird: My grandfather and my father and I all became good fly casters. It was something I learned as I grew up, and this was marvelous. My father helped me draw and paint and do this, but I think it was best when we went up to Coleman Lake in Wisconsin. When I first went up, our log cabin hadn’t really been much changed in fifty years. It was built of huge, Norway pine logs, twenty to twenty-four inches, piled on top of each other. It had no electricity, so you lit oil lamps when you got in or you staggered around with flashlights. We rode about a half to three-quarters of a mile over to a clubhouse for meals. It was just wonderful, and the fishing was good.

Benjamin: Where is Coleman Lake in Wisconsin?

Holabird: It’s up near Pembine, Wisconsin. My grandfather had evidently known the people—the robber lumbermen. In those days there was no such thing as selective cutting. The lumber people just moved across the state of Michigan and the state of Wisconsin and cut down everything. There was nothing but stumps left. My father said when he was a little boy you could see all over the country because there was not a tree standing. My cousin Bill became a member about ten years ago, and he went up a couple of times. Now it’s a forest again. It’s just marvelous. But when we were little, there was a whole chain of lakes and ponds and rivers, and I was able to run wild. My father gradually taught me not to hook myself in the face with a fly or hook anybody else in the boat or hook trees. It’s a marvelous skill. I don’t suppose it really produces much, but it’s just fun to be all by yourself, down a pretty river. This is kind of an excuse for not just walking down the river. I think my brother going bird watching had probably the same feelings that I did going fly- casting. He was out alone with his binoculars doing something, but he had a reason rather than just jogging aimlessly down a road. I’m sure joggers have noble feelings, too. Anyway, I learned to do this, and it was fun. I’d often go out for six or seven hours by myself. My mother didn’t seem to worry about me. I’d drive the car somewhere, and then go walking up rivers. I didn’t drown myself and managed to come back. I didn’t catch much fish, but it was a

39 marvelous thing to do.

Benjamin: As a youngster, you began to draw with your father’s encouragement. How did that develop along the years?

Holabird: I told you yesterday about how we started drawing, and my father gave me walls to do, and so when I was a senior at Parker there was a play and the art man gave me not only a wall to do but started me doing scenery. The next year at Harvard when I was a freshman there was a notice in the Crimson for tryouts for the dramatic club. I didn’t know what the dramatic club was, but they were so surprised to find out that somebody wanted to work in scenery and not be an actor. Shortly after this it turns out that the father of one of the people in the dramatic club was the manager of the Boston Symphony. The Boston Symphony was doing a pension fund concert and they got me to do some sets for the Boston Symphony. Robert Edmund Jones worked on Koussevitzky’s costume for the Farewell Symphony of Haydn where all the players gradually leave their seats. They’re all in eighteenth-century costumes and they blow out their candles and leave and only the conductor at the piano is left. I did the Daniel Jazz sets and then I went to New York and Robert Edmund Jones and I sat together in a bar. I was eighteen years old. I was absolutely out of my mind. I think my life has gone downhill ever since. But I discovered I like working the theater, and I started doing sets for the dramatic club, all their plays the first year, and then I got involved with the student union theater group, which was kind of the leftist group. There were various house operas and Hasty Pudding. The Society Club put on an annual musical, and pretty soon I was doing all the scenery sets at Harvard. I knew where all the lumber was and all the flats and all the paints, and gradually trained a staff. If we’d only been paid for it, it would have been marvelous. The great thing about doing a set is that if you do it properly and work with the director, you could make a contribution. Then if you did it early enough, actors started using it and you could see how to improve it so you could make it better. With architecture, you have to do the whole thing ahead of time and just guess that it’s going to look right. It’s awfully hard to make last-minute changes. Lots of architects do, but it’s expensive. With flats you didn’t have to, which was marvelous. For summer,

40 some of the graduating seniors at Harvard were rich, and they opened a summer theater at Marblehead. I spent fifteen hours a day, I guess, being the carpenter, painter and scenery crew. I learned enough there to last me. I taught school for seven years after the war, and I learned there listening to directors and listening to what went on. I remember this marvelous stage manager, Ambrose Costello, who taught me about the kind of tolerance an audience should have and that you shouldn’t milk an audience. You should treat them right. They were the ones who paid their money, and you treat them like good clients and not make them sit in the dark, not make them wait too long for a scenery change. When you clapped at the end of the thing, you should clap enough and you should listen to the sound and plan your curtain calls that way, not trying to scrape out. At any rate, Ambrose Costello was one of my great people.

Benjamin: And who was Costello?

Holabird: He was just a New York stage manager, an old professional, but he ran us at night. In the daytime there were five of us who sat building scenery and painting it. There was a designer named Ben Edwards who is still alive. He just did that show A Streetcar Named Desire in New York—I’m sure he’s done it before—the one with Alex Baldwin and whoever else was in that show. Anyway, Ben Edwards. I was eighteen or nineteen and he must have been twenty-three or twenty-four, and he always had a hangover. I had to wake him up in the morning and say, “Could you give us some kind of a sketch of what the show is going to be for next week?” We had a new show every week, and sometimes they were three-set shows, the old-fashioned ones with box sets. This was a new theater, and we had no flats whatsoever, so the first two sets we had to do from scratch because you took three sets away from the first show and you had to have the other three sets all ready for the second show.

Benjamin: Did what you learned from that experience translate into architecture?

Holabird: The army was a cinch after this, and architecture was a lot more interesting. I didn’t ever have to do much drawing of sets. I used to make models, and alas,

41 an architect is supposed to make drawings, but it was a marvelous experience, especially since we had to build on a budget and we didn’t have much money. In those days there wasn’t a theater at Harvard, so we had to bring in lights and switchboard and hang the lights on portable rigs on the balcony and on booms and whatnot. And this was my extracurricular life at Harvard. I used to occasionally go to class, but I would disappear often for two weeks at a time to do this and then try and catch up. But I managed to keep on the dean’s list somehow. It was difficult. When I went into the Army Corps of Engineers, as it turned out this was more of the same kind of thing—trying to improvise what you were doing with whatever you had on hand, which was good.

Benjamin: Were there other students in the architectural program at Harvard who were also in theater?

Holabird: Well, I drafted a couple of my classmates when I needed people to help paint and whatnot. As a matter of fact, there were three of them. Bob Neiley, who was a class behind me, runs a very good architectural preservation office in Cambridge. And Rolland Thompson, who was a class below me, worked on the stage sets with me, and he’s an architect in Cambridge. He was with a firm in New York, but I think he’s back in Cambridge. Another man in my class, Ted Weren, died some years ago, but he was just great. There were four or five of us, as I say. We learned rough carpentry and rough painting. Both of my wives have always said that it didn’t help me much for my interiors. I walked back twenty feet from the stage sets, which is the first row in the audience, and if it looked good at twenty feet away I said, “The hell with it”—that’s the sense I brought to my shelving and painting in the houses that we built, as if they were going to be viewed or seen at twenty feet. It was really tough because you couldn’t buy prefab paste. You had a gluepot and powdered colors, and you had to mix them dry because you usually put some kind of white in. Once you put water in they got much darker, and if you didn’t have enough paint you were really at a loss because then you had to start all over again and try and match. So, there was lots of speckling. I’ve forgotten what they used to call it. It looked like Seurat when we got done. You took a paintbrush with different colors and tried to even up the mistakes. Supposedly it brought out the colors

42 in the flat by catching the light, but I used it to try and even out my mistakes if I couldn’t match the colors better. Anyway, we took brushes loaded with paint and just kind of flipped them at the thing so you got little dots all over, speckling it. I don’t know if they still do that or not.

Benjamin: How did that experience at Harvard serve you?

Holabird: I used a lot of that in the army, and I used a lot of it in architecture, too, because it was kind of fun doing this, especially using light, how to use spotlights and cover people. Unfortunately, actors were difficult to work with because they often wouldn’t stay where they were supposed to. They liked moving around the stage, then they wanted there to be light wherever they went. This was hard.

Benjamin: That was the late thirties, early forties. What was Harvard like then when you weren’t doing theater?

Holabird: I had a marvelous time. The first year I didn’t, because I was working hard and didn’t really understand how to relax and do the things, and I felt driven to do all kinds of things.

Benjamin: Were you in the architecture curriculum right away?

Holabird: No, they didn’t have one. When I first went there, they didn’t. They started when I was a sophomore. Gropius had just come to Harvard a year or so earlier, but by my sophomore year in 1939-1940 they started undergraduate architectural sciences, which was just great.

Benjamin: Did he start it?

Holabird: Harvard started it. Before that you were supposed to be a fine arts major.

Benjamin: Is that what you started in?

43 Holabird: I did. Typically at Harvard you were a fine arts major for four years, and then you took three years of architecture afterwards. But with architectural sciences supposedly if you entered you got out in six years and they gave you credit for essentially one year of graduate school when you got out, which is what happened to me. I went back after the war and had two years, which was good. But I started in fine arts and I was doing this work at night in the theater. After the summer of working fifteen hours a day for nine weeks, I was so exhausted that when I got back to school I took it easy and it turned out that was the way Harvard was supposed to work, or at least it was for me. I still was able to do my work and I was doing these extracurricular things. Soon they wanted me to do decorations for the various dances, and I started doing linoleum blocks for the leftist magazine and all these shows, and by the time of the end of the second year, much to my surprise, I was becoming a big man on campus. It was awful.

Benjamin: Do you mean you were becoming a big leftist on campus?

Holabird: Well, I was everything. I was all sorts of things. By the time I was a senior I was on the senior council and the head of Lowell House and the head of this and that. I was very much surprised at myself. As I say, it was a tough act to try and stay on the dean’s list, but I somehow did. Well, I did well in the courses I took in architecture. Josef Albers came my junior year. Gropius got him from Black Mountain College, and that was great. He was there for half a year, and it was just marvelous.

Benjamin: Did you have him for a teacher?

Holabird: He was one of my teachers, and there were about six of us.

Benjamin: Did you study his color theory?

Holabird: He said it was too bad we were nineteen. We ought to be three years old to start out with what he was doing. He brought all kinds of colored papers. We did Bauhaus stuff. We folded papers and we got color vibrations and we drew,

44 and he was just marvelous, very exciting. He didn’t really like Harvard because we weren’t as dedicated as the people at Black Mountain were. They were there all the time. There they kind of lived art. When they cooked, they had meals with various color combinations and meals with various textures. It must have been a God-awful place to eat. And we didn’t come and hang around him very much because a lot of us had other things to do. I’d come and do my lab with Albers, and then I’d have to go and make scenery or do something like that.

Benjamin: Was there camaraderie among the teachers and students?

Holabird: Quite a bit with Albers. When we had our final exam at the end of junior year, we were showing our work, Gropius came and Dean Hudnut and Albers, and we all had schnapps. It was a very happy affair. We hadn’t realized how schnapps could really cheer us all up and make everybody happy. I think Hudnut and Gropius thought what we were doing was kind of foolish, but that’s all right.

Benjamin: Was Gropius accessible?

Holabird: I really never saw Gropius, even then and afterwards. Gropius worked with what was then called the master’s program, which I suppose would not be called a Ph.D. program because everybody took elevated degrees after the war. Gropius worked with about ten or eleven of these kind of very gifted people who came for a year as master students. He influenced the rest of the school, because I presume he hired and fired and people knew it was his school.

Benjamin: What was the direction like? Was it like the Bauhaus?

Holabird: It was the so-called International Style, but not as hard-boiled as Mies made it. Gropius used lots of brick and exposed concrete and different window sizes, where Mies would have everything the same. It was the standard that a living room window was large and a bedroom window was smaller and a bathroom window and kitchen windows were smaller than that. There was a certain

45 amount of in and out and play on the exterior which, again, by the time Mies was teaching in Chicago it was really quite rigid. You made a series of rectangular solids and that was it. You didn’t carve out holes inside. The same junior year Philip Johnson came. He had suddenly decided that architecture was for him. He had been curator at the Museum of Modern Art in the architectural department. I guess he fell in love [with architecture], so he came to Harvard with his manservant and lived in the hotel. We certainly were surprised. He joined our class then, and he dismayed the faculty by buying a piece of land in Cambridge and building a traditional Miesian glass house where you put an eight-foot-high fence around the whole lot and then you put a roof over one-third of it, and that was his house. I don’t know if it still exists or not. It disturbed the neighbors because most houses there had open front lawns and open back lawns, and here he built an eight-foot-high fence. It looked like a construction barricade. The house was very nice looking, and all the faculty who couldn’t afford to build their own house would come out and stare at Mies-rampant. But he was very nice, and he certainly stimulated the school. Wherever Philip Johnson goes, I think stimulation is in his wake.

Benjamin: What impact did he have?

Holabird: You had to argue with him, and he was very gifted and bright, and cultivated.

Benjamin: He was older. Did that matter?

Holabird: Actually, it was good to have different age students there. When I went back after the war, we all had been gone for four years, and my class of six before the war—none of us got killed, luckily—but when I went back the class was forty-six students instead of six. There were that many more students at the school. And then we were all by this time twenty-six or twenty-seven, and it was a very different kind of school because we were kind of grownups.

Benjamin: Did you have I.M. Pei as a teacher?

Holabird: He was my teacher in the graduate school. He just came from China during the

46 war. I think he went to MIT and then studied with Gropius. He was one of these master students with Gropius, then he taught for two or three years and then went off. I had him for, I think, two problems in the summer and another long problem. He was marvelous to work for, but I got angry because he was very much into Chinese houses, which are evidently a series of interior courts. In China, when the daughter moved in, another court was built and her rooms were around that, and the widowed mother had another courtyard. So, we built these big buildings. One of our problems was a school building for Winchester High School, I think, and it looked like a Chinese court because of holes going in and holes going out. When I did the Parker School for my thesis in 1948, it had some Chinese qualities, too, I think.

Benjamin: In the courtyard?

Holabird: I went to Dean Hudnut and said, “I think I’m tired of doing Chinese courts,” and he said, “Do you want to graduate or do you want to be an artist?” I said, “Maybe I should graduate first,” and he said, “That’s good thinking.”

Benjamin: Did it seem logical for you, in your sophomore year, to shift from fine arts into architecture?

Holabird: Oh, it was such a relief. The Fine Arts Department then wasn’t interested in artists at all or art. It was really interested in the history of art and all that business. There was a freshman course called Fine Arts 1-A, and you did a series of plates based on color and tone, and then you copied a Greek vase drawing and you copied a something or other. You worked ten hours on these things. There was no playing around. But one time I thought my drawing was so nice, I mounted it and put a border around it. The instructor gave it a good mark, but said, “Please, let’s not have any art school stuff here.” Finally you hit what was called the total visual effect, and they had a little still life of a plant and an apple and a piece of cloth, and you had to sit and show light and shadow and whatnot. My father, when I took them home I told him that this represented pain and outrage and everything else, and he said he thought they were pretty good. At any rate, it was tough. The next year they opened up a life

47 class for the architects, and then, as I say, we had Albers and a couple of other people who let us do all kinds of things, so that was good.

Benjamin: Sigfried Giedion lectured at Harvard during those years. Did you have him?

Holabird: Yes, he was there. He was on the faculty. I went and heard him. He gave some public lectures. I went and talked to him because my father knew him, and he was very nice. He’s the one who mentioned the Brewster Apartments, the building down the street, in his book Space, Time and Architecture. I have all his books.

Benjamin: What was he like?

Holabird: A funny little man. And Lewis Mumford used to come and talk, too. He was a lovely man to listen to. And Frank Lloyd Wright came and talked to us at one point.

Benjamin: What was he like?

Holabird: Well, he loved talking to young people because he just wowed us. He said, "What are you doing in a place like this? Get out of Harvard! Go off to plant a telegraph pole, plow a furrow! Get out of here!” Some young man from Australia or Hawaii said, “It’s taken me five years to get here, Mr. Wright,” and Wright said, “Get out! Go do something useful,” or “Come to Taliesin” was the other thing.

Benjamin: Was he seriously promoting his own school at Harvard?

Holabird: He said, “You could come there,” and, “We’ll teach you what architecture is all about.” He’d talked the night before in Boston to some very social group, and he looked around the room and said, “What this city needs is 300 first-class funerals”—how to cheer up your audience. I saw him for the last time when he came to Chicago, about ten or twelve years later, with his Mile-High building project. There was a ballroom in the Sherman, and he had this huge drawing.

48 We always wondered how he got his architectural students to draw it—it was a long piece of tracing paper—and whether each one got a foot to draw or two feet or something, because it just went on and on. I think it was sixteenth-inch scale, and it must have been twenty feet high or eighteen feet high because they drew the whole thing. I sat, as a matter fact, that night with Rebori and somebody else, and we had a Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte at our table, wearing the costume and telling us what to think when Mr. Wright said this, that and the other.

Benjamin: What’s funny is that still happens.

Holabird: But that’s beside the point.

Benjamin: What was Harvard like after the war?

Holabird: Harvard was great. It was very difficult to leave it after the war when I went back, because everything seemed to be happening in Cambridge—just the people there and I knew my way around. After the war there was something called the Veterans Theater Workshop. My first wife appeared in “St. Joan,” and I did the sets. It was one of the great productions of all time. Some people still talk to me and say that’s the thing they remember. But I figured I ought to go back to Holabird and Root. My father died the last day of the war, and I felt it behooved me to go back. I guess it was a good idea, but the office seemed poor. The difference my father would have made is that he admired young designers and he would have kept people. He didn’t feel threatened by them, but the partners then did.

Benjamin: Who were the partners then?

Holabird: Well, Bartsch was one, and Bartsch couldn’t stand bright, young people. The whole point of running offices is you get the best and brightest, and if you could get them cheap and use them as long as you can until either they want to quit or you have to pay them more to keep them. That’s typical. You asked about architectural fees. Architecture was not a great-paying profession. Young

49 lawyers come out of school and get into high figures right away, but young architects would take any kind of a job. I think they’re still vastly underpaid. They have as long a training period, college-wise, as a lawyer.

Benjamin: In spite of the fact that you were heir to Holabird and Root, how did you make it as a young architect?

Holabird: I don’t know. When I first came to the office in 1948, I think I was getting $240 a month, and finally I went and taught school for seven years. I started out at $300 a month as a schoolteacher, which was a big, big change in those days. You multiply everything by about ten or twelve now, so that the difference of sixty dollars would be six or seven hundred dollars nowadays. It made a difference. I had a terribly difficult time, and I’m sure part of this business was a long mourning period for my father. This I discovered years later when I had the advantage of a very nice doctor and we talked things over. But the office didn’t seem right, and I think the Burgee people resented me a little bit because I was the boss’s son. I always felt peculiar about nepotism anyhow. The good thing about the seven years’ teaching experience was that I did this well. I was happy doing it, and we did some good things, and so when I went back to the office in 1955, I had a feeling that I didn’t have to bow down at all, that I had earned myself.

Benjamin: What was your army experience like?

Holabird: I did well in the army. I didn’t get promoted very high or do anything, but I think I was a good army officer. It was good training because as a company officer you were running a group about the size of an architectural office. It was 120 people, and at Holabird and Root our fighting strength was always somewhere around 130 to 140, so that was good. I liked the army because I met people from all over the country for the first time in my life. At Harvard you met lots of different people, but the army was very different—Texans and Southerners persecuting Southerners. When I first became an officer I worked with black troops for three months, which was an eye-opener since I’d lived such a sheltered life. I’d never been associated with any kind of Negroes, as we

50 called them at that time, and the Southerners were just perfectly awful, telling me if you said anything decent you were a “nigger-lover.” It was very hard, but I learned from them. We could see that we were taking these very primitive, Southern black people and teaching them about plumbing and being clean and learning and doing things. You had a feeling that after the war they weren’t going to just go back and live in some old shanty ever afterwards. They might want to have some of that good life themselves. To the everlasting goodness of Harry Truman, he stopped the army from being a Jim Crow army, which it was, unfortunately, during the war. I think we probably would have gotten through the war a lot faster if we’d had some good, hefty blacks on our side. Look at the National Football League. In the army, I went from the black training troops to a camouflage outfit because Mr. Root, who had been a camouflage officer in World War I, said that would be skillful and a good thing for me to do because of my interest in stage design. It turned out all they were really going to do was weave burlap netting for gun things. That didn’t seem very adventurous to me, so I discovered that I could volunteer for the parachute troops and nobody would turn me down. The company or battalion commander had to accept my transfer, and so I did and went to Fort Benning and became a parachutist and engineer.

Benjamin: Why did you pick being a parachutist?

Holabird: Because I could leave the outfit. I could leave where I was and get transferred. Almost everybody else in the parachute troops were not there because they loved parachuting, they were all people who had been somewhere else and discovered that this was a way out. So we were at the place of the last resort. We were all the mugwumps and disadvantaged who had joined the parachute troops only to get away from something else. We were the lame, the halt and the blind. We didn’t look like the Green Bay Packers, we looked like mugwumps. But we all knew this is where we were going to end up, and it was great. They were marvelous, marvelous people, both officers and men, and eventually after being a replacement—which is the worst thing that you could be in the army because you didn’t really have a name or number, you were just waiting for somebody to take you in—we spent three months in North Africa,

51 and finally we were sent up to the 82nd Division at Anzio-Nettuno [Italy] on the beach.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Benjamin: We’re talking about the war years. You got a medal. Tell me about that.

Holabird: The things I remember most about the army was, first of all, it was fun working with the men. Essentially you’re a teacher as an officer, and I discovered that what you’re also supposed to do is to be able to say follow me and carry through. That’s what, at least, a junior lieutenant was supposed to do. That’s one reason why they’re paying you more and sending you to the school so you would be a leader, which is very tough. If you didn’t, they had ways of getting rid of you very quickly. In Anzio the area had been drained for farming by Mussolini and they were called the Mussolini canals. Nobody was moving. The Germans were on one side and we were on the other. The Germans couldn’t push us out, and we couldn’t push them out. But they used to have scouts out every night, and we had to build a bridge across one of these canals so that the people could get across and could get back without having to swim. So I remember crawling up one afternoon—you couldn’t expose yourself much in the daytime because the Germans were up in the heights and they could see you and they could shoot down on you—so we went up and peeked over this thing and tried to see how to make the pieces of a bridge so that we could put it together at night because you couldn’t work during the daytime. We kind of guessed what the various heights would be, and guessed what stuff we would need. We got to the engineering-lumber store that the army had set up, and we tried to find a sheltered place behind a farmhouse so that nobody could see what we were doing and they wouldn’t shoot at us. We built a series of bents, which are little supports, with some rails and floorboards to go between them, and then at night we got a truck as far as we could and then we carried this stuff down and built it. It was about seventy or eighty feet long. It was quite a long thing.

Benjamin: You did this all in the dark of night?

52 Holabird: Yes. You had to hammer at night, and every time you hammered you knew a mortar shell was going to come somewhere nearby. But if you didn’t hammer the thing wasn’t going to stay together. Anyway, we built the bridge somehow. That’s when I learned how to make a good prefab thing. We had done this a little bit in college. Essentially, scenery is prefab—you have to put it together and take it apart very quickly. Somehow we got this one together. I did go back two weeks later and it was still standing although it had become something of a suspension bridge because somebody had put a wire in to hold up some of the parts. My platoon sergeant probably put a sign on it called the Holabird bridge, so it was my only bridge. Other things we did after the bridge were to lay mines. And then they pulled us out of Naples and we went to England. Luckily since we were the only part of the division that was in action at Anzio, we didn’t have to go in on D-Day, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here today. So we were reserve at D-Day, but they sent in a whole division to Holland in September—I think it was on the nineteenth, a Sunday—and this was the famous Montgomery attack, to go around left-end to the Germans. It was to get beyond the Siegfried Line and come in from the rear of the Germans and thus end the war nine months earlier. It has been treated in A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan. The 17th Airborne went to Eindhoven, the bridge there, and the 82nd, which is what we were, went to the bridge at Nijmegen, and the English went to the bridge at Arnhem. There was a famous movie about it.

Benjamin: A Bridge Too Far?

Holabird: This was the bridge too far, because what Montgomery evidently knew but didn’t tell anybody else about is that the Germans hadn’t pulled out. They had pulled back their tanks to Arnhem—that’s the third bridge, Arnhem—and the British parachutists landed right in a German tank parking lot. Half of them were lost right away, and the other half somehow survived for six to seven days. Anyway, we arrived Sunday in Nijmegen and were lucky that we weren’t shot down during the thing because they had by that time air superiority. I don’t think we did much of anything for the first two days, but then since we were the engineers they moved us up to the riverfront, and the

53 British tank unit by this time had come up with assault boats, and they said, “You are now going to make an assault crossing of the Maas Wall River, which was about 150 yards wide at that point, in the middle of the afternoon. All river crossings were usually done in the dead of night. So here at three in the afternoon, they said, “Don’t worry. The British tanks will fire smoke so that nobody will see you,” and they did. I was sent in one of the first boats with a whole group of engineer soldiers. We all had had some paddling experience, and I think we got across before they had a good target and before they got their aim in good shape. Anyway, we got across, and the bridge was taken later that night. I was awarded a silver star, I think just for living, not because of anything more. Robert Redford played a combination of me and several other officers in the movie.

Benjamin: That’s good typecasting.

Holabird: That’s right. Well, he actually played a Major Ford, who did a lot more than I did. We lost a third of our company that afternoon, either dead or wounded, and again, I’m surprised I’m still here. We stayed in Holland for laying mines, and I learned to make maps of minefields because the worst thing you could do is leave mines around and then pull out and somebody else comes in and you’ve killed your own troops. Two of my friends were later killed in just that kind of accident, so whenever we laid mines, again, you did it at night and you tried to step off in the dark where you put your mine so you could tell somebody else about it. We did that for a month and then pulled back to France, hopefully to spend the winter happy in the champagne country of France.

Benjamin: Did it work that way?

Holabird: And we did for two weeks. I went to every cave in the Soissons area, picking up champagne for Thanksgiving dinner. Then one night I was sitting in the officers club and I’d started—every time we went somewhere I had to paint murals again of whatnot, and I’d started doing this and I heard our supply officer get on the phone and it turned out he was drawing ammunition and

54 food rations, so I had to go and wake up all the other officers and all the men. We left at four o’clock in the morning to head to the Battle of the Bulge. We went through Bastogne and the 101st came behind us. We passed through Bastogne, and then the Germans passed behind us. Then the 101st came up below us and we spent the next four weeks in the snow and ice, trying to find out where the Germans were, and they were trying to find us. That was the Battle of the Bulge. We spent about three months there, and then got sent back to the wine country. Then we took one last trip. They put us on railroad cars, and we went to Cologne. By this time the Remagen bridgehead had gone. Americans were behind the Germans, but there were still Germans on the other side. So, each night I had to send boats out to harass the Germans so they’d know we were there. And we lost lots of people there, too, going across at night. Then one afternoon we thought the Germans had pulled out, so my company commander said, “Why don’t you go and see if they’ve pulled out.” I said, “In the middle of the afternoon?” He said, “Sure.” We walked where we’d been going at night and being shot at. We walked a boat across with an outboard motor, and we got in the Rhine River and went across to the other side. It turned out they had gone, otherwise I wouldn’t be here again. Then they put us on a train in Cologne and sent us up to the Elbe River. We were part of the British Second Army then, and by this time it was May and the Russians were coming one way and we were coming the other way. We made a river crossing there, but it wasn’t under fire from the Germans. We were trying to get away, I think. We were going along the road, and all of a sudden one of the trucks in the road just blew up with a huge hole. And then about fifteen minutes later another one did. The German naval cadets had used sea mines and put them in the road. These were magnetic mines, and they could set them for a certain number of metal things that would pass by. You could set it for twenty, and the twentieth one would blow up. We found out where they were set on the side, finally, and I was running down to my platoon to tell them to lay off because they were shoveling in the middle of the road to try and find one of these things. I was about a hundred yards away from them, and one went off. There was nothing but pieces of the six men that were there. By that time, as I say, there was a little switch on the side of the road where you could deactivate these things. Two days later my company commander and I

55 were driving down on a road, and a whole German SS tank division surrendered to us. We were scared to death. All these tanks and armored cars came in, and we just told them, “Drop your guns here and go to the rear.” There was a pile of guns about eight feet high. We just felt so unprotected—just told these people, “Down the road.” They were escaping from the Russians. They knew the Americans were going to treat them better than the Russians. They all looked in good shape, and all their equipment, it was just marvelous. My company commander said I should take a pistol, a Luger, which I did. I think I still have it. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at it since. Then we came home, and I went back to school in a year on the veterans’ bill.

Benjamin: During that year before you went back to school, what did you do?

Holabird: That’s when I went to Paris. I went to the Sorbonne. The 82nd Airborne was set to go and be the honor guard in Berlin, but lots of us had enough points to go home. Actually, the 82nd Division that went to Berlin was almost a three- quarters new division. It was so-called the 82nd, but the new people had come over. We became kind of a replacement unit, but they were sending new troops to Japan then. Luckily I didn’t have to go to Japan, so a notice came in saying that for the troops that were still in Europe they were going to send some of them to the university, and did they want to send an officer to Paris. I decided since I was the education officer of the company, I knew exactly who to send to Paris. So I sent me.

Benjamin: That was a wise choice.

Holabird: We spent three months in Paris. We lived in Lycée Henri IV and went to the morning class at the Sorbonne with a cute little lycée teacher from Rouen. We took French culture and civilization from nine to one, and the rest of the day we were looking at culture. I went to the theater almost every night and the opera, and Paris was just marvelous at that time. No traffic. They still liked American soldiers, and it was great. Eventually that beautiful period ended, and I went home. My father had died the last day of the war when I was in Germany, but there was no way to get home because my mother wasn’t in

56 desperate need of money or anything like that. So I got home, I guess, the end of September. Then I went back to Harvard a year later after spending six months at the Art Institute. I took a painting course with a marvelous man named von Neumann. I would think of the various people in my life: Ambrose Costello, the stage manager; and Robert von Neumann, the painter; and maybe Mr. Pei as an architect; and Albers and a couple of others, were marvelous teachers—and my father. I thought once if I were ever going to write an autobiography I would make it about just the people that I remember so much because that’s what it was about. The Harvard Graduate School, as I said, was fine. I’d been married just after I got out of Officers Candidate School, but I hadn’t seen my wife in two and a half years because I was overseas.

Benjamin: Where did you go to Officers Candidate School?

Holabird: That was army. Before I went to parachute school, I went to Fort Belvoir, which was the Officers Candidate School. First of all, you went to a replacement center, and supposedly then you were shipped off to a training center in whatever field. I went to the engineers training center at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and then they’d cut it down to eight or nine weeks, and we spent one of those training weeks building the officers’ swimming pool. So I always thought if I were killed in action it was probably because I hadn’t learned enough when I was building this swimming pool.

Benjamin: I read that during the time you were in OCS that you were staying at the Statler in Washington. How did that happen?

Holabird: Well, with OCS I came in there. We were building the Statler then. It opened up, I think, just after I became a lieutenant. But I went in to visit the job. My father’s sister was married to a brigadier general and they had a house in Washington. I could go in on weekends from the candidates school and become a human being again. They tried to make Officers Candidate School a little bit like a military school. The first two or three weeks they treated you like dirt so you could rise again as an officer from the ashes of your former ego. I’d gotten in on the train, and I was hot and dirty and the sweat was pouring

57 down my back. Washington can be hot as hell in September. The tactical officer who had been to VPI, or one of those awful schools, came out and one of my buttons was unbuttoned on my shirt. He said, “Do you want this button, Mister?” And there were two answers: if you said, "Yes, I do," he tore it off and handed it to you, and if you said, "No, I don’t," he tore it off and threw it away. They were not supposed to make you feel cheerful. But then again, they had to do this every week. There were two-week cycles. I guess we had twelve weeks there, and then all of a sudden they treated us like second lieutenants and we got saluted. Then I got married and I went back to Fort Belvoir and the black training battalions.

Benjamin: After the war you went to the Sorbonne, then you came back to Chicago, and you decided to go to the Art Institute. What prompted that decision?

Holabird: I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went to Goodman Theater, and I thought maybe since I was this great set designer that this would be great. I don’t know who the registrar was at the time, but she said, “Oh, you’ll have to start as a freshman,” or something like that, and I thought, after four years of Harvard and four years in the army, they want me to be a freshman here. I didn’t pursue it very much, so that’s when I decided maybe I would try and see what painting was like so I took this marvelous course. He was such a nice man, and I learned so much from him. I worked half the time. I used to go mornings to the Art Institute, and then the Parker School needed somebody to help do scenery so I went there in the afternoons and started doing that and liked it. As a matter of fact, Perry Smith wanted me to come and teach drama at North Shore Country Day School at that time, but I decided to go back to Harvard. I went for two years, and then spent half a year at the office and thought it was so awful—or I was so awful. By that time we had two and a half children, and life at home was absolutely wild. So I quit and taught school for seven years and enjoyed this, again. I could use the building and lights and set design, but I also could use the teaching things I’d learned. I became a director without having any reasonable education for it. I spent three years at Parker, and then a year at Bennington in Vermont.

58 Benjamin: How did you decide to make the leap to go to Bennington?

Holabird: One professor there—the drama professor, Arnold Susskind, I think it was—left because he got a Guggenheim Fellowship or something, and they suddenly needed somebody in a hurry. It was a dumb move, but again, I learned something from it. At that time Bennington was all girls, and they had some so-called drama boys from New York who either couldn’t make it in New York, or at least they got scholarships at Bennington and could hone their talents a little bit.

Benjamin: Did your family go there with you?

Holabird: Oh, sure. By this time we had four girls. Three of them went to the Bennington kindergarten, and two of those graduated later on. I told them they were probably the only Bennington college girls who went to the kindergarten and then graduated later on.

Benjamin: What was Bennington like?

Holabird: We did all kinds of funny things at Bennington. The rest of the drama faculty was very much of the method persuasion, which was you had to study and study a part, and you didn’t dare to act until you had psychoanalyzed the character and every nuance of the character. My notion of teaching drama was to do plays. In my freshman class—I had thirty-six of them—we first of all did Aristophanes Peace, and then we did two or three Christmas plays, and we did Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and we did Deidre of the Sorrows, and we did a whole group of Japanese Noh plays. We also did a couple of days of Comedia del Arte. We were just constantly on the stage, all of my group, and the rest of the faculty took a very dim view because they didn’t put anybody on the stage. One morning I had a bright idea with the Bennington group. I’d called up a couple of the local public schools, and I said, “Can we come and give a play for your children?” and so we were going to come in at eleven o’clock. I got into my class at nine o’clock, and said, “We are going to do Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Hansel and Gretel at such-and-such school in two hours. This is the

59 story, and let’s go over it a couple of times. Then we got costumes and got into the station wagon and off we went. We did this two or three times. I said, “This is what theater is all about. You’re a touring company now.” It was fun. The children liked it and the others did and it was just great. Working with all girls, we did plays that had been all-male casts before, but it didn’t seem to make that much difference.

Benjamin: How did Bennington work out for you?

Holabird: I liked it but, as I say, I didn’t like living it. It was like being in the army again, on a reservation almost, because the faculty all stuck together. On weekends all they did was sit around and drink together. My wife wanted to stay there because she was a new, young faculty wife, but I said, “Wait a while and you won’t.” But it was fun working with girls, but the Bennington faculty early on was supposed to be revolutionary, and the faculty was supposed to be teaching and not necessarily writing books and papers and whatnot. But by the time I got there in 1951 or 1952, it was about fifteen or twenty years after the early revolution and the faculty was pretty much set in its ways. The young faculty didn’t know how long they were going to be there, so they were worried about their credentials, and the older ones liked doing what they were doing. When I’d call one of them to help me—a dance faculty member to help with a dance in a play—he’d say, “I don’t think it’s important enough for dance majors to work there,” and the English people would say the same thing. Parker School was a little different. Griffith, the music man, and all the teachers would be overjoyed if we could work together. If I could put on the stage something from the English department and music, that was great. That’s why Parker was just absolutely marvelous for me because I could work with the first grade or I could come into the fourth grade and we’d do something. We did a marvelous Cats long before Andrew Lloyd Weber. I just liked the book by T.S. Eliot, and the kids loved the poem, so we made a whole morning assembly out of it; the children doing certain ones of the poems, and some together. Sarah Greenebaum, who was a lovely lady who taught eighth grade, is another of the people who is going to be in my autobiography when I get around to it. She loved plays and thought that having children appear in plays was important.

60 And not just one, because that put too much emphasis on one thing, so we did four or five plays a year or assemblies with children telling stories. She and I both agreed that it was good for children to be up in front of an audience and trying to learn to speak on their feet and speak clearly and with conviction. If they could also play roles it would be good to have them play different roles than what they are. We put on some very good senior plays. I taught the kids how to build scenery, and I taught them how to run the switchboard and I taught the girls how to run a sewing machine and make costumes. I tried to make the people understand about Ambrose Costello and being good stage managers and really make that thing work, and then if I did things right I could sit out in front and not worry about a thing except enjoying it. That happened often. I’ve gone back with my own children to Parker and seen kids peeking through the curtains and whatnot, and the people not keeping the auditorium set up ahead of time and mussing around and running up and down. It just breaks my heart, because I think the audience should come into a theater setting and should expect the play and not see the head of the drama department running back and forth and into the curtains and kids’ heads sticking out and all this other business. It is amateurish and childish and is not teaching people how the theater should be. The formalities of the theater are there for a reason, I think. My kids didn’t do this. If they did it, they got bloody hell from me.

Benjamin: Did your children love the theater, too?

Holabird: No, I’m talking about the students at Parker. But, I think my two older ones did quite a bit. When my two younger children went back to Parker, the theater program had changed and they were in one play in eighth grade, which was a long four-week thing, and everybody in the class had one line or something. It didn’t seem to me that they were going to do the kinds of things we used to do, and, I say, they should have appeared in second grade doing something. It didn’t have to be important, but it should be something. That’s all.

Benjamin: What did you do after Bennington?

61 Holabird: I went back to teach at Frances Parker for three more years. Then I quit Parker, partly thanks to a nice doctor I was talking to. He thought I ought to get away from Parker and from other problems. I was a set designer at CBS for three months, and then at NBC for six months. At NBC we had a lovely little evening program, and so we’d figure out the sets during the late afternoon. The next morning they’d be built, and we’d do them that afternoon. We did this five days a week. It was a very wild period, but it was fun. But then we did the Saturday night beer commercial in which we were building houses and painting bricks, and I finally decided if I were going to start building houses every Saturday night, I’d better go back to Holabird and Root. So I talked to Mr. Root, and I said, “I think I’m ready to come back now.” It turned out I was getting paid more as a set designer at NBC than the office paid their department heads. I think by this time—this was seven years later—I was getting $175 a week at NBC, which is $600 or $700 a month, so I’d gone up from $250 seven years before at Holabird and Root to about $750 now. I was getting more than the department heads at the office.

Benjamin: And this was in 1956 or 1955?

Holabird: Well, November of 1955. At any rate, Mr. Root paid me on the side for about five years until I caught up. I thought it was very nice of him. I didn’t resent it a bit. I had all those mouths to feed. My mother always helped me out when things got bad. She was generous. I always called them loans, but I guess I never paid any back. But she was helpful, and the children were going to Parker on scholarship, too. When I went back to the office they went on partial scholarship. I think I paid back all those things many times.

Benjamin: Was your salary fairly typical?

Holabird: Well, as I said, architects were poorly paid, and they’re still poorly paid. I didn’t begin to make anything until 1965, ten years later, when I became an associate, and then once a year I got a little bonus or a sharing on some kind of a formula. Then in 1970 I became a partner, and then I hadn’t realized that the firm was doing this well. We began to get a good deal more, and we also, the

62 three of us, saw to it that we raised the base pay of all the department heads and everything to something commensurate with other offices.

Benjamin: The three of you? Who were the other two?

Holabird: Cook and Pook were their names. There were actually four of us. Joe Burgee was there, but he got sick right away and had to pull out. It was Holabird, Eugene Cook and Gerrard Pook. I told them they both should change two letters in their name and it could be Holabird and Root and Root or Root, Holabird and Root, but they didn’t. Cook retired two years after I did in 1989, and Pook left about six years before and is a painter now. His wife died. He moved from a pretty house he’d designed in Barrington to a loft on Kinsey Street, and I see him rarely.

Benjamin: When you were growing up and living at home, was there a lot of talk of the office?

Holabird: Not that much. My father was very close-lipped about it. He was afraid secrets would get out, and my mother didn’t ask. I don’t think he believed in talking about architecture because of trying to get jobs and whatnot and the personality. He talked to me later on about some of the people, and lots of the people in the office whom I got to know would talk to me a lot more than my father did because he had very strict notions of what should be discussed and what shouldn’t. The architectural business was private, from his point of view, and mother didn’t ask. They discussed everything else. When it came time to go to college I said I didn’t know what to study, and he said, “Well, why don’t you take architecture? It will prepare you for anything, ha, ha, ha.” And I did. He said, “You’re taking history and English and mathematics and arts, and that’s it.” I forgot to tell you, really the best teacher I had at Harvard was a math teacher in freshman calculus. His name was Halpern, and he was a young graduate student from Canada. He made the whole thing exciting. He said, “I don’t care if you birds get the right answer arithmetically”—this is in the days before computers or anything—but he said, “What you’re really here for is to learn how to solve problems—how you put the formulas together and how you

63 use them.” This was just great. I’d spend hours on whether you can get a twelve-foot ladder down a six-foot corridor that has a right angle and becomes a four-foot corridor. Does it fit around in there? There are ways of setting up integral calculus and differential equations to solve that. Or, if you have a piece of tin so big, what is the most economical can you can make out of it or box which will hold the most things? As I say, those were fascinating to me. I didn’t know you could do this with mathematics. It was just fun to do. I don’t know what Halpern’s first name was, but I always remember him, too. Back at the office, one of the things that drove me out of the office in 1948 when I first came there was, they were doing the First National Bank in Minneapolis. They were trying to put together two or three old buildings, and I traced innumerable schemes, which I thought were each worse than the other. Seven years later when I got back the job had come alive again. They had decided to tear down the buildings to build a new building and not make a combination of all these old buildings.

Benjamin: Was that the first real skyscraper in Minneapolis?

Holabird: No, the office did the Rand Tower earlier. But this time at least the First National Bank building was a little better. We worked with a Minneapolis firm, Thorshov and Czerny, and the young man there helped Bartsch, I think, to do a better job.

Benjamin: Was Bartsch the designer of that building?

Holabird: Yes.

Benjamin: Much like Lever House New York?

Holabird: Well, this was his Mies period. The first four or five floors were a very handsome stainless steel building, and then they put a tower in aluminum, which wasn’t quite as good. I was disturbed to see that back on the horizon, but at least it was better than our first try.

64 Benjamin: What was Bartsch like to work with?

Holabird: I couldn’t stand working for Bartsch because he was such a mean and underhanded person. He liked to go out to eat lunch early, so then when we went out he’d come back and he’d look and see what we were doing and make little sniveling comments. Or sometimes he’d come to my desk because supposedly he was a friend of my father’s, and he’d tell me what he thought about my friends all down the line. I presumed he’d go down with them and tell them about me. It was just not a way to run a railroad. I used to go on trips with him, and I used to carry the drawings because he didn’t want to look like an architect. I didn’t mind. I’d just carry any old thing. Gentlemen were not supposed to carry packages in the Emily Post period, you know. Somebody else carried packages or carried something. My father, I don’t think, even knew where the kitchen of the house was until World War II came and all our cooks went off to war work. I can still remember my father and his sister, who was equally ladylike or aristocratic, both washing dishes in the kitchen. Under my mother’s tutelage they learned a lot. We got up to the office, but most of what we did in the office was pretty plebeian stuff, I think. Partly because of the clientele and because of the office’s reputation. It no longer had the opportunity of doing some of the good things. The buildings that we’ll talk about, whether it’s now or later, are those at Ravinia, which it seems to me is fun, and the Parker School, which I had a good time working on. The Bell Laboratory building and the big Madison-Canal Long Line building and the Intramural Physical Education building at Champaign-Urbana, which I think is a good building, too. I think in all of these, instead of trying to wow people we were trying to keep a relationship. What do they call it, context? You know, when Frank Lloyd Wright built the Guggenheim Museum and it didn’t fit in on Fifth Avenue, he said, “You should tear the other buildings down.” But I think we’ve always had a different feeling at Holabird and Root that you try to work within an environment and be contributive, if you could. I think Bruegmann is kind of nice about the office. He said, “They never had many stars, but they had a good many first-class draftspeople and they did a decent job with what they were up to. And they kept people for quite a while.”

65 Benjamin: What was the policy in the firm regarding staff?

Holabird: They had a lot of young people. Our notion—Jerry Horn’s notion—now is that you get the brightest people you can and you exploit them to work their tails off if you can, and then if you can afford to keep them when they really get good, you try to. Otherwise they’re going to go off somewhere else, and you get some other bright young men. But you try and keep a cadre of these people because they’re going to be your partners and your department heads and your experienced people. So if you have an office with bright young men and women and have some older people who can oversee to be sure the details are worked out, then you’re great.

Benjamin: Some people were with the firm for years, so it seems to have worked.

Holabird: Bartsch had Bruce Graham, and Bruce Graham I’m sure was a threat to Bartsch because he was very bright and smart, so Bartsch gave him dumb things to do so he quit.

Benjamin: There were some other people who quit during those years, too.

Holabird: Yes. There were a whole group of people who became PACE Associates who quit when they made Joseph Burgee a partner because they could see the writing on the wall. He was not design-oriented at all. He was a contract and supervision and field man and thought that designers were effete and expensive and changed a lot. You know, some people hate designers because they mess up drawings and make changes. They don’t use tried and true details. They try to improve things. Why don’t they just keep the good, old things? For the years the office was doing Northwestern Tech, it was considered the great building, well built and everything. And the telephone jobs, we kept doing those because we knew how to do them quickly and well, but the telephone company used very high standards for all their plumbing and electrical. Everything was the top thing so it would last. But when we had a different kind of building to do we were far too expensive. We were using such expensive stuff because it was the standard Illinois Bell specification. So it

66 turned out there were other ways of doing it, and you didn’t have to have everything built with gold-plated plumbing fixtures that are going to last for 150 years. There were things called spec office buildings that you thought maybe could last forty years and that you could do a little better. So in the office you had to develop two or three different offices.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Benjamin: I would like to backtrack and get into some information on the twenties and thirties. May we start with the Depression?

Holabird: Well, there wasn’t much architecture during the Depression. Certainly. Holabird and Root, which had been up to 350 people, I think, went down to about seven or eight.

Benjamin: Seven or eight?

Holabird: Well, I don’t know. It varied a little bit, but it stayed in business, which is more than can be said for three-quarters of the other architectural firms. There just was no work. Luckily the office had some telephone work and some Northern Trust and Commonwealth Edison work. These people continued to do some building or alterations. My father, at one point, evidently called the employees in and said, “You go home to your wives”—this was before the firm went really downhill—”and ask your wife what you think you could live on. Otherwise we will have to cut staff.” So evidently they came back and they all took a salary cut for a while. They kept one switchboard operator and one secretary and a couple of field people, and there were three or four lonely people in this huge drafting room: my father and Root and Joe Burgee and a couple of superintendents, and that was it.

Benjamin: Did Bartsch stay?

Holabird: Oh, I think so. Then gradually they got some public housing. We talked about the Century of Progress a little bit, the fact that that was a bonanza for the

67 architects. Even though they were building in Masonite and cardboard and whatnot, it was nonetheless building, and this was good.

Benjamin: Was your father one of the superintendents or commissioners of the fair?

Holabird: Yes. I’ve forgotten what they called it—supervisory architects or something. He and his people selected young Louis Skidmore and Nat Owings to be the people to do the actual work.

Benjamin: Why was that?

Holabird: Well, as I say, they were both young and probably cheap at the time, and ambitious. They did a marvelous job, and look what happened to SOM after the war. They did pretty well. Lots of people say the fair was when they first started working together and accomplishing a great deal. They did a good job.

Benjamin: The Chrysler building was the piece de resistance. What other buildings did Holabird and Root do?

Holabird: The office had done the administration building, which stayed up for quite a while after the fair. It was close to the yacht harbor and next to the park district—between the Field Museum and the park district building, at the end of that street which is named for the janitors. McFetridge Drive. It wasn’t called McFetridge Drive then. The firm did the Streets of Paris with Rebori and others, and they did the English Village. I think I did drawings for another of the villages there. Lots of people were doing lots of things, and it was very exciting.

Benjamin: Was the English Village as popular as the Streets of Paris?

Holabird: Oh, it was marvelous. My grandfather Hackett used to take me there. They had a replica of the Globe Theater. Thomas Woods Stevens, who I think taught at the Goodman at one time, had taken Shakespeare’s plays and reduced them to forty-five minutes or an hour or something, so my grandfather would take me

68 and we would go to three Shakespeare plays in an afternoon. We would see Julius Caesar and then go and have tea at the English tearoom, and then we’d go back and see Macbeth and then go and have something else, and then we’d go back to see another. Later on when I was teaching at Parker, I remembered these and found the scripts. They were very good. I’m blasphemous enough to think that Shakespeare is much better edited a little bit. One night we did The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet at Parker.

Benjamin: Both?

Holabird: Yes. The Taming of the Shrew took about fifty minutes, then there was an intermission, and Hamlet, I think, took an hour and a half. All the boring parts were left out. It was a very fast-moving drama the way we did it. My God, there were no quiet moments at all. Anyway, I remember that especially. And then at the fair the Chicago Symphony used to play there in concert. The Swift family had Elsie the Cow, and there was a beautiful amphitheater on a bridge, so you could see water all around. You could go from the English Village to hear the Chicago Symphony, and it was absolutely beautiful. They had Greyhound buses that traveled back and forth. They were big carriers with tent roofs and seats facing out like a San Francisco streetcar, and they were great. I’ve always thought the Chicago bus system would be much nicer if they had those same things now. You could get off any time you wanted and walk up. I think I had a fifty-entrance pass, and I used every one of them. I was twelve years old and thirteen, and it was great.

Benjamin: Do you have recollections about Keck’s House of Tomorrow and the wonderful house that Rebori did?

Holabird: Oh, sure. I used to go through all of those. My father was involved in the Transportation building, which kind of looks like the Skidmore addition to McCormick Place. It was just booms with cables going off it. It was at one end of the fair. One of the great things I remember about the fair was the Wheels Are Rolling that Helen Geraghty produced. It was right along the lakefront with a grandstand, and it told the history of transportation in the country. It started

69 with Indian scouts going across in canoes, and covered wagons and stagecoaches, and cowboys coming across and the pony express riders—the first engines coming across and then the bigger engines and the first motorcar. Finally it ended up with the Twentieth Century Limited coming across the state. These were all actual locomotives and actual stagecoaches and a cast of hundreds. Helen Geraghty was this marvelous woman. She worked with Max Reinhardt in Vienna, and she came and ran it. I think she was all of twenty- three or twenty-four at the time. She later did it again at the Railroad Fair when they tried to recoup the early fair. It was in the fifties or late forties.

Benjamin: What attracted the most attention at the fair?

Holabird: What most people remember mostly is the amusements. This was the beginning of some of the bobsled or flying turns kind of things, and also Sally Rand, of course. She was at the Streets of Paris, and it was very risqué to have a fan dancer doing things for the general public. This was a period when people didn’t even dance cheek-to-cheek, really. That song came out when I was in high school, and there were faculty members at Parker School to prevent cheek-to-cheek dancing when I first went in there.

Benjamin: What else happened to keep Holabird and Root afloat during the Depression?

Holabird: The fair got the architects going a little bit, and then there was some public housing. My father was a supervisory architect of that. The office did two or three. These were the early three-story, nice ones. We did the Jane Addams Homes, I think, and some others. They tried to bring in some sculpture. Edgar Miller did some sculpture for one of their project. My father said they were very nice units, and they still are. I think lowrise was the answer to public housing because the ones on Diversey still look pretty well, too—the Julia Lathrop Homes. Then the first glimmer of a new job was Northwestern Tech, which started about 1935, or something like that. And then the office got the Statler job in Washington—that was a big job for the office—and the telephone company started doing things again. I don’t know how the economy really got going. Lots of the people from the office got farmed out to various people. Gibs

70 Hall went to London and worked for someone in there doing perspectives and drawings.

Benjamin: Did he return?

Holabird: Yes. He was loaned out, and then he went out to Hollywood for a while and helped draw stage sets. He could draw these beautiful French chateaus as if he had been an architect of that period. He designed a building on Lake Shore Drive that has long since been torn down. It was first of all the Illinois Life Insurance building, and then it became the federal court building. Now it’s been torn down, but it was le Petit Trianon de Versailles—exactement. It was a very beautiful building. You probably don’t remember it. It was about 1100, right between Scott and Division on Lake Shore. There is a very tall building there now—quite a handsome apartment building. That was Holabird and Root. But Gilbert Hall could do these beautiful things, and he drew stage sets. He worked for a builder in London for a little while until the office had enough work for him to come back and do things. Then he came back and stayed forever.

Benjamin: So was it really the public work, in a general sense, that kept the firm alive during those years?

Holabird: Yes. As I say, luckily the office had the Illinois Bell telephone and people like Northern Trust and Commonwealth Edison. They were doing substations, and that kept going—on a lesser scale, but it kept going, which was something. My father was terribly worried and hated to let people go. He had a marvelous office that had done all these things, and all of a sudden, there was no work. In those days the office was at 333, and when I’d come to pick up my father—by this time I guess I could drive at the age of fifteen—I’d go down to lower level Wacker to pick him up, and there were people living in lower level Wacker in shacks and all over the place. There were much more homeless then than now, although people, I think, tolerated them a lot more because so many people were in the same boat and knew the problem.

71 Benjamin: Of the other large architectural firms, did Graham, Anderson, Probst and White shrink?

Holabird: They kept going, and I’m sure some others did on kind of a token basis, but it was no time to be an architect. That’s why those two young guys, Charles Luckman and Bill Pereira, got out of Illinois as architects in 1930, because there was nothing for them to do. That’s when Luckman entered the soap business and became the president of Lever Brothers. Pereira came to work at Holabird and Root for a while and after he left he did the Esquire Theater. Then he went out to Hollywood and worked on sets for a while and came back to architecture later. Luckman worked at wherever Lever Brothers is—he was the president of that—and then he went back to architecture later on.

Benjamin: When you mentioned the Esquire Theater, what comes to mind is a beautiful Hedrich-Blessing photograph of that building. They also took the most wonderful picture of the Chrysler building. Kaufmann and Fabry were the official photographers. Why were Holabird and Root buildings at the fair photographed by Hedrich-Blessing?

Holabird: Hedrich had just gotten started. That was their first real thing. Holabird and Root was their first major client, I think. Jack Hedrich still remembers that with pleasure. We went around and they took pictures of all the Holabird and Root buildings. They took the A.O. Smith building in Milwaukee, and they went up to St. Paul and took the Ramsey County courthouse and they did Diana Court building.

Benjamin: When I looked at the photographs of Kaufmann and Fabry and compared them with the ones of Hedrich-Blessing, Kaufmann and Fabry looked like they were more commercial pictures.

Holabird: Hedrich-Blessing’s are great. I don’t think there were architectural photographers then. That’s a relatively new profession within the last fifty or sixty years.

72 Benjamin: How did the firm get into public housing? How did the jobs come?

Holabird: Roosevelt was trying to find a way to house the people. My father, who had been a lifelong Republican, still was very interested in this, and he helped. Two or three of the people from the office went to Washington to work in public housing and the WPA. Colonel Knox, who later on was the secretary of the Navy, I think he helped recruit people from Chicago. He was the head of the Daily News. Colonel Hackett from Holabird and Root was down in Washington, and a man named Clas was down in Washington. And there were others. I remember in those days my father going to Washington regularly—monthly, anyhow—because of various things that came up. Housing and public works—I can’t remember what they did with the WPA; probably nothing.

Benjamin: I was interested that a lot of really fine architects worked on public housing. I’m thinking of Ernest Grunsfeld, Jr., in particular, whose practice I’m familiar with. He played a leadership role.

Holabird: I have a scroll or something up in Michigan that Ernest Grunsfeld wrote for the public housing architects, thanking my father for his leadership.

Benjamin: How did the Depression affect your family? Did you have to cut back?

Holabird: This sounds like the question in the President Bush thing, “How did the recession affect you?” and poor Bush didn’t know how to answer it at all. One time they talked about taking me out of private school and putting me in public school. We didn’t talk very much about it at home, but we were certainly aware of the fact that a lot of people were very much deprived. I guess my father had some income from land—real estate that my grandfather had—but everything was going into receivership then, too. 333 went into receivership. So did the apartment building that they’d lived in. They couldn’t keep up.

Benjamin: Which apartment building?

73 Holabird: It’s called the Shakespeare Garden Apartments now. It’s between Webster and former Grant Place and Belden on Lincoln Park West. My father and Clay Judson, a lawyer, and three Erickson brother contractors bought the building in 1928, and they were going to tear it down and build a highrise, by which they meant about a ten-story building. But the Depression came and they never built it. It’s still there. My mother finally got her apartment for the one-third interest my father had put in in the whole business. At any rate, our family was very much aware. We didn’t talk very much about it, but we just crossed our fingers and hoped that our good daddy would bring things back. My mother got the vote about that time, and my father wept.

Benjamin: Wept?

Holabird: Well, he said from then on he knew his vote was just going to be wiped out, and it was. My mother became a lifelong either Democrat or Independent.

Benjamin: Did your mother influence you?

Holabird: She influenced me a lot. But I got too liberal for mother at one period. My father was about to give me up. They thought I was, if not Communist, Communist-inspired. But Communist was a word that you could use in many different ways for a long time. As a matter of fact, I never did know any of my friends at Harvard who were actual Communists. “Parlor pink” used to be the name in those days.

Benjamin: Parlor pink, what does that mean?

Holabird: Parlor pink was for somebody who talked the party line but hadn’t gone all the way and really signed up. As I say, most of us were parlor pinks. That means that you talk a big game but you’re still keeping one foot in the capitalist system. At Harvard as a freshman, Hitler and Stalin joined forces. This was the Berlin-Moscow pact, which really cemented the Second World War, the fact that the Communists and the Nazis could make such a pact. This started

74 knocking the wind out of the sails of the student union—the kind of leftist movement—because all of a sudden you had to equate Russia with the Nazis. They had lots of weasel words—they were doing it just to protect their borders and so on, and it was only a temporary thing. But the leftist movement was fragmented from that day forth, and the only time it came back together was about two years later when the Germans attacked Russia. Then everybody was back in the same thing. It was a great relief because we had been against war and fascism, but after the Berlin-Moscow pact, we had to change. We were for peace and democracy, not against war and fascism because the Russians were fighting the Finns and the Nazis were fighting everybody else. It was very complicated. Your philosophies had to be very strained each day by changing news items. The attack on Pearl Harbor straightened out a lot of people, too. You no longer had to worry. You knew you were the good guys because you’d been abused. Somebody else had hit you first, which was not true in Vietnam. Anyway, we somehow got through the Depression. I think it was public work and private utility/public utility work that kept our office going.

Benjamin: How did the Commonwealth Edison work come into the office?

Holabird: I don’t know. We had been doing substations for years. They were not very fancy buildings. Telephone buildings were not very fancy, but they kept people employed. In those days the telephone company wanted their buildings to blend in as much as possible. They didn’t want them to stand out in the way of design. I can always tell these old ones because they look a little like hotels. There is a little bit of stone on the bottom, a couple of arches and then some brick and a cornice or something on top. They were well built buildings, but they were not supposed to stand out later on. In the fifties the telephone company finally became design-conscious, and then they started putting out books and giving awards to their own buildings. They’d get juries outside to say which were the best looking telephone buildings. That was a whole new world.

Benjamin: You mentioned earlier that your grandfather had land. Did many of the early architects invest in land?

75 Holabird: Oh, sure. I don’t know how much because I think it was sold early on, but there was a lot on Chestnut Street right next to the Fourth Presbyterian Church. And John Smyth Furniture, which was first of all Woolworth and then John Smyth and now it’s a Nagle and Hartray building—at any rate, that was a piece of land that my family owned. I suppose there was income from some other things, too. Grandfather had securities, I guess. Oh, there was a lot of Elm Street—the corner of Elm and Lake Shore Drive. It’s now a twenty-story apartment building. This is the south corner of Elm. At one time when my father got back from Paris he and Root had a little, one-story pied-a-terre there where they used to entertain.

Benjamin: What do you know about that?

Holabird: I was minus six years old then so I can’t really tell. But my mother said it was supposed to be a very sporty place. They had a sunken dining room with a table with water running across it, or something like that, or fountains in the table. I don’t know what Root and Father did at the time. They were both unmarried, they’d both been to Paris and they both, I suppose, had modest incomes at the time. So, they were young bachelors having fun. I wish there was somebody around I could talk to who would have gone to one of those soirees, to let me know how risqué it really was. If you read my father diaries that are at the Chicago Historical Society, though, they’re not very—he thought they were daring, but in today’s world, we wouldn’t consider them very daring. The revelations are charming and not damaging.

Benjamin: Did you have any mentors?

Holabird: I mentioned Helen Geraghty before. She was my patroness for years. She did the living pictures at Ravinia.

Benjamin: Would you please explain what the living pictures were?

Holabird: One of the few times when my stage career and my architectural career came

76 together was when Helen Geraghty convinced Earle Ludgin—I guess he was the head of something or other at Ravinia, one of the trustees—that they should do a Gallerie Vivant. She hired a composer and she hired some dancers, and she got together all these marvelous society ladies and they did a whole series. There must have been twenty vignettes or scenes or living pictures. I remember I was working at the office full-time, but I’d get home-—luckily my family was away that summer, so I’d get home at five-thirty and grab a sandwich. I still could use the Parker School facilities for some unknown reason—I guess because I’d been there for quite a while.

Benjamin: In what year was this?

Holabird: 1956-1957-1958—somewhere in there. I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, I got twenty backdrops made by somebody—sewn and with battens put in. I used the stage at Parker, and I had all my paints there. I’d hang one up and get a coat of sizing on this muslin, and meanwhile, the one I’d done the night before I’d have flat on the stage and start painting these things. They were fourteen by twenty, so that’s pretty good-sized stuff—fourteen feet high so that they’d fit on the stage at Ravinia in the Murray Theater there. And we did Raphael and we had a Renoir and we had, with my friend in there, the Botticelli, and we had Breughel and we had Gauguin. I can’t remember—there were eight or ten others. I used postcards or whatever I had and tried to guess what the painter would have done if he hadn’t had people in it because the people were going to be these society figures or the dancers that Helen had hired. My greatest kudos for that, though, is that Sam Marx, the architect, told somebody that it was the best show he’d ever seen, and he wanted to know who the painter was. So evidently somebody thought it looked like the painters’ work. It was kind of fun, though, because you had to do Renoir with a huge brush instead of Renoir doing his little strokes.

Benjamin: For Seurat you could use a small brush. Did you do a Seurat?

Holabird: I can’t remember if we had Seurat. I don’t think Helen Geraghty could figure out how to put in all those people. Later on, of course, they did the thing in the

77 park—that show of George in the Park, or whatever it’s called. But this was fun. The other time I worked at Ravinia, Earle Ludgin got the Peter Dews Company from England over, and I helped create a kind of stage. Peter Dews came over, and we put him in the Murray Theater.

Benjamin: Who is Peter Dews?

Holabird: He was an English actor who had a company. He came and we took him to the Murray Theater. We were going to build kind of a Globe Theater there for him to work in, but then he saw the large open pavilion, and he said, “Ah, no. Oh, we’ll do this,” and we said, “You can’t talk out here.” ‘Well,” he said, “we can project. English actors can project.” And it’s just huge out there. We built a false stage out over the seats with a long thrust coming to kind of a blunt point. One critic said it looked like a baseball field, and that broke my heart. But the first night nobody could hear the actors, of course. The first night there were three or four microphones suspended, and eventually there were about twenty or thirty all over. The whole ceiling was a series of hung microphones. Dews was angry. They did Twelfth Night and Henry the Fourth, part 1, and Hamlet, I guess. It was a very interesting night. It brought theater to Ravinia in a big way.

Benjamin: I don’t recall knowing about any large-scale theater at Ravinia. Was that a first?

Holabird: This must have been in about 1964. That’s twenty-five years ago now. My daughter Jean, who is forty-five, was sixteen, and all these young Englishmen were just the most exciting thing she’d ever seen. She spent a good deal of time in Highland Park that summer. Anyway, those were the two times. They were not great productions, either one, but they were kind of interesting and then I put them together. And with Helen I continued to do the scenery and was stage manager for the St. Luke’s fashion shows and some of her other great shows until she finally retired herself and I retired with her, alas.

Benjamin: She sounds like a very interesting lady. And you said she was your patroness.

78 Holabird: Yes, and she did the history of Rotary, and we did a huge thing at the Stadium. I did the sets and costumes for that. It really was marvelous to be in the Chicago Stadium with 25,000 Rotarians. She’d gotten a composer, again, for that.

Benjamin: Why?

Holabird: Well, there were choruses and marches that showed the Rotarians in India or in Nepal or somewhere else. We had a great Indian procession, and people in the Balkans dancing. Again, they didn’t work out very well, but we made some colored slides, and they projected them on the screen and then the dancers were underneath. At least we didn’t have to build sets for it, but the projectors were not all they should have been. The last thing Helen had me do was the debutante cotillion at the Hilton. I was already doing the decorations for it, but she got the job halfway through. Chicago had a world’s trade fair each summer at Navy Pier, and she got the job of going looking for acts for that. She went all over Europe and had a marvelous time. “Meanwhile,” she said to me, “you take care of the debutante cotillion.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, the figures the girls do are very simple.”

Benjamin: Did you do the choreography for all this?

Holabird: Well, the choreography was laid down. You told the girls, and they did very simple walk-through figures. They said the big problem was to keep the men sober. And then they all got to one place together and sang White Christmas. But before that the fathers came, and you had to teach the fathers to waltz.

Benjamin: Oh, how funny.

Holabird: I did this once, and that’s the only time, I think, I ever wore my white tie and tails. I went and was stage manager and everything for this thing. Heather Bilandic was a debutante that time. I still remember it. I can’t remember anyone else. Anyway, we had some beautiful white lights on little white branches that I’d had spray-painted white, and they all went around the

79 balcony. I thought it looked perfectly beautiful. Some cleaning lady came and said, “Gee, whiz, it certainly looked better last year.”

Benjamin: You mentioned Sam Marx. He was an architect who did furniture design. I don’t know too much about him.

Holabird: I don’t know who does. He and his wife had one of the great collections of modern art. The Art Institute wooed him for a long time, and I think he gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, much to everybody’s chagrin. I think he was a trustee of the Art Institute. When we [Holabird and Root] did the Ferguson wing, I think one of the problems was that Bartsch was doing it from Holabird and Root, Sam Marx was trying to redesign it from the point of view of the trustees, and there was somebody else at the Art Institute who… It was a bad building. Well, not bad but a disappointing building because it was the first addition to the Art Institute. That’s the wing on the north side.

Benjamin: How did the firm get that job?

Holabird: Well, because during the Depression, one of the big jobs was a competition for an addition to the Art Institute, and Holabird and Root won it. I think the trustees felt somehow duty-bound to offer this job. It was criticized by everybody because it was the first somewhat tall building—or not tall, but it helped block out Grant Park, and everything was supposed to be low. And then you weren’t supposed to use the Ferguson money for buildings. You were supposed to use it for art, and this was not considered art. Then they had the big problem with the McCormick Gardens, and the lady who was giving the money didn’t like Bartsch and didn’t like what they were doing. Bartsch put in some new, modern staircases in stone, and eventually they removed those and put back the traditional ones. And the garden used to have a pool, and now it’s just lawns and hedges. When I came back to the office after teaching school, the office was doing the Ferguson wing of the Art Institute, and it was being heavily bashed for that. And it was at that time they were about to tear down the Frank Lloyd Wright house on the South Side.

80 Benjamin: The Robie House?

Holabird: Yes, because the Chicago Theological Seminary owned it and was going to build a dormitory. Eventually they traded that for some other land.

Benjamin: How did that happen?

Holabird: How did they happen to own it? The Chicago Theological Seminary wanted to build a dormitory for their students. At any rate, they swapped the University of Chicago for some other land or something like that. But again, if we had torn down the Robie House, there would have been hell to pay. And there was a third thing. I guess the third thing was that the office was on the site-selection committee for McCormick Place, and Mr. Root wanted to put it in the south Loop where he thought it would have the most advantage in terms of hotels and restaurants and whatnot. The Tribune, of course, had long ago decided that the lakefront site was where it was going to be. But the office got the credit for it, and they put Mr. Root as a saving grace on the board of architecture with Edward Durell Stone and Al Shaw—mostly as a consolation prize. So Al Shaw did the building, but Mr. Root’s name was on the drawings, too.

Benjamin: Was that the one that burned?

Holabird: The first McCormick Place, which my mother said God struck down. She was always hoping that God would strike down the John Hancock building, too. She said every time she went by it on the bus, she’d put her hex on it, but it didn’t seem to work.

Benjamin: Is that what greeted you when you came back to Holabird and Root in the fifties?

Holabird: Anyway, the office was working on McCormick Place, and trying to tear down the Robie House, and was screwing up the Art Institute with the Ferguson building. That’s what I came back to in November of 1955. This was, I think, my fifth appearance at the office. I can’t remember. I worked one summer on

81 Northwestern Tech, as I told you, as a superintendent, and then I came back in 1948 after finishing Harvard and spent five months and then taught school for seven years. While I was at school, I came back and worked on Stateway Gardens—the housing thing—one summer, and then finally I came back in 1955. It was kind of like the parachute troops, my last bump—I knew this time I was going to stay, no matter what they did to me.

Benjamin: What cemented it that time? Why did you know you were going to stay?

Holabird: I just figured I’d bumped around enough. I talked to Mr. Root and the kind of stage work I was doing then, at best, was not the kind of thing I really liked to do. I would have had to go to Hollywood or New York if I were going to do sets. Theater in Chicago just didn’t exist at that time, except for the Goodman. Anything else was a road show, and the little theaters that were coming up were things like Second City, and what not, that didn’t really need a designer. So, I figured I’d better go back and see if I could be a decent architect at that time.

Benjamin: When you went back to Harvard to graduate school, John Johansen was there. Who were some of the others?

Holabird: Johansen was a year or so ahead of me—two years I think. I can’t remember all those people.

Benjamin: And the architect who did the Chicago Botanic Garden?

Holabird: Oh, Eddie Barnes.

Benjamin: Yes. He was there?

Holabird: Yes. He was three years ahead of me, too—he and Harkness, who started The Architects’ Collaborative. Harkness was one of the critics we had in the graduate school. Barnes went into private practice. He was at Parker School and was three years ahead of me there, and he was three years ahead of me at

82 Harvard. He still looks like a high school boy. He must be seventy-five or seventy-six now, but he has this lovely, youthful, boyish grin and is a very good architect. I can’t remember all the other great names in our class. I mentioned Harry Cobb, who is Pei’s partner. It was very exciting then, as I say, because the classes were so much bigger. We had five or six before the war, and in 1945 after the war, two women for the first time, which was great because there had been none before. And now it’s 40 or 45 percent women at Harvard, and it should be. I was going to tell you about another thing about Harvard involving the war. When I ended up in the 82nd, my company commander said, “If you went to Harvard, you must be a lawyer,” and I tried to explain that Harvard was a university with many disciplines. He said, “No, you are a lawyer.” When they had a battalion court-martial, I became the defense counsel because he said, “You’re a lawyer.” I said, “I don’t know beans about it.” Well, it turns out the army has field manuals on everything, so I got the field manual on courts-martial.

Benjamin: And you became a lawyer?

Holabird: I got two obviously guilty people off because of my great skill with the law, and they dissolved the court, which I thought was great. They got a better court that wouldn’t be susceptible to my persuasive defense.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Holabird: One other funny thing about my army life, about Harvard, too, and the company commander having discovered that I was a lawyer—a manqué—decided I probably should be a writer manqué, too, since I’d gone to Harvard. So when anybody did anything in the organization, he had me write them up for a medal. There is a field manual on awards and decorations, so I read the field manual on awards and decorations. I think our company had more medals per unit—it turns out there was a formula just like high school diplomas or citations. There were phrases that you used that so and so “with complete disregard for his personal safety and in the best interest of the United States of America” did thus. You had to be very specific about what he did and

83 how bravely he did it, and I wrote these up. Darned if that was what you had to do. People don’t get medals unless somebody turns them in for a medal, which I learned is part of a great personnel thing. Later on when I was at the Holabird and Root office, we had Christmas parties, and I used to use my great medal-writing skill, and we gave medals to all kinds of people in the office just as a nice, funny thing. We picked out somebody who had done some terrible thing, and we gave him the Fearless Fosdick medal for this. Anyway, it was kind of a nice thing, but the army fostered my skill in that. We had a marvelous first sergeant who had been a coal miner in southern Illinois—a great, huge man. He had also been scouted for the St. Louis Cardinals as a catcher, but I guess he wasn’t good enough. His name was Sgt. Kratsch, and the company commander said, “Why don’t you write a medal for Sgt. Kratsch.” I said, “What in the world has he done to earn a medal?” He said, “Look it up in your book.” So I thumbed through the field manual of awards and decorations, and there was something called the Legion of Merit, which they give for overall service. It usually is given to colonels or generals who haven’t been in action very much but have done a superior job. So I wrote up Sgt. Kratsch. The war was over and we were having some kind of a parade to celebrate something or other, and they called out four colonels and Sgt. Kratsch, and I heard my beautiful ennobling words read out by some major general and they awarded Sgt. Kratsch the Legion of Merit. I was overcome with my own brilliance. Capt. Harris, my company commander, said, “You’ve been a second lieutenant long enough. Why don’t you write up your promotion to first lieutenant,” so I did that.

Benjamin: On the basis of what?

Holabird: I just did all the things he asked me to do. Then he said later on, “I think you should have a bronze star for the work you did during the Bulge. Why don’t you write it up,” so I wrote up my own. What else do you do? You write it in the third person anyhow. I’ve become quite an expert on the fellowships for architects because I help them write up their awards. It’s supposed to be written by an outside person anyhow, but you’re the only one who really knows all about yourself. But I tell these people they have to write something

84 that somebody else is going to say, “Why, that man should have been a fellow years ago,” then you write something. That’s what we do. “So-and-so is an architect, and has had a brilliant career teaching young men to do this, that and the other, or running an office through the most difficult, mind-boggling work that would have killed many an other.”

Benjamin: Were you on the Fellowship Committee for the AIA?

Holabird: Well, I used to be that, but now I’m called in sometimes as the old hand to help. I say sometimes I’m the kiss of death, but sometimes I can tell people how to write these things up so they make sense. I say to make them short and make them eloquent, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be modest about your achievements because this is not the time to be modest. You can be modest at home or to yourself, but these people want to know what you’ve done.

Benjamin: When were you made a Fellow?

Holabird: Oh, 1974 or 1975, something like that. Jerry Loebl and Norm Schlossman and Paul McCurry grabbed me one time shortly after I became a fellow and said—there used to be a party once a year Sam Marx would give for architects, and it was the only time architects ever got together—“I think it’s up to you to arrange such a thing.” So I said let’s do it with the fellows, so once a year I’d arrange a party. It was usually at the Tavern Club, and we’d invite all the Chicago and Illinois Fellows. There are about a hundred, and usually fifty to fifty-four would come. If we do it this year, it will the sixteenth year in a row that we’ve had this party. We started in 1975 or 1976 or something like that. We find who the new Fellows are and we invite them and make them explain to us why they have been so selected. It’s very good-natured. It’s not a hazing, but it’s kind of an initiation. I’ve made big felt halberds or something, in medieval times, with a big F on them and their own names, and I’ve just had different colored felt, and we award everybody his F.

Benjamin: Well, did you get your F in front of the AIA?

85 Holabird: And we have some women Fellows now, too, so we award them their F’s.

Benjamin: Is Cindy Weese a Fellow?

Holabird: Yes, she was very good-natured and she made a very funny speech. I told people that they can’t be less than two minutes nor more than four in their presentation, and if it’s boring they’ll be sorry. So, I write that to everybody, and that’s been fun. Somebody said it’s the nicest party of the year. The architects talk to each other at one point; they’re friendly. I think it reminds me of my Saturdays at the Tavern Club years ago when architects used to talk to one another. They probably didn’t talk the rest of the week, but they did that day.

Benjamin: I think it’s interesting that you’re establishing the same camaraderie for another generation of architects.

Holabird: I don’t think it lasts, but they have a good time at this time and it’s a nice way to do it. I tell them when they go on to Washington to the actual fellowship things that they’ll wish they were back in Chicago. It’s a huge, big, dumb cocktail party—noisy with very brief mention of everybody. Well, there are eighty or ninety a year, and they just have to skip through them to get through all the names.

Benjamin: So the real party is here.

Holabird: That’s still part of my award business that I started doing in the army because I think it’s fun. People like getting awards. If you do it in a nice way and you’re not making fun of people, you’re extolling them because they’re important and people like to have attention paid to them.

Benjamin: You mentioned Jerry Loebl, that he and your father were very instrumental in getting Mies to come to Chicago.

Holabird: Loebl was a professor at Armour Institute then. I think he was running the

86 architectural department. Architectural classes were held at the Art Institute. The poor students had to go down south to Armour to take their classes, and then they came up to the Art Institute under the skylights up on top of some gallery or something. That’s where the architectural school was for Armour Tech. And they remained there when Mies came for a while until finally they found the space down on the campus. But they didn’t get Crown Hall for many years after that.

Benjamin: Tell me how your father and Jerry Loebl were connected.

Holabird: They knew each other as fellow architects, and Father was a trustee at Armour. David Adler was a friend of both of theirs—a marvelous architect. He did these buildings here on Lake Shore Drive. He was with Henry Dangler. Dangler was the firm’s name, but Adler was the designer and he designed many, many beautiful houses in Lake Forest and Highland Park and Libertyville. Anyway, David Adler knew both Father and Loebl, and he said they’re looking for a dean for Armour and they suggested that they go to Gropius or Mies van der Rohe. I don’t think Father and Loebl knew either one of them, but they were both out of a job because of Hitler. I think Gropius and Breuer were both in England by this time. And so they made overtures to both, and at the same time, Harvard was making overtures to both. My father said Harvard outbid them for Gropius, and Mies, I guess, finally decided on the second best. That’s why in my great fishing talk, I say supposing Gropius had come to Chicago and Mies had gone to Cambridge, what would Harvard look like now and what would IIT look like. I think Mies was a marvelous architect but he shouldn’t have been doing a campus because he’d never been to a college himself and he didn’t, I think, have the slightest notion of the nice feeling about enclosures in a college, a quadrangle or something or other where you could become at least a little part of a social unit. His layout of IIT, although people brag about it, looks like a chemical or research area, like a pharmaceutical company. The buildings look as if they were ordered for research and not ordered for people to live and have fun in. They’ve done a lot of tree planting now, which I don’t think Mies envisioned. Well, everything was supposed to be on a rectangular grid then except for the one building that he did, which

87 Schipporeit and Heinrich used as the model for Lake Point Tower. Anyway, Father was pleased when Mies came, and I was just about ready to go to college. Father thought when he saw the students’ work of Mies that they were all doing the same thing and evidently working on what the master thought was important. He thought that was a bad thing that the students should have had so little chance to investigate their own ideas and not do just what the master thought was important for them. That’s why I went to Harvard.

Benjamin: Does the teaching at IIT today still follow Mies’s concepts?

Holabird: I was a trustee at IIT for a while, and one time, we found out that all the tenured professors there, eight or ten, were all Mies’ students and graduates of the school. That seemed somehow unhealthy to me. Lots of them wanted to do things just the way the master had done them, except the master would probably have changed as he grew and the world changed. Gene Summers has opened the thing out quite a bit, and they’ve hired some other people now. I think they still have kind of a stern notion about structure and things like that, but that’s fine. Why shouldn’t they? We thought the school needed a little bit of romance in it to cheer people up.

Benjamin: What could they have done to cheer up people?

Holabird: We had a marvelous young man at IIT—I can’t remember his name—and I asked him what they did Saturdays because Saturdays, when I was at Harvard, we’d either go to the football game or we’d lie around. He said, “I worked. I pictured all those other dummies going to football games, or what not, and I was just so pleased that I was just drawing all the time and accomplishing something.” I said that’s probably the problem with the school. They didn’t have any fun. They ought to have had some fun, too. Architectural labs at Harvard were hilarious. I used to go home sometimes because I could accomplish more work at home. Everybody was kibitzing and playing around.

Benjamin: Did the Holabird firm stay involved with Mies when he came to Armour?

88 Holabird: As I say, when Mies first came, they tried to give him some jobs but he didn’t have an office. He just had two or three people there, so he got Holabird and Root to do the working drawings. Mies was essentially the designer, and Holabird did the heating plant. I can’t remember some of the buildings that were done. Then later on I think PACE Associates did some. Again, Mies was the designer and the other firms provided the working documents because he didn’t have an office. Later on he finally got his own office together. It was the Office of Mies van der Rohe, and then it became Fujikawa, Conterato and Lohan, but now that’s split up. Joe Fujikawa has one office, Lohan has the other and Bruno Conterato is retired.

Benjamin: What role did Bruno play with Mies?

Holabird: As I say, they were all students. Joe Fujikawa and Bruno and Dirk Lohan, his grandson. They all went to IIT, and they were all part of his office, just as The Architects’ Collaborative in Cambridge had all gone to Harvard—at least in the early days, they had all gone to Harvard—and then they worked at the Gropius office, which was TAC, The Architects’ Collaborative. Anyway, Mies used the same system in Chicago because Herbert Greenwald got him to do the Promontory Apartments and then 860-880 Lake Shore Drive and then the buildings on Diversey. By this time, Mies was really launched, and they were doing things in Montreal, Detroit and everywhere else. There were projects all over, and he set up an office largely staffed by his bright students from IIT. That’s what people do who have a foot in both camps. When Jerry Horn was teaching at IIT, he tried to get the gifted students to come to the office.

Benjamin: Was that often used as a way to get good people in your firm?

Holabird: Yes, certainly. He saw them as students, and he recognized their ability and tried to get them to come to the office. I think this has been done forever by anybody who was teaching on the side.

Benjamin: You mentioned Herbert Greenwald. He was a developer. Was he the person who launched Mies’s career?

89 Holabird: I think so. He was a sociology teacher and instructor at the University of Chicago, and supposedly, he inherited a little money from some relative and he decided he was going to build a building. He asked somebody who the three greatest architects in the world were, and they said Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Wright and Le Corbusier turned him down and thought he was a nut.

Benjamin: How did you learn that?

Holabird: That’s what Herbert said to me. I used to see him constantly because later on when we did the Parker School, he was the head of the building committee. He had children in two of my children’s classes at Parker and was a very nice man. Anyway, he got Mies to do the Promontory, and then that was so successful, and then he started 860-880 and the other and the rest is history. And then poor Herbert went down in an Electra crash on Long Island coming in to LaGuardia. That must have been around 1960. And then Bernie Weissbourd and others took over and it became Metropolitan Builders, and Weissbourd became the major figure in that. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it. I think he was Herbert Greenwald’s lawyer, and then he just had to pick up the pieces that Herbert Greenwald had left. At one point we had Herbert Greenwald’s horse. My four daughters were horse mad, and we rented somebody’s farm in southern Illinois or central Illinois. Mrs. Greenwald gave us his pacer or something very fancy, and I finally put the kibosh on it because we had to hire trailers to move him and we had to pay for all the fodder and the tack I said there was no way we were going to keep it, and I broke my oldest daughter’s heart. I think she was thirteen or so at the time. She thought we were going to just keep it in the backyard or something. Anyway, we briefly had a horse.

Benjamin: We started to talk about when you came into the firm in 1955. Was Bill Holabird there?

Holabird: He was one of the partners. At that time there were three partners—John Root, Bill Holabird and Joseph Burgee. Joe Burgee was certainly the dynamic one of

90 the three. Bill had been mostly in the field or on contracts, and Mr. Root was wobbly by then. Later he got either Parkinson’s, or I think it was probably Alzheimer’s. I don’t think they knew what Alzheimer’s was then, but he began getting to be more and more forgetful and would forget what he said. Alas and alack, his wife, who was a perfectly marvelous and attractive woman, used to say it was good for John to go to the office, so he’d come to the office and be vague at the office and vague with clients. That was another marvelous thing for losing clients, if you can imagine, to have somebody come in and forget what he said the minute before. We were doing all the work for the Newberry Library at that time, and Northern Trust, but I think John Root would come to a meeting and would fade out. I don’t know why Burgee or Bill would let it go by. But eventually they got him to retire and he moved down to Cape Cod.

Benjamin: When did he retire?

Holabird: Well, I came back to the office in 1955, and he was perfectly fine. I think by 1960 he was really over the edge.

Benjamin: During those years, who brought in clients?

Holabird: They did a lot of work, but they were also losing people. Burgee was very much a go-getter and as tough as nails—he was very ambitious—but he didn’t think he needed designers so a lot of the bright, young designers left the office. Bruce Graham and the entire PACE Associates group left.

Benjamin: How did this happen?

Holabird: I don’t know very much about them, but Johnny Kausal was a very bright guy, and Skip Genther was another. There were two others, whose names I forget, but these were all the second-echelon design types who could have carried the firm to do a lot more work. They saw the writing on the wall, and they just went off and started their own firms. Lots of people would have done this anyhow, and maybe they would have, but Graham went off to Skidmore and two or three others went off to Skidmore. Some went off to Perkins and Will,

91 but luckily there was enough left.

Benjamin: Who was left?

Holabird: There were three or four very bright people. I kept thinking that if my father were alive would he have wanted bright, young people because that’s what an architectural firm lives on, bright, hard-working, upwardly mobile people who just want to do things and are fighting hard to do everything they can.

Benjamin: Were Burgee’s sons in the firm then?

Holabird: Joe was there, but John had just left. I came back to the firm in November, and I think Joe Burgee died in January of the next year, two months later. He’d had one heart attack, and he drank heavily and just had another one in a hotel room in Washington and died there with a lot of leftover business. His son Joe, Jr., was a perfectly marvelous guy, but he was poorly treated by some of the partners at the office. Then they divided his interests among three other people—Bartsch, the designer; and Bernard Bradley, another designer; and Harry Manning, who had been an architect. So there were then five partners, Root, Bill Holabird and then these other three—Manning, Bradley and Bartsch.

Benjamin: What kind of design influence did Bartsch have?

Holabird: He was a man of, I think, great sensitivity and exquisite taste. But he was trying to be very aristocratic and he didn’t really like people. I think his primary interest was interiors, and if he could have only stayed in interiors, it would have been great. But by attrition, I think, he ended up as a major designer in the firm, and therefore, he was working about the exterior of the buildings, too. He just wasn’t capable in exteriors, and he didn’t know enough. He always had second guesses, and he was looking around at other buildings and kind of borrowing from them. The nicest building I think he did is a little library out at the Morton Arboretum. This is Bartsch’s. It’s a cute little building, and it’s just lovely. I told you how he did the interiors at the Diana Court building, which are great. And later on, he did the First National Bank building in Minneapolis

92 and, I think, borrowed heavily from Mies and Skidmore, but at least it was a very straightforward building. The last thing I think he did well was in Washington, D.C., the federal office buildings 10A and 10B, and these are white marble and very simple. I think they’re probably among the best of the postwar buildings, which got pretty formidable and heavy, but this is very nice. I think the Federal Aeronautics Administration is in one of them now. They’re just very nice. They’re Miesian. There was a Philadelphia firm who were supposedly doing the design, and they sent design after design—curtain walls in diamond shapes, and curtain walls in alternating blocks of this, that and the other. We were only supposed to be doing the working drawings, but we finally got the thing down to a very simple statement. I think they work, and he did very well. Bartsch had a lot to do with that building, and it’s good, and he did some buildings in Bombay, India.

Benjamin: How did the firm get a commission in Bombay?

Holabird: Well, Bartsch was traveling around, and he met Dr. Bhaba, who was an atomic scientist from India, and Dr. Bhaba was going to build a research center for Mr. Tata, who was a rich Parsee in Bombay. Lo and behold, we ended up doing the Tata Center for Fundamental Research in Bombay, and then we also built an Air India building because Mr. Tata owned Air India, among other things, and he owned the steel industry. The Parsees were Persians who came over from Iran and were the traders of India. The way the Indians have gone to South Africa and have become the middle class, the Parsees came and just took over. Maybe like Jewish financiers in other countries, too. Anyway, the Parsees showed the Indians how to operate, and Mr. Tata was one of them. When Bartsch retired suddenly in 1963—kind of walked out of the office and never came back—I had to go to India to try and pick up the Air India building. Well, it was twenty stories high, and we went over there because with the 747 jet, instead of a jet coming with 100 people at a time to India, 350 were suddenly going to come sailing in. All the baggage racks and everything else were geared up for 150 tourists arriving instead of 350, so we had to go and see what we could do about that. It was a pretty dumb building. Bartsch had made it all in precast concrete with white chunks of stuff in it, which would have looked

93 marvelous in Washington, D.C., but in India when the monsoons come, there is a kind of red dust that blows all over, so this beautiful white thing was kind of peach colored when I arrived. I couldn’t think what to do with it except to spray it with white or do something with it. They all asked me why it wasn’t going faster, but with this building they didn’t even have a crane until they were up to the eighteenth floor, so Indian ladies carried concrete in what looked like salad bowls on their heads.

Benjamin: Up to the eighteenth floor?

Holabird: Yes. And the men mixed the concrete down below on the ground floor, and these poor ladies made an endless chain, walking.

Benjamin: Did the men ever help carry the concrete?

Holabird: The men were doing heavy work, too. I don’t know why—the ladies must have developed strong legs, that’s all I can say. They looked like ants moving along. I couldn’t believe it. Then they’d pour the floors, and once they poured the floors then they’d get a chisel out and start chopping floors for electrical, and things like that. In America we put all kinds of things into the slab when we’re pouring them so that you don’t have to do that. They’re called sleeves. You put in little pieces of plastic pipe or something wherever you want an electrical conduit or a heating pipe or a duct to go. But in India you build it first and then chop a hole in it.

Benjamin: That doesn’t sound very efficient.

Holabird: All this with bamboo scaffolding and people walking around barefoot among all the junk. I looked out my window from the famous Taj Mahal Hotel, and there was an old man who looked about ninety and two little boys [who] had long pieces of reinforcing bars, and they were bending them in the proper shapes out in the backyard around a couple of cleats. That was life in India.

Benjamin: You said that Bartsch left suddenly in 1963. What precipitated that?

94 Holabird: He just got tired, I guess. He decided he was going to retire, and he did. We paid him a certain amount for ten years.

Benjamin: Some people weren’t so sorry though.

Holabird: Years later, when the firm was celebrating its hundredth anniversary in 1980, I asked him for help and Bartsch said he hated the whole subject of architecture and he hated every minute he’d worked in it. I wondered why in the world he hadn’t decided about forty years earlier and made life a lot pleasanter for a lot of people.

Benjamin: Did Bradley leave also?

Holabird: Bradley stayed, and Bradley was a lovely man. But Bradley had had polio as a child, and the Chicago winters began to get him. He had a spinal fusion years ago as a child, which was evidently one way of getting him to walk. One leg was in a cast, although he used to hike all over the office with a cane and this brace. I can still see him legging it down O’Hare, those endless runways. Eventually, though, the doctors told him he ought to go out to Arizona where he is still. He arranged for the other partners to retire. I think the others would have been perfectly happy to sit there forever, but Bradley wrote a retirement thing for himself, and William Holabird and Manning, who were still left.

Benjamin: What was Bradley’s role in the firm? What did he do?

Holabird: He was a designer. He was marvelous. He did all the telephone buildings and lots of others. Gerry Pook and I always thought Bradley was too fast a designer. People would come in and want a sketch for a new building, and instead of sitting on it for weeks Bradley would take it home over the weekend and he’d come back with a picture of the building with trees and vines and everything. They were beautiful, beautiful drawings, and the owner said, “This is what I want.” So the rest of us would spend months trying to see if we could work it out. He did it too quickly, and he drew too beautifully.

95 Benjamin: What was his background?

Holabird: He’s from Chicago or La Grange or something like that. He went to the University of Illinois, and he won every possible scholarship there. When he got polio as a little boy they didn’t think he was ever going to walk again, but his mother read in the paper about hot baths and the spinal fusion. Bradley went to Warm Springs, Georgia, and they got him moving again. One of his friends in the pool was an older man named Franklin D. Roosevelt, and when Roosevelt came to the convention in 1932, he had Bradley meet him in his wheelchair.

Benjamin: What happened to Bradley’s drawings?

Holabird: We used to throw them away like mad. All of Gilbert Hall’s stuff, mostly thrown away. His wife kept a few and his brother-in-law kept some. That’s why they appear in Bruegmann book [Holabird and Root: An Illustrated Catalog of Works 1880-1940, 1991]. You just couldn’t store them. They were all over the place, and you had to have a spot. Or we’d put them in the basement.

Benjamin: And the flood ruined them?

Holabird: And we got rid of them that way. As I say, Gilbert Hall’s things were so beautiful, and Bradley’s were so beautiful.

Benjamin: Did some of them end up in the Holabird and Root collection at the Chicago Historical Society?

Holabird: I don’t think so. We have photostats of all of them, but that’s hardly the same thing, especially in this day and age when they could have been sold for hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Benjamin: How did the firm decide on the Chicago Historical Society as a repository? Who made the decisions?

96 Holabird: Well, me, mostly. We had all of these drawings and we knew we had to do something with them. We hadn’t even realized that they were worth anything, except that we used them when clients wanted a building that they already had or owned and we had the drawings. This was marvelous. We got jobs out of this often, although sometimes they wanted to buy our drawings from us and give it to a different architect.

Benjamin: Did that happen often?

Holabird: Sometimes, sure. Having the drawings of a building that they own makes all the difference in the world because you can see what went into it initially—where the columns are and where the pipes are. But if you have your own favorite architect and you don’t want to use Holabird and Root, or whoever has the drawings, you try to make a deal with them for the drawings. We sold the drawings of the Board of Trade to somebody, and the Pat Shaw office did some of the work. We sold the drawings of the Daily News building to somebody or another, and they did that. I think we gave the Diana Court building drawings to the Art Institute for nothing. We also gave away the Fortnightly Club building that was done by McKim, Mead and White, but Holabird and Roche did the working drawings. And then Walker Johnson in our office said, “You ought to talk to Harold Skramsted at the Chicago Historical Society because they’re thinking of making an architectural collection.” So I talked to Harold, and he said, “We’d like everything. We don’t want just the special buildings.” The Art Institute just wanted certain things—kind of the plums—but the historical society said, “We’d like everything.” I said, “Well, we’re having a hundredth anniversary,” and he said, “All right, we’ll give you a show if you give us the drawings. The drawings will be there for scholarly purposes, but you can still have access to them if you need them for very special things, because since you gave them we feel, at least for the next few years, you’re entitled to that.” This was good, because if you give something you’re not supposed to give it with a proviso. But the proviso was that we were giving them for scholarly purposes to the historical society. We doubted if we were ever going to use any of them

97 anyhow. It proved very good. The historical society learned to start conserving. I think we gave them 200,000 drawings. Oh, the other thing that happened to us is that we had this terrible flood in the office. The Northern Trust, right next to the new Northern Trust building was going up, and Sears was just barely completed. The Northern Trust had a hero sandwich place in the basement.

Benjamin: Where was your office then?

Holabird: At the corner of Adams and Franklin, where we are now. Anyhow, uphill from us was this building. Evidently one night—we don’t know if this was because of the Northern Trust building or because of Sears or just their own poor something or other—the hero sandwich place blew up. It forced the elevators all the way up to the top of the building. It blew a metal grating all across the street, and the Sears wall was plastered with little pieces of iron. If it had happened at 8:30 in the morning we would have wiped out half of the city of Chicago, but it went off at 2:30 a.m. It scared the pants off the janitor, I think. At any rate, there were water mains in the street—underneath the sidewalk; water and sewer—and they exploded. We were downhill of them, and we shipped eighteen inches of water into our vaults. Our photographs were taken there, and drawings were there. The next day we could get in. The fire department had sprayed water there, and we picked up some water from them. I had a friend who was a bookbinder. I said, “What the hell do we do with all our life’s work of documents?” I called somebody in Chicago that she knew, and he said, “You call the Library of Congress.” I talked to the man at the Library of Congress, and he said, “McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis is just doing some drying out because the war department lost something in Kansas City because of flood and fire and water damage, and McDonnell Douglas has a freeze-drying thing. But,” he said, “the first thing you do is you’ve got to get those drawings refrigerated.” So I was learning all kinds of marvelous things. This was the morning after. We called up somebody and got a refrigerated truck and parked it there. We dragged the drawings—a lot of these were in big metal containers, and lots of them were flat. We shipped them all in this truck. Meanwhile, I called McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis and told them they were going to get a shipment of stuff, and we shipped them down there. They

98 freeze-dried them. They were on old linen paper and they were kind of stuck together, so when we got the drawings back they were clear, but we often had to dip them in water again to regularize them so we could dry them out individually. But that’s when we also decided and knew that we ought to get somebody better to take care of them than ourselves. This happened only once in ninety-five years, but that was enough. So, we contacted Skramsted, and that’s how we really got started and sent our drawings up through 1940 or 1945.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Benjamin: We’ve talked about the office in the fifties and sixties. What do you think were among the most successful buildings during that period that the office turned out?

Holabird: We touched on them a little bit already. I said I thought that Bartsch, the chief designer, was limited in the fact that he’d really been a marvelous interiors person and wasn’t really ready to cope with the entire thing. But the First National Bank in Minneapolis and the federal office buildings in Washington, 10A and 10B. I’m trying to think of the other buildings Bartsch did. Bradley did a half-dozen very handsome telephone buildings, culminating in the 225 Washington building, which is Illinois Bell headquarters. He, too, was such a marvelous delineator that he sometimes found the solution too quickly and then he had to stick with it because the client enjoyed it immediately and wanted to build it. The first job I got which I thought was a contribution to the office was Francis Parker School. I got this because I’d taught there and I’d graduated from there and I was a parent there. I did everything at the Parker School. I was a trustee at one point, I think. The only thing I wasn’t was a principal. Once they tried to get me to be principal, too. I think it’s very wise that I wasn’t. They also wanted me to be president of the board of trustees, which was another thing I said, “What you need as president of the board of trustees is somebody who is a money-raiser and a rock of the business world, and I’m certainly not that.” Anyway, the Parker School came up, partly because, I guess, of the Our Lady of Angels fire. It was a fire in one of the

99 Catholic schools, which wiped out a number of little children and nuns. Part of the problem was that it was an old building and the staircases were not fireproof. As people do, you stowed stuff under the staircases, so they were lethal. And the Parker School was an old building exactly like that, and Nat Owings was on the board of trustees—I can’t remember if he was president. At any rate, Skidmore came in and investigated the old school, and they figured it was going to cost about $500,000 just to bring the school up to code—to fireproof stairwells and to bring new electrical codes into effect. And the trustees, I guess, decided that to spend $500,000 and not get any more space or room or amenities but just safety was not worthwhile, so that’s when they started considering a new school. Also, my father and Clay Judson had been on the board before the war, and they pictured the Parker School as having an eventual capacity of 300 students. Then after the war the school suddenly had 500 students and people clamoring to get in, all the war babies, so the clouded crystal ball had been clouded again. They needed more room, and they needed something safe. I think they were going to go to Skidmore first, and then I don’t know who outweighed them, but this was the first job I had in the office and it was good. I wished I’d had a chance to do it twenty years later because I would have done a better job.

Benjamin: Why do you think the job came to Holabird and Root?

Holabird: Holabird and Root and Holabird and Roche had done all the various remodelings on the school, forever. It had been built by James Gamble Rogers. It was the first building he had ever built, said Miss Cook who was the old- time principal. She was a kind of Jane Addams lady, and she said, “James Gamble Rogers did this as his first building, and he would have liked to have redone it later on when he knew more about it.” But it was a marvelous old building, all the rooms were different and it was a crazy form. One of the teachers said, “When you do a new building, make it so that the principal can’t stand at one end of the thing and check all the corridors,” so we did that. When we made a new building, there were going to be twelve grades in this building. We tried to make the first and second grades on one level and then the third, fourth, fifth and sixth on the next, and that was different, and then seventh and

100 eighth were kind of in limbo between lower-school kids and upper-school kids. Then the high school was on the top floor where they should be since they were the oldest. It’s hard to make different kinds of rooms when you’re using a square grid of one kind or another, but we did it as best we could. The lower- school rooms had toilets adjacent, and the upper-school rooms were lots of different sizes because we knew there would be seminars and small groups and languages and bigger groups for English or mathematics or something. Then we tried to give every teacher some kind of a little cubicle so that they had a place to call their own. In the old days, of the teachers at Parker, only two or three ever had a place for their own desk. They kind of lived in the faculty smoking room or in the library or something like that. So we did that, and we tried within rectangular limits to give variety to the rooms and to the experiences of the kids.

Benjamin: The courtyard is particularly wonderful. Why did you include a courtyard?

Holabird: It was a city school and everything opens out, but we tried to make the courtyard a place where the kids could feel a little bit private. Originally I’d fixed it so they could flood the whole thing for winter ice-skating, but nobody in the city seems to skate outside in the winter anymore. When I was little we used to skate on the Lincoln Park lagoons. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t out there all winter. And Parker School used to flood one of its fields, and we played hockey and just skated. It seems to me we did it all winter long as long as there was any ice, even when there were puddles all over it. But nobody does it anymore. Nobody has ever flooded the thing, even though it’s designed to be flooded. It was also designed with two circular stairs so that the graduating seniors could come waltzing down the stairs and the commencement people would be sitting out in the courtyard, and nobody’s ever used it for that, either.

Benjamin: What part of the building especially interested you?

Holabird: I built a stage, finally, that I thought I could really teach on, with two sides of the stage that could open up so the stage almost surrounded the audience. I

101 don’t think I ever worked on that stage, and I’m sure other people would probably want to do something else. Anyway, it’s a pretty good stage. It turned out it was too small just as soon as we’d done it. The school was designed for 600 students, and the school by that time was pushing 700. So all the rooms became small, and they wondered why we hadn’t made it bigger, but it was so costly that they had to go around and raise more money and take out a loan and get parents to underwrite a loan. We cut a lot of good things out of it—quality roofing materials and valves and things like that. At any rate, that was my first building, and it got a Certificate of Merit award from the AIA.

Benjamin: Did Gertrude Kuh work on the landscaping with you?

Holabird: She was a Parker mother. Her son, John Deimel—her name used to be Gertrude Deimel— and Johnny Deimel was in my brother Christopher’s class. Gertrude Kuh and my mother were great friends, and they went to the symphony together. She and her sister and my mother always went together for years, and Gertrude Kuh landscaped my backyard. Unfortunately, it never lasted because there was nothing but shade here, but she was a very nice lady and she was involved. And so smart and capable and had an eye that could just pick out what she should do.

Benjamin: You have had a strong and long connection with Parker. What is the history of the school?

Holabird: Parker School had been started by Mrs. Blaine, who was Colonel McCormick’s cousin. She started a school because she liked Colonel Parker, and she gave money to the University of Chicago to start the school on the North Side where she lived. They took the money and built the lab school and started selling off her property on Lincoln Park West that she’d bought, so over a period she bought back the property before it was all developed. She lost the Belden Avenue frontage and half the Lincoln Park West frontage, which is this building my mother lived in—the Shakespeare Garden. She originally had the land from Webster to Belden and from Lincoln Park West to Clark Street. It was a huge site but she could only buy back part of it. That’s where she started

102 the school, and for years she paid the deficit.

Benjamin: Who was Mrs. Blaine?

Holabird: She was Anita McCormick Blaine. She was one of the children of Cyrus McCormick, the great McCormick reaper family. Two or three of her brothers and sisters were institutionalized, and I think Mrs. Blaine probably should have been—I don’t know—because she was a little bit exotic. But she was rich enough so that they didn’t have to. If you’re rich exotic, it’s all right. People humor you. At any rate, the alumni never was called in to contribute, as in other schools, because Mrs. Blaine always picked up the bills. So this was the first time they’d ever really expected the alumni to do something, and the alumni was not in the habit of giving to the Parker School because Mrs. Blaine always took care of that. It took them years. Now they’re hard-bitten fund- raisers, and anybody who becomes a parent is signing their life away. So they had a hard time raising money. At that time the school, when we cut it down, was $2.2 million, and they expected no more than $2 million. They only raised, I think, a million and a half, or something, so the parents had to loan money. You were not ever supposed to pay it back. You took out bonds—kind of like bonds for Israel. You buy them and you don’t really expect to make any money or redeem them.

Benjamin: Did Gertrude Kuh work on other projects with you?

Holabird: No.

Benjamin: What did Gertrude Kuh do in connection with the school?

Holabird: She didn’t even work on that one, as a matter of fact, but she did come in for some things. I’d called Mr. Franz Lipp who was an old landscape architect, but he didn’t really give it very careful attention, so my mother said I should talk to Gertrude. She came, and on the two circular stairways she got weeping birches instead of weeping willows—perfectly beautiful trees that just followed the curves of the stairs. She really knew what she was doing. At any rate, she

103 helped.

Benjamin: Did Franz Lipp work with the firm sometimes?

Holabird: No. He had done a lot of work for my father. In the early days he was one of the first landscape designers, I guess, in the Chicago area. I don’t know what he was—Austrian or Hungarian or something like that. He did the Cantigny work for Robert McCormick, and I think he’s still alive. He’s a little round man, about ninety-three, and can’t move around very much. But he lives out in Cantigny and looks out over his gardens.

Benjamin: What other buildings did you do?

Holabird: Parker School was my first step, and I should have had more experience before I did it. I was old enough, but I hadn’t been in the architectural office more than two or three years. The other buildings that were of some importance—I’d worked in public housing on Stateway, kind of designing it, but I hadn’t really carried through because I was still teaching. But we got a public housing project—it was called housing for the elderly—at Madison and Paulina. Eventually it was called the Patrick Sullivan Homes because, I guess, he’s a politician or somebody. I have no idea who Patrick Sullivan is. But this was kind of an interesting project because the public housing department had now decided that for the elderly they didn’t have to be so austere. We had plastered walls, and we had carpet on the floor. This was twenty-five or thirty years ago. We put showers in for everybody with a jump seat and a flexible shower spray so you could either stand up or sit down. I don’t think there was a bathtub in the building except for the superintendent, who presumably had children and they didn’t want to stand up in the shower. We put all the receptacle plugs at least eighteen inches off the floor so older people didn’t have to bend down, and we put some good work rooms on the ground floor and some pleasant kind of solariums on the roof. It was a whole different kind of thing. They were still concerned about minimal dimensions, and things like that. We used the brick that we’d used at Parker. We tried to make this a nice place, and I think it was.

104 Benjamin: Was housing for the elderly kind of a new concept then?

Holabird: Yes. It was coming in, and it was really separated from the family housing things. These were only going to be for older people, and the sociologists or social welfare people who came into the project said there was likely to be some elderly couples and then a few single men, and what did you do with a single man in a project like that? Well, we made a one-bedroom or a studio apartment with a stove and a refrigerator so he could cook for himself, and it turned out if he were any kind of a person he would quickly associate himself with a single woman and she’d do the cooking for him. As it turned out, they did. They used to have meetings up in the solarium and carry their various pots or casseroles up there and share things.

Benjamin: Do you think it was successful?

Holabird: There were a lot of apartments going up in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago, and when I compared our floor plan with something like the Outer Drive East or something like that it was very much the same. We were limited by the government on the size and the equipment—the kitchens and all were a little more spartan and less generous—but otherwise it was a pretty good deal, I thought, for everybody. Then we got involved with Western Electric. They somehow selected Holabird and Root for the new Bell Laboratories at Indian Hill [Naperville]. I think they liked us. The office by this time had a reputation not for great, wild design but for good documents and sound design. I think it’s a bad thing to get into, and you’re lucky if you’re in an office that has a design reputation and people come to you for their great projects rather than just their dumb projects where they just want a utilitarian solution. Anyway, this was to be a big research lab, and the last one had been done by Eero Saarinen. He had just a few years before for Bell Telephone Labs done the most gorgeous and probably the most expensive building in their history at Holmdel, New Jersey. This had been a completely glass Miesian rectangle about 800 feet long, and I can’t remember how wide, with a beautiful pool in front with fountains all over. This was the condenser water for the air

105 conditioning system. Instead of putting a cooling tower on top of the building, what you have to do with an air conditioning system is cool down the water before you run it through again because it heats up and you can’t just keep running heated water through. That’s what a cooling tower is. A cooling tower on top of the building drops the water atmospherically, and with fans it takes heat out of the water and then they can use that water again through the system.

Benjamin: Is it recycled?

Holabird: They recycle it, but they have to cool it first. The best thing to do is have a river and just run it through, and then throw the hot water off and keep the cool water coming through. But that is verboten in most places. You’re not allowed to do that because gradually you’re warming the river downstream for other people, that’s all. In the old days that didn’t matter. Whoever was downstream just took it. Anyway, Saarinen had what was called a spray pond. Instead of running the water through a cooling tower he had this huge expanse of fountains. So it enhanced the building, but it turned out on hot days or on days when there wasn’t much wind it didn’t work very well. Anyway, their last building had been done by Saarinen, and the Bell Laboratories people—the research part of AT&T before the breakup—were enchanted with the building and Western Electric thought it was ten times too expensive. So we were supposed to build a building that had the same lure for the research people but was cheap, or as my famous sixth-grade essay was, “Good Buildings, Cheap,” which was the motto of Holabird and Root. So, we built a building. Western Electric had about three or four people involved on the job and Bell had three or four people. They all used to arrive for long meetings at the office as we got going. I learned a lot from them. The Bell Lab people used to come first class on the plane, and Western Electric people came in tourist class, so they were already cross when they arrived. Western Electric was the profit maker in the telephone system, and Bell Labs was the research division. You can understand. When we had meetings, Bell Labs liked to go out for a rich lunch, and Western Electric would like sandwiches and coffee on the table. So that was another bone of contention. But, we made a building that eventually

106 seemed to work. It’s called Indian Hill and it’s in Naperville. It’s a huge complex.

Benjamin: Did you design that?

Holabird: I was the designer, with Mr. Bradley by that time. I’d had had my revolution from Bartsch and was working for Bradley. The Bell Lab people didn’t think there were enough windows, and the Western Electric thought there were too many. Finally we went to a marvelous meeting in New York, Bradley and I. We took our drawing materials, so we worked in the hotel room trying to finish this up. We took the drawings over, and they had a huge meeting with the head of Western Electric and the head of Bell Labs, and they took the drawings upstairs to the head of AT&T. You could sense the corporate mind at work—lots of people involved in what they shouldn’t have had any business doing because of what did they know. At any rate, they approved it, and we made a building that looked glassy enough for the Bell Labs and solid enough for Western Electric.

Benjamin: And was it cheap?

Holabird: The costs were much less than Saarinen’s. The building has none of the quality, but it was a pretty good building, at that. The other building that was most successful for me, I guess, was the Intramural Physical Education building at the University of Illinois. We’d done a lot of high school physical education facilities, and university people came up and looked at them. The buildings were not all that good, I didn’t think. I hadn’t had anything to do with them. They looked pretty ordinary, but evidently, again, Illinois thought we were going to do a sensible job and we were picked. I had a world-class education because we went and visited the University of Pittsburgh and looked at their gyms, and we went and visited Amherst and looked at the University of Massachusetts. We looked at two or three others in the East, and I went out and looked at the Air Force Academy and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. At any rate, lots of these places were staffed by graduates of the University of Illinois. I hadn’t realized that the physical education department

107 was all over the country. They were very helpful, and we learned what things to do and what things not to do. We went on one whole trip just to look at squash and handball walls to find out what was the best system for doing walls and floors and how to achieve the best things with the lowest maintenance and initial costs. For pool bottoms and pool walls, because we had two huge pools—Olympic size, fifty meters, which is 165 feet or something like that. They’re mammoth. Then things were further complicated by the fact that the president of the university, David Dodds Henry, said when he sat in the stadium, he was going to look at this new building from one end of the stadium, and he wanted the roof to look good. He didn’t want to see just old gravel, so at great expense we made kind of a false top to the gymnasiums with pyramidal roofs. It turned out by the time we finished David Dodds Henry had retired as president of the university. I hope whoever looks down on this will know that our heart was in the right place. The physical education director—a marvelous man, David Matthews—said the indoor pool was a recreational pool and this is where he took Illinois farm boys and girls who had never really swum before. We had a deck-level pool. Deck-level means that the water comes over the side. You don’t have a gutter. The water pours over the sides, and then the top of the floor, after it pours over, has slots in it so it has a gutter but you don’t see it. It’s under the top layer. So for young people who hadn’t been in the water and for lots of handicapped, because the University of Illinois was one of the great handicapped centers, you could just sit on the edge of the pool and slide in—no worrying about gutters or jumping in. For most of the pool the deepest depth was three-and-a-half feet; that’s forty-two inches. But the thing was complicated because this was also to be the varsity diving pool, so we had a diving well halfway down the pool.

Benjamin: Did that present problems?

Holabird: The diving coach was accustomed to doing all his coaching in white duck shoes, and a deck that had water running over it was going to be just terrible for his white duck shoes. So we had an impasse at that for a long time. He was one of the trustees of the state of Illinois and thought he was the cat’s meow, so we had a big problem. Finally what we did was to build a gutter on each side

108 of the diving well that was raised so he could walk with his white duck shoes on the raised part. The rest of it worked the way the rest of the pool did, except with this we made a precasting that was a little bit raised so he could walk on it and keep dry. Of course, he retired before the pool was finished, too. The head of maintenance at the pool—there were great arguments over what kind of filters to use—refused to have anything but the kind of sand filters that his grandfather had used. It took a long time until he retired so we could put in the filters that used less space. The contribution to that, if I made one, was to try and first of all make the building look as if it belonged next to the stadium, which my father’s office had built, and I said at least we were going to pay some attention to the environment there. We used the Illinois brick, which is nice anyhow—kind of a red brick—and tried to make it affordable. Then the outside pool, which they had wanted to surround with a twelve-foot wall so that people wouldn’t get in, we dropped into kind of a lower level. It was twelve feet down, but you could look down in. It seemed to me if it was an outdoor recreational pool with tennis courts on the other side. The thing everybody really likes to do is look down, see who’s there and what it looks like. So we made kind of a glass balcony all around the pool on one side and the tennis court, which was also a skating rink, on the other side. In the wintertime they could flood it but they don’t. We have refrigeration tubes under the tennis court, and at great expense. I think there are four tennis courts, and it’s a regulation ice rink, and we poured that whole slab at one time. I don’t know how they did it. I think it took them thirty-six hours or forty-eight hours. They poured the whole tennis court slab with the refrigeration tubes at one time, and then there’s room on the outside to have it expand and contract if it has to. So that was interesting. We used some of the material that we discovered about squash courts and handball, and as far as I know they’ve held up. We tried to make the building look like a recreational building, which is what it was supposed to be.

Benjamin: Do I remember that with the interior pool your theater background and lighting background came into play?

Holabird: Oh, yes. Most architects, when they do swimming pools just love the pictures

109 afterwards because you get such exciting reflections in the water. David Matthews was the head of the intramural department, and a marvelous, marvelous man with good sense about things. He said, “When I’m coaching down here or teaching kids to swim, the last thing I want is reflections on the water that prevent me from seeing where the kids are. I want even lighting over this thing.” Also, if you put lighting fixtures all over the pool it’s hard as heck to change the bulbs. You have to get some kind of a bridge system or scaffolding system and shut the pool down. So, we made the ceiling like a stage cyclorama. We put little balconies on two sides and put in some high quartz lamps, which provided reflected light all over the ceilings, and it looked like the sky. There are some reflections, but the reflections are even. It’s a very pleasant light, I think. That was one other time when the theater thing helped. When we built the building we still had to make way for the university band to get down onto the football field since this was just at the end. There was a road that went behind the building for trucks and bringing equipment into the football field, but I said, “Why don’t we just march the band right through the building?” I thought it would be very nice, except that then they were so afraid that if you did that people could sit in the building and look out at the football field and not pay. So we were not allowed to have windows on that side of the building because they might get some free kibitzers. Anyway, it was a very successful building, except again the contractors in the central Illinois area were not very inexpensive and the building cost too much. It took a long while of adjustment and bartering. We were going to build it without one pool or without the other pool. Finally they decided to raise the student fees, or something awful like that, and they decided they could go ahead, which is good. I did a lot of other things, but, as I said, we were fortunate to have lots of work, but we were also unfortunate enough to have inherited a reputation in the fifties of not being very clever in design.

Benjamin: How big was the office then?

Holabird: The office has always been about the same. It’s been about 150 people, more or less, for the last twenty or thirty years. People are more productive than they were. One hundred and fifty people now with computer-aided drafting and

110 whatnot can do a lot more, and a lot of the silly business. Where we used to draw the same thing over and over again—now there are ways of doing it by photostats or various reproduction systems, which makes much more sense. I guess I have two more things to talk about. Ravinia is one, and the other is the so-called Madison-Canal building for the telephone company.

Benjamin: That’s an interesting building. Why are there no windows?

Holabird: This was Illinois Bell after it began to be design conscious. Various people said, “Why do you use Holabird and Root all the time? Why don’t you go out and get the best design?” It was to be a long-lines switching center, which was for the long-distance lines. At that time the AT&T system consisted of Western Electric, which was manufacturing; Bell Laboratories, which was research; long lines, which was the long-distance system; and then the local telephone companies. There were really four things, and this was long lines which was coming out of New York to build the long-distance building. They decided to have a competition, and they invited five Chicago firms, Holabird and Root, Perkins and Will, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Skidmore was the only one who didn’t enter the competition. They felt that this was either beneath them, or something, or else they were busy enough. Mr. Bradley, who had done all the phone buildings up until this time, thought that the fact that it was a competition meant that he was kind of out of date, so he turned it over to Mr. Pook and myself. We came up with a building. Luckily we knew how telephone buildings should work—the floors, anyhow. It was kind of a utilitarian building, but we thought it worked. Lo and behold, we won, much to our surprise. We were vindicated—Holabird and Root was vindicated—and it’s called the Madison-Canal Long Lines building. I asked them one time, “Why do you build such a dumb building right here?” It was to be kind of a fortified building to protect all the switching gear, and I said the building ought to be out in the suburbs. They kind of patted me on the head and said, “Buster, we’re building the building there because that’s where all the cables are.” Madison and Canal was the central cable location. One of the problems of the building, if you look at it from the North Western Station, is behind each of the columns

111 it looks like a separate column. It’s a big, black steel thing, about six-foot or eight-foot square, and those are the cables. They come up from the basement to a second or third floor distribution center, and then they go up the building from there.

Benjamin: Was security a factor?

Holabird: Oh, yes. Originally we were to make it atomic bombproof, and then we asked them, "Where is the bomb going to fall that we’re going to build this building for?” Well, when they found out what it was going to cost to make it atomic bombproof, we decided it was going to be blast-proof, from Milwaukee, I think. Also we had to protect it from radiation, so there’s a very complicated way the air intakes go in and out of that building. So, your friendly telephone long-distance lines will still be going even though you are I are wiped out. They’re going to be okay. The building was designed with eighteen floors of telephone switching gear, and then seven floors of office space that could be converted. I think they have converted a couple more. In the whole building you couldn’t have any windows, at least down below, because we were preparing for this very hefty protection from some kind of blast. I had a great idea when we were doing this. I said, “If this whole thing is just kind of a big switchboard, why don’t we just build a big, concrete tube on the outside and then build a whole steel thing inside so you don’t have to worry about floors or construction? The outside would be just a big, rectangular solid, and then we’d build this kind of library stacks.” It seemed to me to make perfectly good sense, and again somebody patted me on the back and said, “Buster, our equipment comes in a different way, and the cost of the building is about 1 percent of what goes into it. You let us handle our equipment the way we’re accustomed to.” And I said, “Yes, sir. No question about that.”

Benjamin: It sounds like the clients had a lot of specific needs. How much room did this leave you to be innovative?

Holabird: Even though the building costs seemed high, they are just nothing compared to everything that goes in it. So my great notion of innovating the interior of a

112 telephone building died an early death. When we got done they decided they were going to put a wave guide tower on the top. Those are those big, fan- shaped things you see on top. They are called wave guides, and there is a system that they reflect waves across the country. You have to have a clear sighting, but you go all across the country in a fraction of a second. They are picked up in one place and immediately transmitted somewhere else. You have to be sure there are no tall buildings in front. When Sears went up there was some question of what that was going to do. Anyway, they wanted twelve of these huge fans on top of the building, six on one deck and six on the other. The customer, I think, was just going to stick them on the roof in a row like soldiers. Mr. Bilandic, the structural engineer, and I devised kind of a drum—two round decks on top of the building. We thought the thing ought to look pretty if it’s going to stick up on top of this austere, utilitarian building, so we made two round drums. Each would take six fans in the proper facing, and this is what they’ve done. They eventually put three up there, and I guess they never put any more. It’s kind of an expensive thing for three fans, but the world changed and I’m sure the technology changed, too. I think it makes the building look better anyhow. The telephone company never really had a logo that they liked. They used to have bells on the outside of buildings, and other things, and they decided to use Swedish colors, blue and yellow and white, for all their phone trucks. I said, “Why don’t we paint the drum?” They were going to put up a big bell on the building, which of course they eventually did because they’d already decided that, but I liked to argue with them so I said, “Why don’t we paint the balconies on these drums blue, yellow and white, and you won’t have to do anything else. People will just know that’s the telephone building from a distance.” That was another of my great ideas. I was full of ideas. We had one meeting where the Rockford dial office was going to do something. In the course of this they had taken down the adjoining wall of their existing dial office and found a logo of the first telephone building that had been in Rockford about sixty years ago, still faintly seen on the side of the building. They said, “Should we just plaster the building and then feature this or something like that?” I’d just seen the building on LaSalle that Ben and Cindy Weese had done where they’d gotten an artist to paint a mural.

113 Benjamin: By Richard Haas?

Holabird: Yes. He’s a friend of my daughter Jean’s—Dick Haas. Here you’ve got a whole side of a building and it went back about 150 feet with a lot alongside of it. I said, “Why don’t we fix up and smooth up the brickwork a little bit and paint a mural of downtown Rockford when that building was there with the telephone logo on it?”

Benjamin: Did they do it?

Holabird: Damned if they didn’t. I said it would not cost much more than just fixing up the brick because I got the guy from New York, who’d done the work for Haas. This was another time my stage work related to a job. We painted a mural of old-time Rockford, which, as far as I know, is still there, and with the logo sitting over the thing. It makes very little sense in the picture because in order for people to see it—I mean, the perspective is all crazy. Jeff Greene, the painter, was disturbed about this, but I said, “Let’s not worry about trifles like this.” Anyway, we did it, and it looks very well. I hope it’s still there. We did a building for DePauw University at Greencastle, Indiana, and it was a music and drama building. It’s a university with a good music department and a good drama department. The two of them were going to be together, and so we had to devise a concert hall for the music school, and a small recital hall, and then a theater for the drama department and all the backup stuff for both of them, which was kind of interesting.

Benjamin: Did you design that?

Holabird: I got started, and then Roy Solfisburg did the finishing-up work. I did most of the design.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Holabird: The thing that I thought I contributed to this building at DePauw and I hope some future students of the department will realize it, was that especially in a

114 music building there were all kinds of heavy equipment—pianos and whatnot—and if you have stages and if you want to remove pianos and don’t have elevators you get into a lot of problems of moving. So I tried to keep the floors of the music auditorium and the stage auditorium and the recital room all connected on one level so at least all that stage scenery equipment could be pushed horizontally on dollies and things like this. I’d spent a good deal of my life carrying things up stairs or trying to get ten kids to lift a piano up and down. The audiences sometimes have to go up ramps or up some stairs, but the stage equipment and the musical instruments can go horizontally or close to horizontally, which I thought was good.

Benjamin: That’s sensible.

Holabird: Again we tried to make a stage which could be a thrust stage and an enwrapping stage and a proscenium stage by use of curtains, and I hope they use it this way. There’s a main stage with curtains and a proscenium—it could be used for the thrust—and then there are two side stages which could be closed with curtains so it looks like part of a house. Then another thing I had done was to make the chandelier light fixture for the auditorium really be the lightbridge for the stage. The audience looking up just sees little lights connected to the structure, but the structure is such that with a catwalk somebody can get out there and use that same structure for some of the spotlights for the stage. That seemed to be a useful thing. We also had a beautiful little courtyard, kind of like the one at Parker only we made this into a Greek amphitheater. This was during the terrible periods of student unrest in 1968 or 1969. The president said students might congregate there, so we had problems, and we never put in the beautiful Greek theater in the courtyard. We’d had problems with Western Electric and Bell Labs with the building at Indian Hill, but that was nothing compared to the music department and the drama department with their classrooms. Drama said, “I’m not going to have a trombonist down the hall when I’m teaching Shakespeare,” and the music department didn’t like all those la-di-da drama people waltzing around. We kept them pretty well separated most of the time. As a matter of fact, the classrooms were at one side, connected with passageways to the theater

115 section, so that worked all right. Kind of an interesting thing we discovered were practice room modules. I hadn’t realized that a good music student is supposed to be sequestered for three or four hours a day, or more, practicing. Each is supposed to be private, and some rooms are just for him or her and his instrument, some needed a piano and something else, and some needed space for trios. So we discovered somebody out in Kansas who made a kind of telephone booth that came complete. They were soundproof modules, and we went out with the music department and we got somebody hammering a piano in one room and someone from the music department went in the other room to be sure they couldn’t hear her out in front, and then they had some drums going and trumpets and discovered that you could sit next door and not hear them. These had glass doors on them, but instead of putting the corridor in between we put them back to back, like a row of telephone booths back to back, and then had the corridor on the outside with the windows there. You could walk down the corridor and look outside, or you could sit in your room and with the glass door you could still see the windows outside. You weren’t in the dark, which was good, especially if you have to spend four hours per day there. They told us that at Indiana University, which has a marvelous music school, everybody just sits in these kind of cellar rooms with artificial light for four or five hours a day. I had a hard enough time practicing the violin when I was little with daylight. Just picture being in prison doing it. Good lord.

Benjamin: When was the firm’s first involvement with Ravinia, in 1948?

Holabird: No. Holabird and Roche did the old—I don’t know if they did the old opera building, but they’d done lots of remodeling work in Ravinia. Anyway, in April [1948] the whole place burned down, the old opera house which was where they had the concerts. Harry Manning from the office, and I guess Joe Burgee, went out there in the smoking ruins the next day. They immediately designed a concrete bowl to replace it, and they went out to American Seating and got a pledge for seating in two months. They got a wooden stage design, which was going to be temporary, only it lasted for about twenty-five years. They somehow wheedled out of the Army Quartermaster Corps a huge tent that had been used for something or other. So in two months they got Ravinia

116 in shape to open the summer of 1948. They had a wood stage and the present seating, about three-quarters covered by a huge tent that went up from the front of the stage, back. The next summer, that summer of 1948, they started designing the pavilion for the next year. Bruce Graham was in the office then, and Joe Passaneau and I were there—we all worked on it—and Bartsch. I guess at that time I quit and went back to teaching, but that summer they built the pavilion. They were going to build a new stage, but they ran out of money. The pavilion, I think, cost $200,000 or $300,000, and that was it. They didn’t have any more money, so they left the stage up to be replaced shortly, and twenty- five years later they did. But again, because of our involvement they called the office in. For years I went out there to worry about the stage. We built some additions onto that wood stage for a while because it was pretty crude. It was kind of a summer camp notion of orchestra stuff, and the orchestra was getting pretty sophisticated by then and didn’t like summer camping in that thing. So eventually, by 1968 or 1969 there was going to be a new stage, and we worked on that. Earle Ludgin, I think, was involved at the time and wanted to be sure we were going to be careful about what we did. Stanley Freehling and others were on the committee. We knew what the program was for the orchestra, and we had to provide as good an accommodation as downtown. Orchestra Hall had revamped theirs, so we knew we had to make private dressing rooms and good things for the rest and storage lockers. You have to be able to store your cello or your bass or your instrument, so we had to provide for that. In addition you had the ballet coming for three weeks. So whatever we designed we had to have enough toilets and dressing rooms so that we could suddenly convert it into ballet dressing rooms. And whatever you did on the stage for the acoustics of the orchestra had to be flexible enough so it could be converted for at least some kind of stage hangings for a ballet. So, we built a big concrete enclosing wall and used textured formwork. You have to design the formwork so you know what’s going to come out. You don’t just let the carpenter on the job do what he thinks would be cute. You have to really draw every board that he’s going to use in the forms. We built the whole thing in concrete behind—I understand they’ve added to it since—but it was pretty generous in its accommodations for everybody. Then they hired an acoustical man, Christopher Jaffe. Christopher Jaffe and Eddie Gordon by that time were as

117 thick as thieves, and you had to be very careful about what you did. I think if left on his own, Christopher Jaffe would have designed the Ravinia stage wall, but I found out that Plexiglas—and he thought that Plexiglas was okay, so I figured then he could see my building through his Plexiglas. We designed some big towers on casters which fit together like grocery carts if you had to take them offstage. This was one of the problems, to be able to nest them together so they wouldn’t use much space when the orchestra was not playing. Then we developed the overhead lights over the stage, kind of big clamshells. You could lower the things down, trip one wire, and then the things that were hanging down would come together and then you could fly them and get them out of the way so you could hang other things up in the ceiling grid. The ones out in the house didn’t bother anybody anyhow. They were permanent. So there were these three things, the towers that were built at the bottom like grocery carts with a lot of counterweight on them because they were big. They were twenty-four feet tall, and I was afraid they were going to tip over on somebody. As a matter of fact, at the time we had little rods that slid along the thing that the stagehand could run up and hook into the gridiron. I was afraid a wind would knock one of these things down. I don’t know if they still do that or not. It’s just a little rod connected to the side of these big, movable, acoustical objects. One time when Balanchine came he did the Stars and Stripes Forever, and he kept these big, domed, acoustical objects against the back wall. All the lights reflected off them so they kind of had red, white and blue sparkles all over them. I said, “My heavens, I designed a stage set for this and I didn’t even know it.” Other times they didn’t do it—they moved them off—but I thought that looked great. We learned from Balanchine, who was critical of all architects—I don’t know if he was critical of Philip Johnson or not—but he came out to talk about it, and he said two things which affected Ravinia. One is, he said orchestra pits shouldn’t be designed just to fit into the rows of the seats. He said the orchestra is too spread out that way, especially with this wide stage. This is for the pit orchestra, not the orchestra on the stage, when it became a pit. So instead of doing it the way it really should be, I mean, the way it looks nice on a plan, drawing the orchestra pit with the same radius as the front row of seats, when the orchestra is playing it’s a much more condensed thing and it’s a whole different circle for the orchestra. That was one thing, and

118 the other thing, he said, “If my dancers are going to come, the stage should be…”—I’ve forgotten what his word was, but the stage should be springy.

Benjamin: Springy?

Holabird: Yes. With the ballet when you make a bounce or leap on the stage you get a little boost from the stage. You don’t just land on concrete. Customarily a stage would have a concrete floor and then maybe a couple of inches of final boarding or flooring or whatever it’s going to be. But at Ravinia we’re down about seven or eight inches from the final floor, and then we have crisscross level of one-by-three or one-by-two bridging. One group goes like this, and then the next group is laid crossing it. It’s like people crossing their hands. I think there are five or six layers of this before we get the final boarding on. So when one guy pushed his cello down with a little stick, the music stand of somebody else, about twenty feet away, jumped up.

Benjamin: That’s very funny, though.

Holabird: So that when Edward Villella would make a leap he had the floor with him. The only problem was we had an elevator to bring a piano up from the basement, and if you ever hit the edge of that you wouldn’t get the same boost from the floor because it had to be reinforced a little bit there.

Benjamin: After all that, did they use a pit orchestra very much?

Holabird: Yes, for ballet.

Benjamin: Because now they don’t anymore, at least for the ballets I’ve been to in the last couple of years.

Holabird: But they don’t have the New York City Ballet coming anymore. They’re using probably, what, just a piano?

Benjamin: They have all amplified, electronic music.

119 Holabird: Oh, well, that saves a lot of money. Why not, if you can get away with it. In the old days you couldn’t. Anyway, that changed some of the contours. In Ravinia there was some property line division at the back of the stage, and the stage is not mirror reflective. You know, it’s different on one side from the other because we have this funny property arrangement to go through which, of course, got straightened out by the time we got done with the building. But we had to stay a certain distance away, so it was more costly because they had to have different dimensions on one side from the other. And Ravinia was fine. Just before we opened, one of the trustees said, “Where are the flags?”

Benjamin: Flags?

Holabird: Yes. We had one trustee who was the head of some very important foundation, and he liked flags so the contractor went dashing out to find a couple of American flags. He and his wife used to come to Ravinia parties with table linen, candelabra and roast beef. My mother said, “What a picnic; what a marvelous picnic!” Anyway, he was a very nice man.

Benjamin: You certainly had a lot of bosses on that job.

Holabird: Oh, well, you always do. Lewis Mumford years ago said the best architects were the ones who had the best clients.

Benjamin: Did you have good clients?

Holabird: But I say, who were thoughtful and generous. I think a good client is a good critic and tells what you want, but he also wants you to come back and do something for him, too.

Benjamin: Did you ever have a client that you refused? Were there ever clients that came to the firm and the firm turned the job down?

Holabird: I’m sure there were jobs that we didn’t go ahead with. I can’t remember. Lots

120 of times people didn’t even think it was worthwhile paying for anything, and to those people you said, “If you don’t think it’s worthwhile to do this, then don’t come to us.” In the early stages there were lots of jobs we didn’t really want to go after, after we heard them talk about the kind of work they wanted us to do. I don’t think we turned them down outright then, but we didn’t make a full-scale attempt to get the job. Some guys came, I remember, from a YMCA job that Metz, Train, Olson and Youngren, I think, eventually got. But he just said, “Well, you’re going to do it, and I want to do this and I want to do that.” I said, “It doesn’t sound to me as if you really need an architect. What you need is a drafting service.” He didn’t think that was very funny. As I say, we didn’t get the job.

Benjamin: Did you want the job?

Holabird: He just talked as if the whole thing was really all done, and all you had to do was scribble down his thing on a piece of paper. Some people may be like that, too. One parcel service, UPS I think was interviewing architects for a truck- parcel depot, and again they came in and said, “Here is the plan. This is what we do,” and it seemed to us, what do they need us for? Why don’t they get somebody who will do just what they want? We couldn’t make any kind of a contribution that I could see. Of course, we could do it faster. Some British developer wanted to build a lot of truck warehouses out in Elk Grove Village, and we worked on that for a while. One of the real estate firms was behind this. They told us what the building should cost, and we said, “We can’t do anything about that. It’s not that we’re muscle-bound, but it just seems to us our reputation is not going to be improved by this, and we can’t do it and we’re not prepared to do it. It’s just building junk” We did a library for Elmwood Park, and I’m sorry we did that. We did it for very little money because that’s all they had. Years later they sued us because they said the roof and something else was bad. I would like to tell them, “It’s your own fault because you wanted us to do this and we tried to tell you this was not suitable.” But again, by the time you get around to this the people who authorized the work are long since gone, and there are some other people now trying to worry about the problems and they think you’ve done a bad job. So

121 you shouldn’t touch anything that you don’t think is going to either be done properly, or is going to be so awful that people in design are going to think that you’re not worth the thing. It’s often luck that you get the good clients. I think architects are selected sometimes because the client likes their style or likes the way they talk, and if they’re presumably all equally competent in certain ways then they pick people that would be fun to work with, that’s all. When you’re in the position, as I was, of a partner, then you try and match up clients. You’re not going to do all the work. You try and find young men and women who you think are going to be this person’s good companion, because you spend a lot of time with clients or their representatives, worrying about how the things look and how they’re going to work and what kind of finishes and what kind of mechanical systems and what kind of lighting levels, and all these terrible details which go into building things. Mr. Bradley, a marvelous partner who is retired, said, “Architecture is probably 50,000 details that you have to worry about all the time, and you’re lucky if you can get the whole thing going.”

Benjamin: Who have been some of your good clients?

Holabird: We’ve had marvelous clients. The telephone company early on was not terribly imaginative because the management was paying them not to be imaginative, but when they found out that management thought that was a good thing they became so, too. And Ravinia was marvelous. The good professionals we worked with, like Dave Matthews at the University of Illinois and people on federal housing, we always learned more from them, I think, than they got from us.

Benjamin: What about specialization?

Holabird: People ask, “Shouldn’t you just specialize on gymnasiums or something,” and I say the good thing about our practice was that we learned in doing the lab what will be good for the lab, but it turns out it might be good for a hospital or it might be good for a school or it might be good for something else. You borrow or you build up experiences of what might be helpful. I think as we got older, too, we got more and more into preservation. We got involved with the

122 Chicago Public Library, now the Cultural Center, with the Marquette building, and with the assembly hall at the University of Illinois and with a couple of churches. In many cases you don’t have to do something extraordinary. You just have to do something which is thoughtful and sympathetic to what is there. You don’t have to invent new things to be a good architect. I think John Vinci has shown that, too. It’s a whole new role. Walker Johnson in our office has done the Student Center at the University of Illinois. When we went down, at the big assembly hall the ceiling was kind of falling in and the stage didn’t work. They saved money fifty or sixty years ago when they built it. I guess a lot of fraternities and sororities and other people put shows on at the assembly hall, and they had to go out one door and run around outside to come in on the other side of the stage. It must have been fun in the rain. At any rate, we fixed it up and built an addition to the stage so nobody can tell which is the old and which is the new. I think that’s good.

Benjamin: Were the restaurant buildings you did at Ravinia done in that spirit? They seem very compatible, too.

Holabird: Yes, well, we tried to keep some of that old thing. Again, one president of Ravinia got mad because he said the acoustics were terrible, and I said, “When we started to do this there was going to be carpet on the floor and tablecloths, and by the time we got done the floors were hard and the tablecloths were hard, and we had a beautiful hardwood ceiling which reflected nothing but sound.” Then they were going to open all the doors so the sound was going to go outside; then they decided no, it was all going to be air-conditioned. At any rate, that sometimes happens, too. We did the box office, we did the restaurant building and the stage, and after that they didn’t call us back which hurts my feelings because it seems to me they should have, at least, because of all the work we had done. When they were going to do another building they should have at least given us a chance to be turned down. I think that’s a decent, courteous thing to do, which they didn’t do. And here my lawyer Don Lubin was by that time the president of the Ravinia board, for heaven’s sakes. He’s a nice man, but… And when they came out with a big fifty-year book of Ravinia, or something like that, and the name Holabird and Root who had saved the

123 day when the thing burned down, was not mentioned. Lots of other people got a lot of credit, and it just seems to me that was part of the history of Ravinia—the fire and the various things. But I think the stage is a good stage.

Benjamin: Your role kind of changed within the firm in 1970?

Holabird: Yes. There were four new partners. Bernard Bradley retired and Harry Manning retired. William Holabird stayed on for three or four years.

Benjamin: What did Harry Manning do?

Holabird: Harry Manning was the nuts-and-bolts part of the office. He was a chief draftsman and he was a hardworking architect. He came as an office boy, I think, in the 1920s and then came back as an architect. He went to Illinois. He was a short man, but very hardworking and perky—full of energy. He ran a job the office did building a munitions works in Ohio during World War II. He evidently got a group of people to go down and make drawings day by day while they were building it to try and get it going. He was just great. He lived in the city then, and he married and moved out to the suburbs and had three sons. Then he got too rich, I think. They all went to pieces on him. By the time he became a partner he was ready to take it easy. He wanted to retire a bit. He’d just go out for long luncheons and put a sign on his door, “Do Not Disturb.” I thought if he wanted to go to sleep he should have gone home. He was a very nice man, but I think his best work was done before he hit sixty. Up until that time he was absolutely brilliant.

Benjamin: During the period of the fifties and sixties, there was so much architecture that we don’t usually pay a whole lot of attention to auto showrooms and the beginning of shopping strips and so on. What do you know about them and the architects who built them, or did architects build them?

Holabird: You mean the first shopping malls?

Benjamin: I mean the architecture that is sort of borderline architecture. Your firm didn’t

124 get involved in that. Who did?

Holabird: When I came back to the office at one point we were doing a lot of Gulf Oil gas stations. They made some sketches—you call them site rearrangements. Depending upon where the building was going to go there had to be changes in access drives or whatnot, but we made a set of drawings for Gulf that could be used almost anywhere. I’m sure architects did that for some of the showrooms. I don’t know who did all those buildings. There are lots of small firms, and that’s one way of getting started. If you couldn’t stand a big office or you thought your design work was not being recognized, you had a choice of going to another office, like Bruce Graham did going to Skidmore, or you opened your own office. Then you knew you were going to have to scramble for a while, unless you walked off with a big client as I told you that Bill Tabler did with the Statler Hiltons. You probably did houses, if you could find anybody to do a house for, or you did remodeling or alterations or anything you could scramble around for. I think with a lot of these little suburban buildings you get a young architect who is inexpensive. Lots of people want cheap architects, too, for good reason because it seemed expensive to pay for somebody who is just working on a piece of paper. After all, what’s that? You know if you hire good craftsmen they’re not going to let the roof leak or the windows blow in, or things like that. I don’t know—probably architects are not even listed on a lot of those kinds of buildings that you asked about. During that period we did an awful lot of telephone buildings. I think Mr. Bradley would have been the designer on all of them, but he had a cadre in the office who did the telephone buildings. There were certain mechanical engineers and electrical engineers who did all the telephone jobs, and there were lots of architectural people who did the working drawings who worked only on telephone buildings because they knew all the details and could do them almost in their sleep. At the same time we were doing hotels in Latin America. Bartsch did the hotel in Venezuela and two in Columbia. Later on we did a hotel in Vienna. We were doing these Air India buildings and the Tata Institute, as I told you, in Bombay, and the buildings in Washington. We did four union headquarters in Washington—the bakers and confectioners, which was Bradley’s, and the carpenters union, the Teamsters Union, the operating

125 engineers building—those were four, plus the Veterans of Foreign Wars, I think, so all those went on. That was in Washington. I think that was the last time we did anything in Washington, after the federal office buildings. Washington started developing its own architects, too, as a matter of fact. All small towns all over the country have, I think, very good, bright, young architects, too.

Benjamin: Did your firm have a worldwide clientele?

Holabird: At one time, yes. Then they found that lots of people could do it. Perkins and Will did it in its Near East work, and so did Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and Loebl Schlossman, I think. They all set up personnel to work internationally now. I don’t know how Helmut Jahn runs a building in Berlin or a building somewhere or other; whether he has people. Whether he can keep his hands on the job or whether he has various people who represent him, or whether he’s off all the time. It’s hard work doing it.

Benjamin: It would be awfully hard, especially several years ago when transportation was slower. Did you open up an office for a job in Latin America?

Holabird: No, we didn’t. When we did the hotel in Vienna, for example, one guy from the office went over and spent six months translating the drawings and being sure that they were all right. In India we had an Indian associate architect who was supposed to do whatever was necessary. We sent preliminary drawings and he was supposed to develop them, but when I got there for my brief visit it turned out he’d just used our drawings and put his stamp on it. During World War II we were going to do an air base in Jamaica to protect the continental United States, because this is when German submarines were wiping out our shipping, and we made a deal with the English—Roosevelt and Churchill. They got fifty old destroyers from the United States, and Churchill gave us the ability to arm the West Indies to protect the American coastline. So it was a big deal to make an army air base in Jamaica. We moved a whole office to New York to design this Jamaican air base. I think they were there for a year or a year and a half, but by that time the United States Navy and Air Force had managed to remove

126 the submarine problem, and they finally killed the air base in Jamaica. I think they finally built a few wood barracks. This was designed as a permanent base—very nice little officers’ housing, barracks all raised up on concrete pilotis so they were insect-proof. They were very cute buildings. And we had another job in Wisconsin, the Richard A. Bong Air Force Base which was out in the middle of someplace, and we hired about twenty extra civil engineers to do all the land things. We got hundreds of drawings, and then the Defense Department decided they didn’t need that either, so we fired all the civil engineers. This was in the middle-fifties or so. We did quite a few buildings at Champaign-Urbana. In addition to the physical education building we did a chemistry building and a foreign language building and a biology building. We did four or five buildings there, and we built three buildings at DePauw University—a science building, a dormitory and the arts center that I told you about. We did three buildings at the University of Michigan in the medical school. We did something called Med Science I and Med Science II, and a nurses’ quarters and two little research buildings and a pharmaceutical clinic that I worked on—six, seven buildings for Michigan.

Benjamin: Did Holabird and Root have a lot of repeat business?

Holabird: That’s right. At Northwestern University—my God, we had lots of buildings for Northwestern, except that when we did the tech building, the trustees wanted it to be done in Gothic. My father fought like a steer, but he said when the client is adamant and you want the job, you do it the way he wants. So they tried to make a calm version of Gothic, but the trustees liked that so much that a lot of the buildings afterwards had to be done just like the tech building. So then we built Kresge that was like tech in the same details, and lots of the women’s dormitories. And then a new group of trustees came in—the Crowns and whatnot—and they got Skidmore in to do the library and to do some of the other things there.

Benjamin: Was there a connection between Henry Crown and Skidmore?

Holabird: I don’t know. I have no idea, but as trustees they thought Northwestern was

127 “old-hat” architecture, and Holabird and Root was connected somehow with doing this kind of old-time architecture. They didn’t realize that we were doing it partly under duress. One of our great superintendents, John Sanderson, was the superintendent on Northwestern Tech, and the university liked him so much they put him in charge of their buildings. He became the superintendent of Northwestern buildings. But he was a backward force because he was really interested in how buildings were maintained—he loved the concrete block and coated concrete block—so all these marvelous buildings that the office did, they may have looked nice on the outside but Mr. Sanderson decided what he could best maintain on the inside. He was a marvelous man, Mr. Sanderson, but he decided what was going to wear well, and it wasn’t often the prettiest thing on the inside. Recently when Jerry Horn did the addition to the Northwestern Law School downtown—the addition that we’d done twenty years before was under Mr. Sanderson’s control of maintenance. I had to apologize to the people on the law faculty in charge of the building. I said this is not the way we’d do it now, and we’d rather not have done it that way. There is a kind of khaki-colored glazed coat of concrete that Mr. Sanderson liked to put in stairwells, but it made a building look somewhat like SingSing or Joliet prison. You knew the inmates were going to have a hard time chipping it off.

Benjamin: Did you have an interiors department?

Holabird: Oh, sure.

Benjamin: Why didn’t they get involved in it?

Holabird: Mr. Sanderson would have told everybody just what the walls would be. The fun thing about a general practice of architecture—or interesting thing—is that there are all sorts of different problems to solve, from a wall on the squash court to what you put on a dormitory wall or how you design furniture for a dormitory room or hospital systems.

Benjamin: So it’s constantly creative and challenging.

128 Holabird: Oh, sure, and it’s fun. I think it must be terrible if you just do nothing but apartment buildings all your life, or speculative office buildings, because after a while you can kind of crank them out. They don’t need you. You get somebody else to do it and you go off and sit on the seashore with your grandchildren. But my ambitions gradually calmed down. I always thought I was going to be the world’s greatest architect, but I also thought that I ought to be loyal to the office and I was just as willing not to become the world’s greatest architect. You have to have a different kind of ego, I think, for that, and I think my ego liked the people I was working with and the restraints that we were faced with.

Benjamin: What do you think it takes to become really a star?

Holabird: I don’t know whether you have to be a Howard Roark, or whatever his name was. In some ways you just don’t care, I don’t think, about a lot of people.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Benjamin: I don’t think we ever discussed the Tavern Club remodeling. Was that a labor of love?

Holabird: I think various architects at the Tavern Club say they had one chance to work there. After that nobody likes them anymore because the dust and the plaster change and the fact that part of the club is turned off for a while always makes everybody mad, and then they wondered how in the world you got the job when there were other architectural members. Mr. Shaw worked on it, and I think Sam Marx worked on it, and John Root worked on it. Harper Richards worked on it, and I think Charlie Dornbusch worked on it—everybody. We came in about 1968, I think. That was when I worked on it. What happened is the kitchen needed expansion, and they needed additional dining room space. In the course of this, they’d had the roof—the roof of the twenty-sixth floor was an open roof which was partially covered with a tent kind of awning, and it was used for summer dances. It was lovely sitting out there. That was before

129 all the big buildings were around, and you could see Lake Michigan and all over the Loop from the top. But often it rained on summer nights, so instead of having three or four summer dances, they sometimes had two and then had to go inside. So part of the job was enclosing the upstairs, and we tried to make a nice monumental stairway or a curved stairway to connect the downstairs up to the twenty-sixth floor and then to try and make the room look a little bit as if it had been with a tent. With plaster and lath we made kind of a three-tent ceiling, and then outlined it with little Italian Christmas tree lights. It seems to me that for all kinds of dining rooms or ballrooms what you really see is the ceiling. You don’t see the walls very much unless you’re in very high-ceilinged rooms, so you might as well make the ceiling interesting. So we did. We kept a little outside space so they could still go out in the summertime. They sometimes dance out there. This was to be just a party room for the club, but halfway through they decided, ah, this was a place for women because the Tavern Club had only been open to women after three o’clock or four o’clock. Instead of becoming a party room, it was changed to become a mixed dining room at noon. So a bar which had only been a serving bar now became a sit- down bar, too, and the kitchen which was only to be a serving kitchen got changed and improved. At great expense we had put a dumb waiter down to the kitchen below, but when the room went into use, it turned out the waiters were much happier running up and down the stairs, for some unknown reason. Another problem was, at the board of directors’ meetings they said if we opened the room for lunch, there would be this terrible chatter of high- pitched voices which would disturb the men downstairs, so at great expense, like the great dumb waiter thing I just mentioned, we built a folding door about twenty feet long with Plexiglas panels, which all slid out of its place into a nest and then could be pulled out when the ladies were chattering. I think that was used for about two months, and I don’t think it’s ever been used since. There is a beautiful folding door sitting in its nested place in the Tavern Club. And now with the change in the club over the last twenty-five years—the whole club is coeducational now—they don’t use the room upstairs. It’s just a party room again, so that’s the way the world goes. At any rate, somebody told me places to look at in New York, so I went around and looked at two or three clubs and restaurants, and there was one nice two-story restaurant—I can’t

130 remember where it was in New York. What we tried to do was to make some dining around the staircase, which has never been used either except for very big parties. But I thought it would be fun. There were people who sat right along the glass walls, looking out over the city, and they could also look down and see the members of the floor below. Great architectural plans often don’t work out. That’s the way it is, and you have to adjust to that.

Benjamin: Did you paint a wall separating two of the rooms?

Holabird: Well, I didn’t paint that. We used to do a lot of painting there. We had artists’ night one night a year, and about seven or eight of us would meet the night before and we’d put photographers’ paper or something all over the walls of the club and paint the whole club as murals. Edgar Miller used to come and Bill Jones, who was a commercial artist, and Harper Richards, who was an architect, Earl Gross and various other people. Anyway, there were about seven or eight and lots of paint floating around. They had a good dinner and lots of drinks and painted like mad. So it made the club very different for the party. They don’t do that anymore, I think. Either they don’t have enough artists—or I don’t know.

Benjamin: But there are classes now. Do you take a drawing class?

Holabird: Yes. There is a still life class now. After that the Tavern Club used somebody else to do their remodeling. That’s all right. They’ve gone through several changes. We worked with Walter Frazier. He came in to help on the interiors and the furniture. He put in a very expensive, beautiful carpet, which he called his cigar-ash carpet because he said the members could spill as many ashes on this and it would still look all right, and one of the members said, “Is that the rug pad you’ve put on?” Eventually they covered it up with a red carpet or a multi-colored one. Mr. Frazier and I worked out the tent striping. It was very subtle, kind of an off-white and a warm gray, and now it is baby blue and white and pink and everything else. So, “après moi la deluge.” It’s all right. It looks okay, and different people want different things. Sam Marx did the original furniture in the front room, and it was kind of marvelous. I don’t think

131 he knew it was Art Deco.

Benjamin: What happened to that?

Holabird: I don’t know what’s happened to it. Then they went through several remodelings, and the last one looked, in the words of Geza de Takats, a surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, like a “pre-World War I brothel in Budapest.” And it will probably be changed many times again. The only thing they’ve kept there, really, has been the John Norton murals in the bar sitting room. Lot of people wanted to get rid of those, but there has always been a strong movement to keep them. There were murals by Edgar Miller downstairs, but I don’t know what’s happened to them. He painted the history of dining, or dining through the ages, in the dining room, and when we enlarged the kitchen, that wall went. Supposedly they rolled up the mural, and God knows where it is. And he did the room upstairs twice, once in 1928 or 1929 when it opened, and then it was remodeled and he did it again. This was love through the ages, and then he did love through the ages twenty years later as an older man. He was a lot sourer about love the second time. And William Welch, the painter, had done the card room, and the card room has gone through many, many changes and Mr. Welch’s stuff has disappeared.

Benjamin: Those years, in the late sixties and the early seventies, were years of big changes for you. You got married.

Holabird: I got remarried. I finished twenty-five years in my first marriage, and now I’ve had twenty-three more, so I tell Marcia I’ve really had forty-eight years of marriage, which she doesn’t think is fair at all. Mr. Bradley, one of the partners, had polio, as we said before, and the doctor said he really ought to get out of the Chicago climate. His spinal fusion was beginning to go to pieces, and he had to lie on a board at night and drink aspirin tablets all day long. So he planned to move to Arizona, and he convinced the other partners who were at least as old or older than he was that they ought to phase themselves out too, which they did with good spirit, though I think reluctantly. Some of them just thought it would be nice to sit on forever and collect the dough and not have to

132 worry about anything.

Benjamin: Where did Manning go?

Holabird: He just went home. He had a condominium in Florida, and he built a farm in Virginia, and he had a big house in Glenview, I think.

Benjamin: Did the firm treat everybody pretty fairly in terms of money?

Holabird: Yes. They had what we thought then was a generous payout, and we kind of bought our way into the partnership by paying them out. The only thing they hadn’t taken into account was inflation and we tried to do better. We kept more or less the same arrangement they had, but we had it pegged in a little bit to inflation so if the firm did better then we did better.

Benjamin: Is this when your cousin Bill Holabird retired, too?

Holabird: He retired, too. He used to come to the office because his wife had died and he really didn’t know what else to do. He also discovered arbitration. There was something called the American Arbitration Association—when building projects get into a pickle with the client and the architect and the contractor all fighting each other, wondering who is responsible for what and who’s obligation. And Bill, whose experience throughout the years had really been in contracts and in what the obligations of a good architect and a good contractor and an owner were—this was a perfect place for him. He thought he was doing it as a noble, charitable gesture; he found he was getting paid for it, and he got even more pleased with what he was doing. He sat in on lots of cases, two or three times a week for two or three hours at a time. He said they were ponderous, and he got so angry at all the contestants because he knew right from the start, he thought, who was responsible. But you had to sit and go through this properly, which he did. He was fun to talk to because he knew lots of the old people. At last, by the late seventies, all of his contracting friends and most of his client friends were retired, too.

133 Benjamin: When did he enter the firm?

Holabird: Well, he got out of Yale in 1927, and my father put him to work right away. It was only to pay back part of his investment in his Yale education. He was a marvelous athlete and a very gifted field man. He was so agile he’d crawl all over the steel. He said he tapped every rivet in the Palmolive building when he was a young man. In those days steel was not welded; it was put together with red-hot rivets. Somebody would throw these, and somebody would catch them in a tin can and plunk them into the steel with great forceps, and then the guy at the other end would whack it with a hammer so they’d squeeze together. But then the architect’s superintendent would come around with a hammer and whack them to be sure that they weren’t cracked and they were operable to do what they were supposed to do. So that’s what he meant when he tapped every rivet in the Palmolive building. And he went all over the country. This was during some of the hotel business. I remember he went to Helena, Montana, and I think he went to Boise, and he went to St. Paul and Minneapolis and to Columbia, South Carolina, and Washington. He was a very good—we called them superintendents in those days. Then the legal profession said if you called them superintendents that means you are responsible for any flaws in the building. So now for the last fifteen years it’s all been changed. They are field representatives and not superintendents at all. Those are weasel words for the architects accepting the responsibility. They are now on-site representatives, and therefore they can’t be responsible. They do the best they can under these circumstances, but the owner can’t pin down the architect for not going ahead. He still does, but he has less reason for doing it. Anyway, Bill retired too and didn’t want to. Oh, heavens, we paid his club bills and did lots of things for him. I must say, when I retired nobody offered to do anything for me.

Benjamin: Did they pay your club bills?

Holabird: I didn’t have any. It wasn’t their obligation anyhow, I agreed. I’m always pleased when I see these bankers and big corporate people—the golden parachute people—here they’ve managed the company poorly and somebody’s

134 getting rid of them and then giving them all this stuff just to get them far away. When I went out, I think I went out with a certain amount of a sense of having done a good job. I felt that I had been paid justly and was still going to be for a few years, so that was all right.

Benjamin: In 1970 when you became a partner, how did the nature of your work change in the firm?

Holabird: Well, both Gerry Pook and I, who were design types in the partnership, sat out in the office. I had a drafting desk there, and I wanted to stay there, but Gerry said, “No, you have to move into an office.” I said, “That’s ridiculous,” but eventually I moved in. The terrible thing about becoming a partner is that now you were responsible for the work, and you must go out and try to get jobs. It was becoming more and more competitive. There are more and more good architectural firms all over the country, and you just have to work at it. That’s all.

Benjamin: How did you do it?

Holabird: We did it as everybody else. There was no such thing as a development office or marketing then. I’m sure some firms don’t even have marketing now if there are people on the phone constantly trying to ask them to do work. But we started modestly with one person, and then we turned out all our slides. Nobody really kept track of slides or photographs, and that was something that we had to start doing. It turned out most of the original pictures had been kept by my father and Mr. Root’s secretary, who was a nice lady, but she filed things on a whim. If you were looking for the First National Bank of Minneapolis, you could look under B for bank, or F for First or M for Minneapolis, so you never knew what she’d felt the day she put those in an envelope. So eventually we started filing everything by commission number. Nothing had been kept in order. This is really what we learned from early attempts, that color slides which you use for presentation should be kept, and we put them under commission numbers. The commission number was kind of the bible or the basic thing here. Every job in the office had a number, and you

135 could always refer to it that way and find things. So even if it was a telephone building, it would have a commission number. If it had additional work on it, there would be a new commission number for this. We got all our colored slides together, our photographs together; we started making lists of former clients, of new clients. We had to start figuring out how to make brochures. Holabird and Roche in 1922 came out with a brochure, and that was the first time. It was just kind of a memorial to William Holabird and Martin Roche as a nice book, and then in 1957, I think, when I was there they turned it over to me and we put out a little book on Holabird and Roche and Holabird and Root. It was something we published and then didn’t worry about for a long time. Then we discovered that what you really needed was not a brochure published ten years ago, but something that showed current work. It took years and years. I’m making it sound as if it was simple, but all our photographs now have a little job description on them—what they are and the year, and they’re in a loose-leaf form so you can put together what you want. If you’re going to go and talk to hospitals, you put together all your best hospital stuff or information on related buildings—laboratories or research things—and if you’re going for a sports building, you put together arenas and like things. And for office buildings, the same. Sometimes you also include your great works just for a little snob appeal. You never know, really, what will strike a client. Either he likes you or he doesn’t like you, and sometimes it probably doesn’t make any difference whether you have the greatest pictures or not. Some people now are taking videotapes so that they can walk people right through some of the buildings they’ve done, which makes very good sense. I imagine everybody will be doing that soon. Sometimes they are pre-recorded so you have the talk with the visual, so the people will just set their machine and then the little spiel comes on. It seems to me that what they really want to do is hear the architects’ voices and see what they are like. Our feeling has always been that some clients pick you out just because they kind of like the way you are or act or dress or that you’re kind of their style; either you’re fancy enough for them or plain enough for them or funny enough for them or something like that and different clients act in different ways. Years ago we interviewed for the Chicago main post office, which was a huge job. It didn’t have anything to do with design really; it was trying to fix up a lot of

136 mechanical and electrical and other failings of the building or things that hadn’t been planned or hadn’t been maintained. But when the post office interviewed you, they had a sheet of six questions, and then they had their rating sheet. So from their point of view, it was nice if you followed through just the way their rating sheet was—experience, confidence, the number of people, whether you had engineers. So we tried to answer the questions, and supposedly then they’d write down 75 percent or 80 or A+ or whatever. When we went to the Continental Bank for a job, that we didn’t get, they had thirteen people interview us. They took videotapes of us, and then wanted to know if we wanted them back. I said, “Certainly not, if we didn’t get the job.” I wouldn’t burst into tears at that. It seemed silly to have thirteen people interview for something. It was a remodeling job—selecting furniture and wall treatments for a new bank division—and it didn’t seem to me that thirteen people knew all that much. Probably one or two people should have been hired by the bank to make that decision. But everybody has a different style. This has been a long way around, but as partners we gradually got our records and our marketing together and learned how to do this terrible business of going out and talking to people. And we had to be cajoled. One of the best things about a good marketing person is that he or she makes some of the preliminary calls and finds out who is building what and where and then sends them a letter of interest and says, “We would love to come and talk to you, and hopefully we can be on your list” because lots of people felt that a list of four or five or six capable firms was what they wanted to have. First of all, you’ve got to get on the list, and then after that, you have to try to be as good or better than all of the other people on the list. That sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t, and sometimes the owner already knows who he wants and just puts the people on the list so it’s open and above board, so he can tell the trustees or his board of directors that he’s listed people.

Benjamin: For government jobs they must do that, I understand.

Holabird: Yes. When they did the new McDonald’s Hamburger University out at Oakbrook, there they invited five firms and then paid you a certain amount for the preliminary work.

137 Benjamin: Is that typical?

Holabird: Not really, but they wanted quite elaborate stuff. We didn’t enter the public library competition because we figured it was going to cost us a million dollars—this was when the Harold Washington competition was on—because they were expecting the architect to have practically finished design drawings and a huge model. And nobody was going to pay anything—I’ve forgotten, maybe they paid $20,000 or something, but then we figured that would just pay for the paper or something like that. But on the McDonald’s thing, they paid a good deal more, and they had elaborate models and selected different firms. This was okay. You felt that you’d done your best, and if you didn’t get it, that was it. And we got additional work for Bell Labs, which we’d done before. At Indian Hill we put on a new addition. Actually, lots of people call you back if you’ve already done a good job for them. Northwestern Medical School called us back two or three times for additional work. We did the Ward Medical building addition, and then later on were called in to do the Olson Pavilion—the big building that now serves Wesley and Passavant. And Northwestern University called us back several times to do things. The University of Chicago at least has always put us on their list for new things. Sometimes they try and spread it around so it doesn’t look as if they’re wedded to one firm. The telephone company used to use us all the time because we did the work faster and knew what they were up to. But lots of our people who were on the telephone cadres drifted to other offices, and then they could say, “I worked for Holabird and Root for a long time and know all the requirements of telephone work, so we can handle this too.” This happens all the time. There are no great secrets in all these things. Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum is doing the Chicago Stadium, and they did Comiskey Park. Because they’d done two or three others, they’re the great experts on stadiums, but I’m sure if we had a stadium to do, we could find some bright people who could figure it out. All you have to do is look at what they’ve done, and lots of people have access to drawings and can find out. Or you ask the people who own the thing. That’s what we do on other jobs anyhow. You go out and ask, if you’ve got a new job, what buildings do they like, and you go and look at them. Then you say,

138 “Now, what buildings don’t you like,” and you go out and look at them, too, and find out what the mistakes were of previous architects and how you can do something better. If there is a very good building, then we go out and profit from that, too. When we were building the new Northwestern Law School along the lake, we went to, I think, ten different places with law school professors, which made it good for us because we could listen to their comments. We looked at the lecture rooms, which in law school are very different from anything else because the law professor likes to challenge people around the room, and they’re kind of stepped, just like in the Paper Chase. And we looked at courtrooms, and we discovered that lots of law schools now are using video so that the students can study courtroom techniques and see themselves as a defense counselor or as a witness or something, which makes very good sense. We discovered that in most law schools most of the people reading law books were asleep—if you’ve ever read a law book you’d understand—so you had to make it comfortable for the students because they’re spending eight or ten hours there. They’re not always asleep. One professor was worried because in all the new buildings, lots of them, you could kind of see air conditioning ducts and exposed brick and things like that, which we as architects thought looked very nice depending upon how they were handled. He said, “Well, how can I hang up my English law engravings in an atmosphere like that?” We agreed that probably they shouldn’t go down the corridors but that maybe they would be better in his own office. Traveling with the faculty was great because they brought things to our attention that we didn’t know, and new law libraries are beginning to become computerized. They said eventually this whole thing will probably be computerized, but nobody dares computerize completely now. Meanwhile, they got these huge stacks of case proceedings that come out every month, you know—dozens and dozens of huge books, which then become part of the library.

Benjamin: So the building has to be expandable.

Holabird: And they have to be there. Everything coming out of Illinois and out of Washington and out of Congress—good Lord, I don’t know how a lawyer ever keeps current with things. Each law firm has its own library, of course. At any

139 rate, that’s the way you get jobs, and then when another law library comes up, you try and explain to them how you got this job and the fact that you’ve experienced this, that and the other, and you’ve visited these, and then you point with pride to what you’ve done recently and hope they don’t have a favorite architect that they are already thinking about. And now it’s difficult because you go out of state. In the old days Holabird and Root and Holabird and Roche used to do things all over the country, but now you’re almost required to associate with a local person, especially if it’s for a governmental or institutional project. When we did the University of Wisconsin architectural school in Milwaukee recently, we got a local architect who was very bright and was helpful, and, hopefully, we learned from him and he learned something from us.

Benjamin: Were you required to do that?

Holabird: Yes, from the point of view of the state of Wisconsin. I don’t know if it’s an absolute requirement, but it was in this case, and then local architects feel at least that they’re getting part of the job.

Benjamin: Does that happen here often?

Holabird: Oh, certainly, yes. When Philip Johnson did the building for John Buck at 190 South LaSalle, he associated with a local architect.

Benjamin: It was Shaw and Associates.

Holabird: I think Hugh Stubbins did the new library at the University of Chicago, and Loebl Schlossman were the local people, and when Edward Durell Stone did the Standard Oil building, I think Perkins and Will was the Chicago associate. So it’s with different people and there’s a question of how much they do.

Benjamin: How much does the local office do?

Holabird: Well, it’s divided. What’s usually true of the hot-shot design firms is that they

140 take about 25 percent of the fee for the design and do the design drawings, and then the local office does the working drawings, which are the contract documents, and you work out the details from the design drawing. That’s what we did with the Japanese-American designers for the Otis building. Anyway, as a partner that’s what we were doing. We were much more involved in marketing and getting jobs, and then if the jobs didn’t go well, you suddenly have to explain to the client why it’s costing more money or why it’s not going well or why the roof leaks or the windows leak or something’s happened. Sometimes I think it was much better when you were an employee and you didn’t have to worry about it.

Benjamin: Have the responsibility?

Holabird: Yes. But the architect is responsible. You’re responsible for things all the way through, and usually clients expect you to fix it up with no further cost. It’s not like a doctor or a lawyer, which you can continue to pay fees for. Architects and contractors—when something happens we’re out on the scene immediately because we’re responsible. If a wall cracks or a column cracks or something happens to the roof, we’re out there immediately with the contractor to find out what we can do to make it better or repair it. I compared it once to the work of a doctor and said scathing things. A doctor came in and said his house had a problem. I said, ‘Well, we can’t see you for two weeks.” Then it turned out he wanted me to go out there to the house, and I said, “No, you bring the house into the office,” so eventually he brought the house into the office. We kept it for two months, and we developed termites while it was in the office, and we sent it back to him. And I said, “This is architectural care compared to medical care.”

Benjamin: Do you have to carry great amounts of liability insurance like doctors do?

Holabird: Oh, certainly. And you’re responsible for everything, it turns out. Architectural insurance has gone up, and some people don’t even want to give architects insurance. We asked our lawyers about it. They said this was too risky. It turned out when we asked about architecture, he said it was too risky a

141 profession to be in—said the lawyers—so it turned out no matter what we said, it was too risky. There are words now in the contracts saying that “the architect to the best of his ability” will try and do all these things. The client would like you to say things like “absolutely responsible for the conditions,” and we just can’t do it. First of all, there’s so many people on a big job of many million dollars. There may be fifty people in the office at one time or another working on drawings, from mechanical, electrical, structural, civil as well as architectural, and that means that everything cannot be checked and rechecked and sometimes things slip through. So you try and put down that you’re going to do the best you can, and that you’re going to try and react to all the various codes that you’re working for and building requirements, and so on, and you try and do. You get repeat business kind of on the basis of how well you did this, so architects are trying to be careful because they like to keep working and stay in business. Our structural department has always been extremely conservative, and I argued with one engineer once. He patted me on the head and said, “Sonny, if we make a mistake, we go out of business. If you make a mistake you hire a painter or a gardener to put ivy up.” And this has happened. The Hyatt hotel in Kansas City where people were lost on the steel...

Benjamin: When a bridge collapsed.

Holabird: …and they were bouncing up and down, and that engineering firm is out of business. They hadn’t taken into consideration, I guess, the fact that seventy- five people would start bouncing up and down on it. With our office, when we did the Memorial Stadium in Champaign, they started doing the wave down there, or the equivalent of it—where the students all get up at one time.

Benjamin: The wave?

Holabird: It’s where the whole rooting section gets up and moves. Sitting in the stands, they start doing it. As an architect, to keep costs down, you try and do it as efficiently with as little extra steel as possible, but all of a sudden here are the students making wave action all over, and the thing starts springing. We had to go back and brace it. It was not unsafe for a customary crowd, but suddenly

142 somebody was doing something that nobody could ever imagine was going to happen, and I presume that was part of the Kansas City disaster. They were able to stiffen the structure at Champaign. The Wisconsin stadium that we didn’t do had the same problem because of students doing the wave. I’m sure with the modern baseball parks, they make them much more rigid because they know that the dumb public is going to do dumb things. So we were worried about liability, we were worried about marketing, we were worried about problems and trying to get out and do them right away so people knew we were responsive. It seems to me you’re providing professional assistance, but you’re also providing a lot more with buildings because buildings can be so dangerous. Everything about a building can be dangerous. If it’s not built strong enough, walls can collapse, and people can get ill. There was something in the paper about people in DuPage County having to move out of their new building because evidently something is wrong with the mechanical system and people are getting sick from the air quality. So you can poison people. I don’t think people still know what happened with the Bellevue Stratford in Philadelphia—the so-called Legionnaires’ Disease. So you can have it with mechanical. We did two swimming pools, as I told you, at Champaign-Urbana, and one of the great problems with swimming pools is underwater lights. If anything can possibly happen there, you can just murder a whole group of kids in the water. So one of the big problems was ground-fault detection. If anything happened there, it immediately turned off all the electricity. And they do this. All good swimming pool design has something like that. Water is such a marvelous conductor of electricity. One of the interesting things about the main post office was there was no fire detection, or a rudimentary one, and if something happened, the fire could go horizontally over a three mile thing and then drop down a floor and then continue unabated for about ten floors. So one of the big jobs was putting in electrical detection and, again, a system to turn off the moving conveyor belts so that the platform wouldn’t travel around. The postal union, I think, brought this up. They said, “This is unsafe for us as workers,” which was true. The building had been designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, and it was a fine building, but they said the air conditioning and the ventilation system didn’t work. We discovered it mostly didn’t work because nobody had cleaned the filters in about twenty years. The

143 system was pretty good, it just required a little tender loving care. So all kinds of funny things came up.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Benjamin: One of the questions that came to mind a while ago was about the star system. So many other firms like Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had architects like Walter Netsch who had his little cadre of people, and I suppose Bruce Graham did, too. Was that true at Holabird and Root?

Holabird: I think it’s much less now. Jerry Horn refuses to play a star role. For years he sat in the middle of the drafting room, surrounded by young men and women. I think he’d still prefer to do that. He now maneuvers in a private office part of the time. In the days of my father’s time, I can’t remember a star system. Later on, Mr. Bartsch was very concerned about his preeminence and ego and everything else, and it was kind of a Bartsch-oriented studio. And then there was Mr. Bradley and some other people. I think lots of us left Mr. Bartsch or else left the office. I didn’t leave the office, but I left Mr. Bartsch and worked for Mr. Bradley. When Jerry Horn and I became partners—there used to be a design department and an architectural department in the office. If you were a designer, that meant you were kind of on the way up and you could be a design partner or something. If you were in the architectural office, it meant that you were probably just going to be doing working drawings the rest of your life. You could become a job captain. Anyway, we changed this and made it just an architectural department which had designers and others, but you could work in all parts of the building then and people could move around. It took away, in one way, the prestige of being a designer but also the stigma of not being a designer. And that was good. We never really had a star system. The jobs were divided up coming in depending upon what kinds of jobs they were. When the three of us were there, Cook, Pook and myself, the telephone company jobs were mostly Cook’s because there was precious little design, although there was certainly a design connected with them. And hospitals and labs were Pook’s, and I was kind of the general odds and ends—Ravinia and the schools.

144 Benjamin: I’ll call your jobs cultural and educational.

Holabird: We could see ourselves falling into these disparate roles, and it was easier because we each had more experience in that. Gerry Pook was very well versed in the jargon of medical schools, which was a whole different world. He could talk about operating rooms and intensive care rooms and things of this kind with knowledge. And Cook, was the same way about telephone and manufacturing buildings and things of this kind—like laboratory equipment, which he was a specialist in. Anyway, we didn’t have a star system. I’ve read of other offices where you didn’t design a doorknob without the chief designer approving it and tearing his hair or castigating you publicly if you hadn’t asked him. It seems to me you have to build trust and have confidence in people, and you want them to be able to make decisions. And they ought to come to you if they think the decisions are in any way different or that they might be risky decisions to make, and then it’s up to the senior person to decide. I think you want people to be inventive and creative and everything else, and if you don’t, then you’re just going to have drones or clones—one or the other—working for you, and that’s no fun. I think the best architectural offices have a constant influx of bright young men and women and are able to retain, on the other side, people with fifteen or twenty years experience, who can continue to use their experience as standards that the young people can learn from. They can sympathize with the new ideas but still make them work. That’s all. If you’re going to do fancy skylights and atriums and things like that, you’d better darn well have somebody who knows how to treat them so that the rain doesn’t start pouring in, and things like that, right away. You need age and experience and solidity, or solidarity, I guess, plus young, bright people.

Benjamin: We haven’t talked much about philosophy. What has yours been?

Holabird: I don’t think we’ve ever had a philosophy, but at least in my experience. Most of the people, when you’re doing a new building, were not trying to see what kind of a big whammy we could put on the thing but rather to do something

145 that was appropriate to the function and appropriate to the environment and appropriate to the amount of money the client was prepared to spend and his image of himself. We weren’t constantly trying to get published, although it was nice when you did. But often jobs didn’t lend themselves to be published.

Benjamin: What do you mean, “Didn’t lend themselves to be published.”

Holabird: Well, I mean everything Stanley [Tigerman] does should be published. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but I think one reason why a client might go to Stanley is that he has a reputation for doing lots of marvelous, exciting things. Often they came to our office for different reasons. Our people would do a sound, well engineered something or other and that the client was not interested in whether it got the award of merit or the AIA honor award or something like that.

Benjamin: But your buildings often did.

Holabird: It’s often new buildings do, so if you can do both, it’s good. Jerry Horn manages to handle inexpensive and somewhat utilitarian buildings with a fine Italian hand, or a fine whatever. At the same time, he’s nice to people who work along with him. As a matter of fact, I’ve never heard him really get angry with anybody, although he probably has. I just wasn’t around. The rest of us would get infuriated with people, but I don’t think I ever did it publicly. I had enough reservations about my own skills and experience not to take them out on somebody else.

Benjamin: Was Jerry Horn a self-taught architect?

Holabird: I think he went to one year of junior college or something like that. And then started working for Craig Ellwood in California and learned on the job. Gene Cook, who retired a few years ago, was pretty much the same. He went to, I think, the University of Kentucky for one year and then, after the war, to the Institute of Design for half a year, but he worked in architectural offices and was just very bright and picked up a lot. Eventually he wrote the book for the

146 national AIA on architectural job captains, a kind of a project manual for architects. It was a national AIA project. It was called the Project—I’ve forgotten what the actual words were. It was a guide to how a job went through the office; a project manager’s guidebook on how to be a good project manager. It explained all the duties and how things should move through the office and what you should do. It’s a great big thick book. As a matter of fact, I think it’s in two or three volumes, Architects Handbook of Professional Practice. And that was written by somebody who had never really graduated from a university. Now all the universities and architectural associations require you to have not only an undergraduate degree but a professional degree, too—I think it’s foolish. As a matter of fact, I think all degrees are kind of foolish. You ought to take a competitive exam or something or other and then find out. You could cut the whole university process down to a couple of years if you really sat down to do it. Some people would have to spend ten years and still wouldn’t get a degree, and the others would get out in a few months, which is kind of the way the Beaux-Arts worked in Paris. My father got out in two-and- a-half years, and Root said other people were there for four or five years and never did graduate.

Benjamin: What other projects were you working on? Did you supervise the restoration of the library, now the Cultural Center?

Holabird: Both Gerry Pook and I were involved a little bit in the Cultural Center, he more so than I. We entered the competition. Years before that, they had a competition, and the competition was complicated by the fact that you had to save the GAR [Grand Army of the Republic] museum at one end. You had to save the card catalog with the Tiffany dome, and you had to save some other space, and then you were supposed to add yea-thousand square feet and it was almost impossible. Finally somebody won it, but they never went ahead because it turned out they were paying about twenty-million dollars just to safeguard those special places during the building. We had a great idea. We put four huge columns in the center court and then built a modern building floating above the library and said this way you weren’t going to touch the library at all and just keep that the way it was, and then build the new space at

147 least in a straightforward fashion, kind of cantilevered over. We didn’t think we were going to win, and we didn’t. But then they had us come back when Mrs. Daley, or whoever, said the building should be kept for something, and they decided on a Cultural Center. This was fun. I think Gerry’s great contribution was that he ripped out all the built-up stack areas and just made three nice floors, each with high-ceiling rooms, and this was very nice. Anyway, we worked a little on that. I got involved in the theater—how to remodel the little theater which had always been so awful. It looked like a funeral parlor in the old one, but we tried to make a little stage and keep the room the way it was and enhance it. The Marquette building came up, which was an old Holabird and Roche building, and Walker Johnson was the chief designer on it. He got very much involved in fixing up the terra cotta and finding somebody in California that could cast these pieces because the building had gone through a hundred years of people putting new storefronts on it and tearing out the old. He got the nice lobby mosaics cleaned up and uncovered the existing ceiling and restored some of the columns and painted them to resemble the marble they once were. It was a masterful job. Originally he talked about saving the floors, but the floors had been pretty well cannibalized. There were still some old doorknobs and old doors, there were long corridors and doors with glass transoms, and it really was not very modern. I think even Walker agreed that they could do something and that probably there wasn’t going to be very much left of the existing office structure. Shortly after that, we got involved with the assembly hall at the University of Illinois, which was a building we hadn’t designed. It was where everybody took exams and used to go to the undergraduate extracurricular theater. It had a dome that was starting to fall in, and they didn’t know whether to rehabilitate it or tear it down because it was going to become dangerous. It’s at the end of the campus. It’s right at the end of the mall and the green space. The dome was partly falling down because they’d saved money initially by not building the stage house, so part of the dome’s supports had not really been built up. Anyhow, our engineers went in and said yes, you could save it, and then they decided that they would air-condition and redo the interiors and make it acoustically better with new seating. And then we also added a stage house to it. As I told you, in the old days if a fraternity or

148 sorority put on some kind of skit, you had to come in from the other side of the stage. You had to run around outside and then come in because the back wall was the back wall and that was it. So, we fixed this up for good movie shows and big screens and for lectures and decided not to invent new architecture for this addition. We just followed with the existing brick details, so that nobody will know the difference. We’d done the same thing pretty much—we added the three south bays to Louis Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie, Scott building fifteen years before. And there again, we used the same terra cotta as Louis Sullivan did, and we took a piece of the beautiful intricate old iron moldings around the first floor windows. I think it went to Fred Ripple, and he cast it in aluminum; and then they painted it to look like the iron again. As a matter of fact, I thought we could go in business then just building hundreds of fragments of Louis Sullivan’s and leaving them around the backyard and then selling them to architectural buffs as the real McCoy. Well, it’s what the Crusaders did. Everybody had a piece of the cross. If the Crusaders had to buy pieces of the original cross or thorns from the original wreath, I saw no reason why we couldn’t sell fragments of Louis Sullivan’s if we let them weather long enough. Anyway, at the University of Illinois it was somewhat the same. We didn’t invent anything new. Jerry Horn was a little critical. He thought maybe it should have been at least a simplified version. When we added the wing on the Chicago Historical Society, he tried to keep the quality of the Georgian style for the rest of it but to establish the fact that it was not a copy. He did the same thing on the physics building at the University of Chicago. I was kind of the partner-in-charge and Jerry was the designer-in-charge, so I had to go to all these meetings, too. The trustees gave us some extra time and money because they wanted to be sure that this was in context with the rest of the buildings; and it was about time, I think, that the trustees did that because lots of times the universities let architects just do their own thing. Saarinen did the women’s dormitory, and it’s kind of a cute building, but it certainly is not related to the others. The law school that he did at the University of Chicago is because he kept at least part of it in the limestone tradition. Mies built a building there for social service, and it looks just like an IIT building, and he didn’t change his design because he was at the University of Chicago. And Edward Durell Stone there didn’t change either, but the university has wised up now. I think this is

149 good. You’re supposed to behave, especially in a campus where lots of people remember it one way or the other, and I think that you should fit in. My criticism of IIT is not the individual buildings but the fact that I didn’t think Mies had ever really understood what going to a college in America was like, or in England for that matter, where you had quadrangles and feelings of places where you were a little bit secluded from the outer world and could make friends rather than a kind of laboratory approach where technicians go from building to building and don’t care. They can eat in the faculty lounge if they want to chitchat. Anyway, we did the Champaign-Urbana thing, and then I think Walker got involved with the St. James Cathedral. Again, I was supposed to be the partner in charge, but Walker was a tiger and did almost all the work there-finding what the original stencils had been in the ceiling and reproducing those and convincing the deacons, or whoever the building committee was, that spending the money for it was worthwhile. I was inclined to paint the whole thing white and forget about it, but not Walker. I don’t have much religious background, but I like the plain ones because it seems to me then, like a plain art gallery, you can appreciate the service and the music. Also as a little boy, I loved the ornate churches because when I couldn’t understand what was going on, I could at least look at the pictures and try to guess what they were. Anyway, Walker won out. One of the elders said it looked like a Greek or Russian Orthodox church with all the stuff on it, but I think it looks great. Walker has also gotten involved, through that I guess, with the Fourth Presbyterian Church and with St. Clement’s in our neighborhood here, a Catholic church which he did the same way. He had a marvelous feeling for that. I think whole offices really are specializing in that, and our office, luckily, was able to do some.

Benjamin: How did you get to do that kind of work?

Holabird: Just the fact that owners were taking old buildings of ours and wanting to renovate them. You have a chance to do alterations or restorations. People are interested in their old buildings. The whole world is now—I think partly because of the architectural and art historians. Everybody is now conscious of the fact that old buildings may not necessarily be useful members of society

150 just because they’re old. So everybody was doing it, and we had our share. In fact, it has made Vinci and people like that. I think most of their work is proper restoration now, which is great. All these buildings are coming back on the market—the Dearborn Street Printers’ Row ones. All these old Holabird and Roche so-called warehouse or loft buildings are coming into their own. It’s marvelous.

Benjamin: What role did you play in these projects?

Holabird: I could argue with Jerry Horn a little bit. My role was kind of a critic at that time, and Jerry certainly didn’t need anybody looking and suggesting things. Sometimes I was successful and sometimes I wasn’t, but I thought if it looked well and the client was pleased, that I didn’t have to interject, that’s all. That’s one reason why I eventually retired. I thought that everybody was doing so well without me, they might just as well have to worry about the leaky roofs and some of the other things, too.

Benjamin: So was your job to keep everybody happy?

Holabird: Well, and to see that a job ran promptly. Often they didn’t. The historical society was partly my fault. I think we did this for a fixed fee. It was a percentage fee based on an early estimate of costs, and I’ve forgotten what the costs were. Let’s say it was eight million dollars and the fee was 6 percent of eight million, so that would be a $480,000 fee. Well, that’s fine except that the estimates kept going up, but we weren’t supposed to change our fee. The work got more complicated, and in the case of the historical society, the director and the curators would come in and spend the day; and then two weeks later, they’d change their minds, and there was nothing in our fee that said when the client changed his mind and wanted to come in again for a long session and change everything we’d done, that we should be paid more. After the job, I tried to go and get back some of this, and they just said it’s not true. It was very hard to prove that you spent more time talking to people. It takes people’s time and you’re paying them hourly. And then they were paying their people for their time, too; it’s just that ours had to sit in there and couldn’t be drawing

151 and getting the thing out. I wasn’t always successful in keeping jobs going. We also got involved with a job at VPI.

Benjamin: VPI?

Holabird: It’s Virginia Polytechnical Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. I knew somebody there. We shouldn’t have gone into it because it was kind of a state building and they had very, very spartan architectural fees. It was mostly remodeling, and I said I didn’t think we could possibly do it. I said, “You want us to put our cheapest people on this?” “Oh,” they said, “we expect you to put the best people in the world.” “Well, then you should have fees that reflect this, that you want us to.” Anyway, I’m not sure how many hundred thousand dollars we lost in that, because it couldn’t be done. I should have just said, “We’d love to do this work, and I think we could do well with it, but we just can’t afford to.”

Benjamin: Who else has been in the office the last fifteen, twenty years—Tom Welsh and what other designers?

Holabird: Welsh came to us right out of school, really. He was a marvelously gifted young man who could draw like an angel. Gerry Pook once said, “What you should really do with Welsh is lock him up in a room for about ten hours, and then he’d come out with these beautiful drawings. Then he could go relax for a while and then you lock him up again.” He produced drawings at a prodigious rate of speed, and very facile. Where I learned to make models when I was at school, I don’t think Welsh ever made a model in his life but he could draw everything from any point of view. He didn’t need computer-perspective drafting; he was a built-in one, and did all kinds of marvelous work. I can’t remember him working on jobs that I was connected with very much, but what he did, he did very well. He did a little fire station in Oakbrook, and he did the Oakbrook Village Hall.

Benjamin: So then were the partners kind of connected to particular designers?

152 Holabird: We picked out people. Roy Solfisburg was another one. He came out of Williams. He’d worked when he was in college, too, and went to the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture. He came into the office and did all kinds of things. He worked on a job that we had for Prudential Insurance Company in Indiana, about fifteen miles south of Gary. They decided to move a lot of their people out of Chicago and hire Indiana high school girls to do all their paperwork. They kept getting high school graduates who would spend three or four years there and then get married. That worked fine for Prudential. Anyway, Roy worked on that, and he worked on some telephone buildings. When Western Electric decided to build a big computer center next to Indian Hill in Naperville, Roy did the whole building there. It was on the cover of that thing. It’s got kind of a red stripe wrapping around it. There was another young man named Orrin Arvold. I think he was Swedish. He came out of school and worked on a little library. When we did the Indian Hill extension he was the person who worked with me on that, and then when we did the Ravinia restaurant building, Orrin worked with me on that. He was very bright and gifted and drew well and put things all together. He went back to Blackburg, Virginia, and took a course at VPI and I guess that’s how we became involved in that thankless job. Orrin had put in a word for us. I’m trying to remember the other people who passed through. There are lots of people that Jerry Horn has employed, and most of them have moved on because we can’t keep every bright, young designer. They get too good and then there are too many of them. James Baird is one of the partners. When James Baird came, he’d worked with Dinkaloo Roche and with someone else in New York. He graduated from Illinois, and his nice young wife was going to medical school at Northwestern and he came back. James Baird, also, draws like an angel and is a beautiful, thoughtful person. He worked with Jerry on the physics building at the University of Chicago. He was really Jerry’s right hand and developed that and did all the mighty heavy talking. I mean, you can sit and have meetings with the main people and the client, but then you get down to department heads or other people. When you get into the lecture halls, you have to talk to the person who’s going to run the equipment and ask what kind of screens they want and what kind of blackboards and how much chalkboard space and should it pull down or sideways.

153 Benjamin: I don’t think people realize how much of that goes into an effective design.

Holabird: Oh, it’s just terrible, and you have to plan for it—plan for the screens, and is the screen going to be tilted so that people in a stepped auditorium are going to see it right, or is it going to be vertical, and where do you put the acoustical stuff and how is he going to do it; are you going to use tablet armchairs, which need more space, or not use tablet armchairs. Architecture, as Mr. Bradley said, is just thousands and thousands of details that you try to put together, and you have to anticipate ahead of time and write it all up.

Benjamin: How do you estimate cost? It must be very difficult.

Holabird: As I told you earlier, that’s why I liked set design because you had a chance to try it out and see, and you could make changes easily because it was all just wood strips and muslin which you could rebuild or cut down. Anyway, you try to anticipate everything, and you do it on paper. It’s the most abstract profession in the whole world in some ways, because it’s like writing out a formula for something or other and then years later seeing what you actually wrote the formula for. That’s what you’re doing. You’re making drawings and describing it in specifications and hoping that, when it gets done, it’s going to be just the way everybody hoped it was going to be and not some terrible aberration. One of the bright things Gerry Pook said years ago was that most architects were a little older. Michelangelo was a gifted sculptor and painter when he was in his teens and early twenties, but he did his architectural work, St. Peter’s, when he was forty or forty-five because by that time he knew a little bit more about things. It’s much more complicated. There are so many things that you have to consider when you’re doing a building, from just life—safety matters to beauty and how you build it in and incorporate the other things, too. If you can design something that performs its function and is gorgeous, then you’ve really done something marvelous.

Benjamin: What do you think your best training was for this?

154 Holabird: I don’t know. Everything. I told you, the army training—I mean, to work under difficulties, knowing that you had to do it properly or you’d have to go back and redo it. My father said, “If you’re going to do something, at least do it well.” He didn’t care what I did, but he said, “Learn to do it well.” The experience with clients or with actors and directors on the stage and listening to them browbeat their designers or their technical staff or something, I think this is part of how you learn to live. Be a good father, trying to take care of children at various stages with their emotions—when they’re feeling good and when they’re feeling bad. As I said, we once had four children all on bottles because my first wife didn’t believe in weaning them too early. So as a matter of fact, they were all in diapers, too—four children under three—and they all seemed to have turned out all right, much to everybody’s surprise, but I’m not sure they all agree that they had the best parents. But they didn’t have the worst. They’re still courteous to us. I think everything you do prepares you. I think early on—I don’t know how you decide to be a bad guy, but everybody in my family were trying to be good guys and I think this shows a little bit. I can’t imagine corruption or getting paybacks or things like that, but I’ve heard that some people do in our profession and in other professions. It just never occurred to me. There again, my father and grandfather and all the other partners said that all you have to do is get on the take-back once and your reputation is gone forever. So I think, again, the office may not have had the world’s greatest designers, but we have always had a reputation for incorruptibility and for being hard-working and making proper drawings.

Benjamin: What other architects do you respect today?

Holabird: I don’t know all the new, bright people. I should, but I don’t. I kind of admire Frank Gehry because he’s doing things that seem so audacious and out of the mainstream of things. Probably something good will develop from that. I like what Margaret McCurry and most of what Stanley does. Again, I think he’s taking chances and, in taking chances, he gives a chance for other people to take some of the same chances and perhaps do them in a little bit more mature way. Somebody has to be the forerunner, and I think that’s what Stanley has done. Helmut Jahn I’m ambivalent about because I think he’s terribly bright

155 and makes perfectly marvelous drawings, but again, he’s such a tremendous presence that I have a feeling that you couldn’t ask him to do just something ordinary. I’m sure people wouldn’t come to him if they just wanted a—and again, I have a feeling that he’s pretty ruthless with his staff. Maybe not, I don’t know firsthand. Dirk Lohan, I think, is probably one of the most sensible and sensitive people around right now. I like him personally, and I think he’s doing very nice things. I kind of like talking to Beeby, but I’m really upset by the kind of things he’s doing. I think the Rice building of the Art Institute is handsome and beautiful, but I think the Harold Washington Public Library and some of the other things are just such a throwback to eclecticism. Maybe it’s good and I’m wrong. I think that maybe the Art Institute galleries could have been as formal as they are without being quite as classical. Maybe that’s wrong, too. On the other hand, I like the old Mellon Gallery in the National Gallery in Washington because I think it’s such a pleasant place to see pictures in, and I don’t think that the Pei addition got any where near the same quality. It seems to me, again, that Mr. Pei was doing a building and the other was doing an art gallery. And you’re well aware of the architect in Pei’s work, and you’re not aware of who the architect was in the Mellon Galleries because the pictures are what you see. To a certain extent, Hammond Beeby’s job at the Art Institute is good be cause you really don’t know where the old Art Institute stops, so that makes sense. In the Chicago Public Library I think it could have been different.

Benjamin: What would you have done differently with the library?

Holabird: I’ve still got sour grapes. I wasn’t completely sold on the Goldblatt building at the start, but as we went into it and found out what their program was, and when you see the plans of the new building across the street, it’s practically identical to most of the floors of the Goldblatt building. Really, a library is a warehouse for books, and you build stacks and study carrels or little conference rooms, and that’s what it is, except for the public spaces. The Goldblatt building, with a little bit of expense, could have had those public spaces, too, and in a nice way. But we got hammered by somebody or other—we still don’t know why the Sun-Times suddenly had a vendetta on the building. They said, first of all, it wasn’t strong enough and the column-bay

156 system wouldn’t allow for handicapped access or for books, and the asbestos was a problem and something else was a problem, and blah, blah, blah. Actually, I think it would have saved fifty million dollars if they’d done that. But DePaul got a good building there, and I think they’re going to do very well with it.

Benjamin: What about buildings? Which ones do you think are particularly fine?

Holabird: I don’t like most of the new buildings. I think Skidmore’s NBC Tower is probably the building that strikes me as the most friendly to Chicago, partly because it’s limestone and it’s designed like the Palmolive-Playboy building. I think the Kohn Pederson Fox, 333 West Wacker, the curved building with green glass across from the Merchandise Mart is a lovely building because it reflects the site and it doesn’t do all the funny things that the later Kohn Pederson Fox buildings have done. They’re kind of calling attention to themselves by cute little things up on top. I think the 900 North Michigan building is not very attractive for all the expense, and the building next to Sears I don’t think is all that attractive. As a matter of fact, all those things I can still remember as a young architectural designer. If I’d tried anything like that, I think they would have torn the pencil out of my hand and thrown me out the door.

Benjamin: Why?

Holabird: Oh, with all the changing window sizes and changing materials every few feet and playing around with granite at the ground level. I like some of the things. I think it’s nice that granite has come back as a material, and it’s going to last. At the street level as a pedestrian you see lots of granite. I walked by the Gypsum building, which is next to our office, yesterday, which is Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and there’s more playful granite design at the street level, and this is fine. It must have taken forever and a day to detail the thing, for all I know. I know how hard it is because you’re drawing granite, and if it changes on the way up, you have to keep making drawings all the way up and remembering how it’s all going to fit together. I don’t care for that building so much, but I

157 like the NBC building and I like the Kohn Pederson Fox building. I certainly like Jerry Horn’s building for the Northwestern Law School—the law school library...

[Tape 6: Side 1]

Benjamin: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about your work, and now I’d like to delve in a little bit to the many, many civic and cultural activities you’ve been involved in. There are many that have made life more enjoyable and fun for a lot of people and made a contribution to the community at large. Were you involved in local civic organizations early on?

Holabird: Ah, yes. We lived in the Lincoln Park area, and it seemed only proper that, as a homeowner, I ought to join the Lincoln Park Conservation Association. I think I was on the board of that for I-don’t-know-how-many years, and then it turned out they started developing neighborhood associations, and somebody leaned on me and I became president of the Park West Community Association. I think we had twenty-five members, but only seven or eight came to meetings.

Benjamin: When was this?

Holabird: Oh, goodness, this must have been 1960, I think, or something like that. Eventually, I was going to Lincoln Park Conservation meetings or subcommittees. There would be a committee on zoning and a committee on home beautification and Park West meetings, plus Lincoln Park board of directors, plus Park West subcommittee meetings on membership and whatnot. At one point I think I was going to four meetings a week in the evenings, and finally I got some kind of a job working for somebody in the Lincoln Park area and I said, “I can no longer go to any meetings because I’m in conflict of interest.” I wasn’t really because the job was just kind of a sketch plan, but it was my way out of it. It was silly because I’d go to meetings, and there were the same people only they were wearing different hats. At one point, they were directors of the Lincoln Park Conservation, and in another

158 place, they were the housing committee of something or other, with two or three different ones so you couldn’t go from where you were before because there were always other people. At any rate, it was the start of building up the neighborhood group. Park West was kind of the north part of Lincoln Park Conservation, and it hadn’t really gone anywhere. Finally, another man—an advertising man named Fred Zucker—said, “We ought to have some kind of gathering like the Old Town Triangle Show to make Park West hold its head up,” and we didn’t know what to do. We weren’t big enough to have house walks, and so on. Finally we decided we were going to just have a beer party in the street, and we called it Petunia Day. We decided we’d call the first one The Third Annual Petunia Day so people would think they’d missed the first two. That was my contribution. I said, “Let’s not call it the first annual, it’s the third annual one,” and everybody had missed the first two which never existed. We went down to public markets, I think two days or a week before—or maybe it was the same day, I can’t remember—but I got my whole family and my four daughters in kind of a pony cart, and we went through the neighborhood selling petunias and telling people about Petunia Day, and we had a little band and street dancing and a beer party. We closed streets between Fullerton and—I can’t remember the street it was. We did that two or three years in a row. We rented some tables and chairs and got the beer. I don’t think we could afford to pay whatever that insurance you’re supposed to have when you invite people. Innkeepers and bars have it. It’s bar owners’ insurance. We never did that. We didn’t have any money, but the alderman thought it was a good idea and the police were helpful, and we never had any rowdies. I figured you ought to have a little entertainment, so I wrote some skits about the history of the Lakeview area. I went to the historical society and found out that this was a great celery-producing area of the 1860s and 1870s, and the Swabian farmers, from wherever Swabia is in Germany, came and settled here because it was lovely, marshy land along Lake Michigan, along Clark Street. So we had that and some songs, and we pressed a few friends to play the guitar and things like this. They were very nice parties, I think. Then after that—we did this I think for two or three years—somebody said it was foolish to have something as inane as that, and then he said, “Why not have an antique fair instead?” So the antique fair started then, and that really made money. The whole notion of

159 the Triangle Art Fair and the other fair is to try and build up a little war chest so that the neighborhood can do a little good besides just screaming. Otherwise you just scream when builders do something, and you don’t have much clout. We probably made fifty dollars on the petunia things, but I think we got more people involved, which was the other reason for doing it. And now, I think the antique show has been going for twenty or twenty-five years in the Park West area. It’s very successful, and they bring in people from all over the Midwest. They make a couple of thousand dollars each year, and then they use this to help track developments which they don’t think are right and to encourage a little more activism. I wasn’t a very good activist because I think it’s better to be an outraged housewife because you can go down and sit at city hall when they have the zoning appeal cases and find out what the pols are doing. But I didn’t feel I could leave the office. I was an employee then. It was hard to just walk out and go and sit there for a while. Later on, the good activists enlisted the mothers’ brigade and they were very good. No alderman likes to see twenty outraged mothers while he’s proposing something which he already thinks is a little raunchy. I worked in Park West and I worked on the Lincoln Park thing. For a while they had a third organization. I guess that was called the Community Council. The other two were local, and this one was part of urban renewal. These had some of the same people on them. So I had the Park West, Lincoln Park Conservation and the Community Council or some name like that. These were all twenty-five years ago, and I think they’ve done marvelous jobs—sometimes too much. Years later we were putting an addition on Grant Hospital, and the whole Mid-North Association decided Grant was unfeeling to the neighborhood. The people involved in Grant all lived in the suburbs, and the architect involved in our office lives in Barrington. He said, ‘What’s the matter with these people?” I said, “Be careful.”

Benjamin: Who was the architect on that job?

Holabird: Gerry Pook was involved. Walker Johnson was the designer, but Gerry was kind of the partner-in-charge. I said, “Watch out, these people are very savvy and they know just how to leak things to the newspapers.” There was one planner from Skidmore, whose house was right at the foot of the hospital, and

160 he was afraid the shadow was going to affect him in the afternoon. He held the thing up for a while. Eventually, the hospital spent a lot of money and cut down a floor and redesigned and did all kinds of things. The neighborhood rightly demanded that. The hospital promised to build parking but the neighborhood said, ‘Why don’t you build the parking first so we can see that you really mean that,” and that was smart. The hospital preferred to wait. They’d always parked on the streets in the neighborhood anyhow during the day, which the neighborhood couldn’t stand, and now the hospital was going to be vastly increased. We did build the garage first, and later on they put another floor on it. Jerry Horn was the designer of the garage. They wanted a garage that didn’t look like a garage, so he made quite a nice-looking garage. Neighborhood groups are very hard to deal with. They get pretty smart about what things are. I don’t think they like architects or planners. Jerry Horn told me two days ago that they just got an approval for a Lincoln Park administrative building. The Friends of the Park had been fighting this like mad. He said presently the site is just covered with asphalt.

Benjamin: Where is to be built?

Holabird: I don’t know. I think it’s near the conservatory. I think it’s the area where the restaurants Un Grand Cafe and Ambria park their cars. They evidently rent this from the park district at night, and all their valet parkers take cars over there, to the north of the conservatory, where there are greenhouses. He said the Friends of the Park were indomitable; they said this was taking park land from people, but it wasn’t. It was taking a piece of asphalt out of service and putting a building on it. He said that he thought that it was going to go ahead. At the same time, I guess I was a trustee at Parker, except when Holabird and Root got the new Parker School job I resigned from that. I was an employee then—I wasn’t a partner—but it just seemed to me a bad idea because people thought I was profiting from this. Later on when I was a trustee at Ravinia, we got the Ravinia job. By this time I was a partner, and I resigned because it seems to me you shouldn’t be on both sides. You shouldn’t be approving fees and things, and the architects should be across the table from you, not sitting with you. That’s what my father had always done. He’d been a trustee of the

161 Art Institute, and then when they entered a competition for the Art Institute, he resigned so that there wouldn’t be any question about it. This was in about 1936 or 1937. Actually, the office won the competition, but they never went ahead with the work. It was marvelous sitting on these different boards because there were so many bright people and you became aware of the money problems and everything else. Architecture was probably the least of the worries of any of these people.

Benjamin: What did they worry about most of the time?

Holabird: Oh, they were worried about quality of education at Parker and money to run the school and how did you do it and quality at Ravinia and money to keep Ravinia going and about contracts for the orchestra and how to keep the conductors happy and the musicians happy, in the case of Ravinia. At Parker, keeping teachers adequately paid and the building at least maintained. After we built the new building at Parker, I stayed on as a building grounds man, and each year we—the head superintendent and I and a contractor—would walk through the thing and see what we thought the most important things were, and we just got it done quickly and economically. Years later when we had the Chicago Board of Education schools to do, it was done in just the opposite way. This was twenty years ago, and this is architecture again. The board of education decided that all the deferred maintenance on about 400 schools was going to be done, and this was supposed to be a great bonanza for architects. I thought it was going to be done the way we did Parker—kind of a walk through, this room needs some plastering and you make a note of this, or the toilet room needs to be cleaned up or new tile or new bowls or new partitions or something. And the board of education architects talked to us as if this was the most marvelous job they’ve ever had for architects. We had four schools, but it turned out that what we had to do was to go through every room and figure out how many square feet of plaster—this was architects, not contractors or anybody—how much floor had to be repaired and desks and cabinets and blackboards and ceiling fixtures, and the bathrooms the same way. Then we had to estimate the costs on that room. There were probably a hundred rooms in the school. We had something that was the size of a

162 telephone directory for each of the four schools. Then that had to be submitted, first to the principal, who had to approve it, then the local engineer or superintendent or whatever he’s called, and then it went to the mothers’ committee and to a district superintendent and the board of education downtown. And this whole procedure, from the first time we walked through until we got this report out, was a year. We made lots of changes in it, and by the time it was ready to go out for bids, inflation had raised everything about ten percent, so it turned out we were way over estimate. Then we took this all back and did it again, and we had to go through the same procedure. It took us another six or eight months to get all these changes made, and by that time, inflation had taken the thing up again. When I read about a year ago that the board of education has the same problem with schools, I knew exactly the procedure; it was just not the way to run a railroad. They should hire a contractor or an architect-contractor team in whom they had confidence and then go school by school and just get it done—make an estimate about the thing or what they thought they could spend, and then just do it right away and don’t wait for two years to decide. A contractor, when he bids a building, is trying to guess what things are going to cost if the building takes a year and a half, and he has to guess, “I’m not going to need the brick for six months, is brick still going to cost then what it does now? And the windows I’m not going to need those for a year. Should I buy the windows now and just store them somewhere?” You’re buying the futures in building material, and it’s difficult for a contractor. They’d much prefer to be on a time-and-material basis, so if the cost of materials go up, they’re covered. Especially in government and municipal bidding, that’s often not possible. But you can understand why costs do go up because it takes them so long to make decisions. By that time, inflationary things or other things have taken over. Anyway, that’s what I did in the summers at Parker School. It didn’t take long, and we kept it going. I did a little bit of that for Ravinia. We walked through the old buildings to see what we had to do to keep them from falling to pieces. I don’t know who’s doing either one now—every once in a while I write to Ravinia and tell them, for heaven’s sake have somebody walk up in the truss area over the audience at least once a year and be sure everything is tight there.

163 Benjamin: Do they have someone to maintain the buildings and grounds?

Holabird: Well, I hope they do because we built the thing in 1948 or by 1949, I guess, right after the fire, that first summer, and we went up again twenty years later when they were starting to talk about the new stage. It turned out some of the straps for hanging the ceiling were looking awfully—they’d slipped a little bit and so we just called somebody in to reweld everything to be sure it was tight. We figured all you had to do was drop part of the ceiling on somebody at Ravinia and we could say "night-night" to civilization.

Benjamin: You were on the board of IIT in the 1980s. What was that like?

Holabird: Somebody got me on the board of IIT. I’d always felt somewhat responsible for IIT, not because I admire the architecture so much but because my father had been partially responsible for Mies coming there, and we had so many very well trained young architects in our office who were from there. The fact that they were all very well trained to do beautiful Miesian things didn’t prevent them from being very good architects, and it turned out they were, as I was after my Gropius period, perfectly willing to adjust to other things. It made a good discipline. I think the Miesian discipline and the amount of time that IIT spent on construction and details and putting things together was probably the important thing. I can’t remember—I think I spent six or seven or eight years on the board there, and again, I’d never been on a high-powered board before.

Benjamin: Who else was on the board?

Holabird: Mr. Galvin of Motorola was the head of it, and Bob Pritzker who was in my brother’s class at Parker, was very important. A number of people—electrical manufacturers, civil engineer people. It was, I thought, a very good board. And Heather Bilandic—they put Heather on and a nice lady lawyer. Heather was very good because she helped to establish a little bit of undergraduate life. IIT had always been a streetcar university, and now it was beginning to develop kind of a campus feeling with dormitories and fraternities. Heather was, I think, very strong in trying to get student representatives to come and talk

164 together and have lunch. I admired what she was doing. We were trying to do something about the architectural school. There was an architectural committee, of which I was chairman for a while. I can’t remember what it was called—the Committee on Architecture, Planning and Design. I guess it had all three disciplines. Now it’s just architecture. The School of Design has its own now. But we had a problem—we lost one dean. He was a nice Scotch or north Irishman, I guess. He went out to Arizona, and that’s when George Schipporeit came in. He was both dean and chairman of architecture, and he was there for three or four years and, I think, did a good job, and then there was a notion of getting a replacement. I’ve never known whether George resigned or intended to go back to private practice or what, so we were on a search committee. I was on two search committees: one for a new president of IIT, which was interesting because we had a chance to see bright, middle-aged people from all over the country, and then a search committee for a new design head for the architectural school. The person selected for the architectural school was Gene Summers. We didn’t realize that somebody who had had as much success in private practice—and he was living on the Riviera or someplace in France—was serious about taking this job, which is difficult, and changing his lifestyle, living in Chicago and working here. But I think he’s been very successful. He also has changed a little bit of the quality of the school. When we first started this committee, all the tenured faculty were about fifty-five or fifty- six, and they were all graduates of IIT and they were all very firm products of Mies. I think Summers was able to get a few other people in, which I think was good, so at least the school has a little bit more variety.

Benjamin: When was this?

Holabird: Summers I think has been on the board for about three years now, or something like that. He seems to revel in it, and I think the school has improved. Dirk Lohan, who took over for me as head of this committee, feels warmly about the school but he also, I think, felt that it shouldn’t be so turned in on itself, that you had to feel that you had to do what Mies would have done if he had been here, because if Mies had still been around, I think, Mies would have been doing different things, too.

165 Benjamin: How has Gene Summers changed the school?

Holabird: Well, I think he has hired some new, young people from other schools, that’s all, who have different backgrounds and are bringing different things in. I remember Lohan and I were going to some meeting down there and he had a young man from his office who was teaching drawing at IIT. I saw some of these beautiful drawings that the kids were doing, and they were drawing some of the Romanesque things around the city. One of the IIT people was just shocked that they would be drawing a Romanesque arch or something like that because it wasn’t just bricks and steel. Lohan and I both thought, how small- minded when you see a perfectly beautiful drawing and you’re worried that Mies might not have told the kids to do that kind of drawing. Anyway, I think Dirk Lohan and Gene Summers are doing a fine job. I think I helped open it up a little bit. I came and said it’s really not healthy to have this kind of inbred thing. No matter how gifted you all are, there ought to be a little bit more.

Benjamin: You were on the board at the Graham Foundation. How did that happen?

Holabird: I got involved with the Graham Foundation board after the folderol connected with the Murphy family using the Graham Foundations as kind of a family fiefdom, although certainly it was Charlie Murphy, Sr., who had helped organize it and kept it going. When Carter Manny blew the whistle they needed some Mr. Cleans to come in there. He got Tom Ayers of Commonwealth Edison and the head of the Tribune at that time [Clayton Kirkpatrick] and Miles Berger of the city and Jack Gray, retired from Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and two or three others. They were all businessmen initially, and then they decided that they ought to have an architect. I was evidently suitable, they figured. I wasn’t going to stir up anything, had come from a good family, had a good reputation and was well read and whatnot. Anyway, it was a damning with faint praise, so I’ve been on that board for five- and-a-half years, and I just resigned a week ago. At the Graham Foundation, what we really were doing was trying to do… Carter did most of the groundwork. He reviewed all the applications and made suggestions, and we

166 either agreed or, in some cases, we made minor changes or added and subtracted from the list when we thought they were either repetitious or too out in the wild blue yonder or something. But mostly Carter did the thing, and he did a magnificent job. I always had reservation about the house which the Graham Foundation occupies. I guess the trustees had bought it years ago, and it’s a marvelous house and certainly should be retained, but I didn’t think it was all that useful for the foundation because they didn’t bring scholars in from far and near, and the library had been sold. It’s very convenient if you live on the North Side, but it seemed to me, for young architects from schools like Circle or from IIT or others, it’s just hard to get to and hard to get out of.

Benjamin: So was it your idea to move the offices?

Holabird: I thought the office could be downtown and the lectures could be either at the Art Institute or the Arts Club or the First National Bank Center or some place like that where everybody could hear them. But it fell on pretty deaf ears, so that’s all right. I’ve fallen on deaf ears before. I just wrote to Jim Nagle, who’s now the president, and suggested that they ought to—if they’re going to keep the house—make it like I Tatti and bring in either some local young architects and architectural and art historians or make it a national thing, but bring them there once a week or twice a week to sit down with some of the leaders of the profession and give gifted students a little bit more gifts...

Benjamin: It’s a wonderful idea.

Holabird: .. . and give them a little money so they could travel around and see things. Do it for a year, and then the Graham fellows might then be like the Loeb fellows at Harvard or the Nieman fellows at Harvard or the White House fellows. They had kind of a special opportunity. The Nieman fellows, they’re newspaper people. They do better. They come to Harvard for about six months, and they can take any courses they want. They just audit courses, and then if you have political interests, you can go and take courses at the Kennedy School of Public Administration, or, I presume, you can go to law school lectures. Or if you’re in the art field, you can go to the Fogg Museum or things like that. Anyway, it’s a

167 half year off for a bright newspaper man or woman to relax. It’s kind of like a half-sabbatical. They had weekly or bimonthly dinners at which they sat and talked to each other and to various professors of Harvard who would come. And then I visited I Tatti, Bernard Berenson’s place near Florence, a couple of times. I went because one of my old Harvard friends from Lowell House was the director. There young men and women came from all over the world and spent a few months, and I suppose lived in Florence, but they could spend the day in the library at I Tatti, and then they had lunches together and occasional dinners, surrounded by all kinds of gorgeous books and paintings and everything else, in a beautiful, classic Renaissance garden spot. It seems to me if you’re going to have that kind of a house you ought to do something with it.

Benjamin: You were also on the board of the Chicago Architectural Assistance Center for a while. What did they do?

Holabird: Again, I don’t think we did very well. The Chicago Architectural Assistance Center tried to do for people with building problems what lawyers did—what’s the free lawyer thing called?

Benjamin: Pro bono?

Holabird: Yes, pro bono, but there’s another name—anyway, to provide free or very inexpensive advice to people who have problems. I guess a person could find out about this when confronted with a building violation. Legal Aid—that’s what I was trying to think of. They’d go to Legal Aid, and Legal Aid would know about the Chicago Architectural Assistance Center and would refer them to the architects if it was that kind of a problem. But again, it depends upon the architectural problem. If somebody has a problem because they’re in violation of zoning and they need another stair or something, then an architect could help, but somebody else who wanted to build a nursery really needed much more in the way of architectural services. The people who’ve been running it are people in the field, and there always has been just a few people. They tried to make it that each office would loan people, but again, it didn’t seem that the service was organized in such a way that you could count on whoever was on

168 loan there to either do enough or do too much. I had a marvelous notion for that which never got to first base.

Benjamin: What was that?

Holabird: I thought we ought to buy a van and put Charlie Murphy and William Holabird and Norm Schlossman and a couple of other people in it with a telephone, and when somebody called up and needed help, these elder statesmen of the architectural profession—they would have a chauffeur so they would be sitting back, playing cards or reading or something—at any rate, they would rush out to this place and they would march sedately through whatever it was and then make some little notes. They probably would have one draftsman with a board with them in the car, too, and then they’d go down to city hall and get it all taken care of because they all knew their way through city hall. And they would walk right through and get that done, and then they’d go off on another emergency and then they’d go and have lunch. It seemed to me that way you might accomplish something; otherwise, it was just all these young people struggling against impossible odds. Anyway, we did that for three or four years. The AIA Foundation was something else. One architect, William Smith, of Childs and Smith, left some money, and they put it into a Chicago AIA, and that kicked around for years. I used to go to meetings. John Fugard and Paul McCurry would have a yearly meeting, and they used to loan money to students at architectural school.

Benjamin: This was the AIA Foundation?

Holabird: Yes, the AIA Foundation. Before that it wasn’t part of the AIA. It was just, again, some elder statesmen. Here at one point, I say elder statesmen aren’t useful. This was an elder-statesmen thing, and we had a meeting once a year—had lunch—and they would growl about students who weren’t paying up their debts. They’d loan money to various students at IIT and U of Illinois, Circle, to get through school. Eventually they all died off, or something, and left it to me. It seemed to me that, rather than depending upon that, we ought to bring it into the Chicago AIA chapter and then arrange for an orderly

169 handling of the thing. I said each chapter president, after he was president, ought to become the president of the foundation and that would keep a continuity there. The only thing I managed to do was to keep it going and said that we shouldn’t just spend money on student loans; why didn’t we give the money for traveling scholarships, and things like that. So during my regime that’s what we did. We made gifts, and we didn’t make student loans because it seemed silly just to spend our time worrying about kids not paying us back. I see it’s still going strong. It turned out Mr. Roche had left money for traveling fellowships, and that became part of the AIA Foundation because he’d left it so that my father and Root, when they were alive, could select the young men and women for the awards. But when they died, it reverted to the Chicago AIA Foundation, so there’s still a Roche Traveling Fellowship there. The year of Mies’s death, or Mies’s anniversary at IIT—he and my father were both born in 1886—I finally got my tightwad cousin, and he and I gave $40,000 to IIT for a traveling award for students. So there’s a John Holabird Traveling Fellowship at IIT, and a Martin Roche Traveling Fellowship at the Chicago chapter of the AIA.

Benjamin: You’re a fellow. Were you active in the AIA?

Holabird: Yes, a fellow. I sat there and I was the president of the Chicago chapter for a couple of years. Again, at least I kept the chapter going while I was there. I think to be a good association president, you have to be violently or passionately interested in all the committee work and everything else, and I had a hard time ever getting very excited about the AIA. People were always critical of it because they said it could become a management group, but it really is the managers of the firms that get the most out of it. The documents and the discussions of responsibilities and specifications and contractual things—this is where the association helps. For the younger people, I suppose you meet people on the way up. But there was a membership committee. I always had a hard time figuring out why anybody would want to belong, you know. If the office belongs, you get all the advantages of membership. It’s like becoming a registered architect. Most young architects don’t even have to as long as they work in an office that belongs, it’s registered, and the partners are

170 registered. You don’t have to be registered. There’s no reason to except for your own confidence and in case you want to go off on your own. You can’t become a member of the AIA unless you’re registered. You can become an associate or something.

Benjamin: How does one become a fellow?

Holabird: You have to be a member for ten years, I think.

Benjamin: It’s more than that. There are architects who have belonged to the AIA for ten years and have not been made fellows.

Holabird: My friend and former partner Mr. Pook said the other architects’ group, the Society of American Registered Architects, he said there you become a fellow if you pay five dollars more a year. He said, “I think we ought to join them and we can become fellows.” Dave Dubin, who is a marvelous, bright man, said the honor of being a fellow is not so great, but getting turned down for a fellowship is a real pain in the neck. You put in your application, and then you’re likely to be turned down. I was turned down two or three years, so I knew exactly what he meant. You couldn’t believe that anybody was going to turn you down when you think you’re so brilliant. But in the course of this, I learned to write fellowship things. I finally reverted back to my army medal applications, and I got much better results with my fellowships then.

Benjamin: Didn’t you plan the celebrations? Isn’t that what you were in charge of, the fellowship dinners?

Holabird: And we had good dinners. Loebl and Schlossman and McCurry, all people interested in young people and the profession and other people said we ought to have an annual gathering. Sam Marx used to have an annual gathering. They tried once at the Graham Foundation for Mies, which these older men all remember with pleasure, but they only did it one year. We did it once, and everybody thought it was great. I think this year will be the sixteenth, if we do it again. I always ask the chapter, and if somebody feels strongly—and I’m

171 trying to pass a good deal of the responsibilities off to John Schlossman, who’s very kindly and generous and hard-working. He’s very much like his father. He’s a good architect and a good person. He’s interested in this, and that helps. Jack Hartray has always been the master of ceremonies. He is absolutely the funniest man in the whole world, and he’s been a tour de force. Norm Schlossman was always the leader until he died a couple of years ago. Larry Perkins is now kind of the dean. And Bill Keck comes, and Al Alschuler, on account of the older ones, and I’m moving up quickly.

Benjamin: Where do you have the dinner?

Holabird: We have it at the Tavern Club. We had it there for a couple of years. The first year, they had a new manager, and it turned out when the bill came at the end of the evening, we owed $400 and I didn’t think I could go back to people. The next year, I only lost fifty dollars. After that Norm Schlossman said, “If you have a deficit, let’s share it,” which was very kind. Then we moved to Cafe Bohemia a couple of times because I thought the Tavern Club was overcharging us, having had to pay the deficit. We did that for two years and then went back to the Tavern Club.

[Tape 6: Side 2]

Holabird: So these fellowship dinners were to be a reform movement, and the two reformers were Carter Manny and Ben Weese. They said, “Why not make this a little educational.” It had worried me that it wasn’t very educational. This is when we were trying to make the Graham Foundation house a little bit more useful. They said, “Let’s have it at the Graham Foundation again, just like that famous Mies evening.” So we had it at the Graham Foundation, and we got Jean Paul Carlhian to come from Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge in Boston. Jean Paul Carlhian, whom I had known at Harvard, came and gave kind of an amusing talk, but he wanted travel plus $800, and that shot my budget for that evening. And the food wasn’t as good because it had to be catered and they had to carry it up the stairs because our dinner was on the second floor. Downstairs, people assembled in the dining room, and there wasn’t room to

172 walk around.

Benjamin: When was this?

Holabird: It was about three years ago. Ben didn’t come after all, and after this we went back to the Tavern Club, and we’ve forgotten about education. We’re now just trying to have good food and drink and good talk.

Benjamin: Well, is there much camaraderie among this group?

Holabird: At least during this one night.

Benjamin: What about the rest of the time?

Holabird: I think “armed neutrality” is perhaps the best was to describe it.

Benjamin: Armed neutrality?

Holabird: Well, you don’t want to let down your guard because somebody might take advantage of you. I think our office is very friendly to people at Loebl, Schlossman and Hackl, and they’re very friendly to Nagle, Hartray and Associates, and I think they are friendly to various people at Skidmore and various people at Lohan, and whatnot. Some offices are more open than others to other people. You meet people when you serve on AIA committees, but some offices don’t send their young people off to AIA committees, so it depends upon whom you meet. I don’t know how that worked. It was always understood at Holabird and Root that certain people should go off if they were asked. When I was asked to be president, I talked it over with the partners and said, “You know, I’m going to be gone for two years.” The hardest part about being president is being the vice-president because the first vice-president does more work than the president, I discovered. Once you become president, you’re a lame duck immediately. Phil Will told me once that the big problem with the national AIA is that they finally cut the term down to one year instead of two or three, and so by the time you get to be president, you only have a few

173 months to serve and meet. So people who are on the national are all the administrative personnel—the paid staff—because they know what’s going on.

Benjamin: You’ve mentioned many architects who have contributed to the history of architecture in Chicago. Whose work do you particularly respect?

Holabird: My friends at Loebl, Schlossman I like, but I haven’t cared especially for their work in Chicago recently. The Water Tower Place seemed to me kind of out of scale. Maybe there was a way of handling that big block of building in a lighter way. I don’t know. It’s a terribly difficult problem to solve. That’s one, and their new building across from Saks I find difficult, too—I don’t know what it’s called—and the new Chrysler building tower seems to be so...

Benjamin: The one next to the Prudential building?

Holabird: Yes, it’s the new Prudential Two. At any rate, I’ve seen some of their work in the suburbs on a smaller scale, which is great.

Benjamin: Many architects that have made an impact on Chicago lately have been from out of Chicago.

Holabird: Well, maybe they have, but I haven’t gone into all these new buildings, as I should have to know. I’ve been into the new Saks that Skidmore did, and it’s a far cry from old Skidmore architecture, I must say. Chicago Place is where Saks is, and it is a Skidmore building. It is so odd. I do like the NBC Tower that Adrian Smith did and some of the details of some of the other Adrian Smith buildings. I think the Neiman-Marcus building has a video style and quality. I don’t know Adrian very well, but he seems to be a very nice person. He doesn’t socialize in my areas; of course, I don’t socialize very much myself anyhow so I don’t really know him. I think Nagle and Hartray have been doing some nice things. They did some buildings at Northwestern. I think they have an apartment building down on Ontario, which I like. They did the elderly center that my cousin lives in on South Shore called Montgomery Place or something like that. I think they’re very thoughtful architects, and a lot of the houses that

174 they have done that I see in Michigan are very nice. I haven’t been into the new aquarium, but I think Lohan did a good job relating to the context of the old, and Hamburger University in Oakbrook looks pretty well, too. A big problem with architects now is that, since they don’t have the simple form that they used to on account of the formalism of column and spandrel or column and floor, everybody’s experimenting with little funny things on the outside. Some of Lohan’s work looks very picky to me, but then so does some of Helmut Jahn’s. His Northwestern building I think is kind of exciting to be in with the skylights coming down—or the atrium; I don’t know what you call it. When I was first working in architecture, one contractor said, “Don’t put in skylights because we spend all our time removing skylights and replacing them.” But now if you don’t build an atrium or a skylight, you’re just not with it. On the other hand, the gasketing for such things is vastly improved, so maybe they’re going to last through the Chicago winters. A Chicago winter is probably the acid test for any kind of glass connections because, with the sunlight and freezing, the glass just moves back and forth, and whatever holds it in had better move with it.

Benjamin: Like the State of Illinois building?

Holabird: Well, the State of Illinois building, but everything else too. We built the Northwestern Law School, and there are cascades of glass there, too. Somebody asked how they were ever going to clean it, and I don’t know how Jerry Horn answered that. I’m trying to think of other people—I think some of John Vinci’s restorations have been very handsome.

Benjamin: You were on the Chicago Commission on Historical and Architectural Landmarks.

Holabird: Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot my other great civic thing. I was on the Landmark Commission but I can’t remember how I got on.

Benjamin: Did Mayor Daley appoint you?

175 Holabird: No, I never got an official appointment. And then two or three years later, Mayor Washington came in and I discovered I was off, and nobody ever sent me a letter saying that I was off. I wrote a letter to Mayor Washington, saying, “I got on this commission without an official letter, and I was removed without an official letter, and I spent three or four years of my own time and paid for my own luncheon. It seems to me at least you could send me a printed something thanking me for my service.” There was absolutely nothing. Ira Bach was the chairman first, and then Ruth Moore Garbe, both of whom were very nice.

Benjamin: During the time that you were on the commission, what were some of the problems that you wrestled with?

Holabird: Again, it was pretty much like sitting and approving Carter Manny’s things at the Graham. The staff there was Joan Pomaranc and Bill McLenahan and Meredith Taussig and the two men whose names I keep forgetting. They prepared very good evaluations, and in most cases, all you could say was yes, these are fine. The only time things came up is when it turned out there were other irons in the fire. When the 900 North Michigan building, which I always used to love—it turned out the chairman had received word from someplace or other, whether it was from the developers or the Wexlers or the Pritzkers or City Hall, I have no idea. At any rate, Ira Bach called everybody personally and said, “You don’t really think the 900 building is that good, do you?”

Benjamin: He did that?

Holabird: Oh, sure. He did it in a very informal way to try and do a little proselytizing, but it turned out we were four-and-four or four-and-five. At any rate, this wasn’t the final thing because it went to a city hall council meeting which would be loaded the way they wanted to anyhow, so I figured they should have let us be a little pure and they could then do their pulling and yanking at the other level. It was turned down and demolished, and I don’t think the Bloomingdale building that went up there has all that much going for it.

176 Benjamin: Did that happen any at other times?

Holabird: Oh, there were other people. The head of the Michigan Avenue Association would always come in. He didn’t want any building to be a landmark. He was the executive director of the North Michigan Avenue Association, and he was against everything because he said the highest and best use of the land is being violated if it becomes a landmark. He didn’t even want the Fourth Presbyterian Church to be landmarked, and I don’t think it ever was, because he said this is preventing the trustees from selling that land ripe for development and income. I don’t remember his name. Walker Johnson said we ought to propose to put a highrise up in Barrington Hills, where he lived—that that’s the highest and best use for the land there, to build a highrise right next to his house—and that would quiet him down for a while. We used to have landmark hearings on these things, and they were just awful. We’d sit for eight hours in kind of a courtroom setting with the seven or eight of us at the table, and there was a council for the commission. People would come and testify, and you had to go through it endless times. The person had to state their name and their interest. It turned out even if we then went ahead with the landmark designation, the City Council was going to vote on it anyhow. Finally they stopped those. I think somebody else discovered that this was absolutely a frivolous waste of time. And money.

Benjamin: Were you doing it pro bono?

Holabird: The staff was getting paid anyhow, and the lawyer. It was just a waste of our time, I think, more than anything. A lot of people were saying they couldn’t spend the whole day sitting around listening to tedious things. People who gave testimony not only had to tell their name and interest in the case, but then they had their résumé given and all the books they’d written and their other things.

Benjamin: Do you think that the commission was effective?

Holabird: Sure, I think so. I don’t know what’s happening to it now, but I think twenty

177 years ago there wasn’t such a thing and people didn’t realize that important buildings that were helping to hold the environment together could be torn down at the drop of a hat.

Benjamin: And that happened—Louis Sullivan’s Stock Exchange.

Holabird: I had a notion for the Stock Exchange that they should do what they eventually did with the Otis building, which is a block away from it. With the Otis building, they saved the first four floors, so it still looks the same from the street and then built a tower on top. The Stock Exchange was not a very useful building upstairs, but I thought they ought to hold the frontage with scaffolding or something at the first bay and then build another building behind it and keep that up. Once you got above it, you could do whatever you wanted to, but keep the street character, which that building had established, and, hopefully, save the Stock Exchange trading room itself. I wasn’t involved on the Landmark Commission then. It was interesting to hear a lot of people testifying and architects wanting to do something that wasn’t according to Hoyle in zoning. Especially in landmark districts like Old Town, listening to developers pitch their woo about the great benefits that were going to happen and then hearing outraged people who didn’t want landmark designation because it was going to take away their rights to make a profit. I remember I went to a couple of meetings long before I was on it. Sam Lichtmann—Sam was a very nice older man, kind of a dean of architects. He said, “There’s a mistaken idea that every piece of land in the city of Chicago can be turned into a bonanza for riches. That’s just not true. You can’t tell me if you tear down existing buildings that every piece of land is going to make you a rich man because that’s silly.” The highest and best use from the point of view of a real estate person is to build the maximum square footage on it and to hell with the world. I got angry with the zoning code years ago because it seemed to me that, by the setbacks in the arcades, which were permitted in the Chicago building code, you would get things like the Federal Center and the new Daley Center building and all these other things. They had a great, huge arcade which was of no use to anybody and that allowed them to build several more floors up in the air, because they were giving this ground space to the public.

178 But then there was nothing for the public to do—wind pouring through it and no amenities, no restaurants; the fact that the ground floor no longer had shops or anything, all it was was a glass-enclosed elevator lobby. Again, I suppose it was partly Mies van der Rohe’s contribution to the city to have the columns right down there and the glass set in with just the usefulness of stairs and elevators in a perfectly gorgeous, pure setting. But it didn’t seem to me to help the city very much. I think people have come away from that now. They’re now making shops. Oh, it’s ridiculous in the city of Chicago on a Sunday—it’s bad enough on weekdays—but on Sunday you can just walk through the whole city and not see a soul. There’s no reason to walk there. There’s nothing to see in the buildings. You walk right by. They’ve put a lot of interesting things underground in the city, but again, that doesn’t help the city very much. Years ago Bruce Graham was trying to improve the city, I guess, having done his great, huge things to dehumanize the city. He was trying to cheer up the city. Incidentally, I think the Sears Plaza is one of the worst spaces because, first of all, it’s on a slope. I always thought it would be good for those little carts on wheels. The plaza is on a slope, and they could have a big derby there, going round and round. But it was just no good for people. I’m sure they could build even higher for that. And here Sears, Roebuck was kind of the family store, and they built the harshest corporate headquarters in the whole world, next to John Hancock. Anyway, Bruce was trying to get some committees to do it, and one idea was to try pedestrian corridors across the Loop, creating a continuous awningway on one side of the street or the other. But then you’d come to these arcades, and how are you going to carry people through there unless you set kind of lower awnings and just run through? You can see how nice the city becomes when you close off Adams Street and have the Berghoff Brewery Day or something like that. They’ve got skating now, except there is a fence around it. If they were only smart—this is the same thing as our pool down in Champaign—they would let people look in and see people ice-skating.

Benjamin: Like Rockefeller Center?

Holabird: You can’t look over a ten-foot fence or an eight-foot fence. Well, Rockefeller Center, and in Central Park in New York there is a big skating rink—the

179 Wollman Memorial Rink—it’s just great. People walking along the street love to see somebody skating. A chain link fence is not the answer, but I think they could put up Plexiglas or something like that. Anyway, the Landmark Commission was interesting, just to hear various people. I always thought we were going to be damned if we did and damned if we didn’t. Whichever position we took there were people grumbling. Some people thought that all old buildings should be landmarks, and it seemed to me that was a mistake, too, and that everything Louis Sullivan had ever done should be a landmark. I think Louis Sullivan, like other people, didn’t do a whammy every time he did something. He had a lot of lesser things. A lot of architects have many lesser works. As a matter of fact, Dick Bennett once said he was going to get a book of architectural photographs—of the pictures of the buildings that the architects didn’t like. They usually hire an architectural photographer to photograph your building in the best light, and he was going to get a photographer to take the building showing the fact that it wasn’t related to the environment or that it didn’t work. Luckily he never got around to that. He had a lot of great ideas, Dick Bennett, but he never quite got to them.

Benjamin: You were in the political arena in some of these situations.

Holabird: Yes. I was also the person in the office who would go to work for the Girl Scouts, the community fund or all those other things. I was the patsy who did all the noble work in the office. One partner called me the giveaway partner. My mother always said, “It’s only money, and if you have money, you ought to be generous with it,” which I think is true. My cousin and some of my partners felt that if you had it, the best thing to do with it was bury it somewhere and keep it.

Benjamin: Are there more Holabirds at Holabird and Root?

Holabird: No.

Benjamin: Will there be?

180 Holabird: I don’t know. There are lots of women—female Holabirds—but none of them seems to be interested, which is all right. One daughter of mine said she would take over, and I said, “Wouldn’t it be good if you took a course or two in architecture before you take over?” and she said, “I don’t like math.” Although now with the computer or calculator you almost don’t need to know math. People ask me what you ought to know in the way of math to be an architect, and I say you ought to be able to add and subtract, and it’s helpful if you can do multiplication and long division.

Benjamin: And that’s it?

Holabird: That’s about it.

Benjamin: Not all that calculus...?

Holabird: I took calculus. I can’t remember why I took it. It was very interesting mental discipline, and lots of formulas that you use in engineering are derived from calculus, but I never did any engineering after I finished anyhow. You rely on people who were doing it all day long. I can’t remember a thing about calculus except a great teacher.

Benjamin: With no more Holabirds, what’s the future going to be at Holabird and Root?

Holabird: The firm is going to be fine, and nobody’s indispensable. I think we discovered that, and the earlier partners should have discovered it, too. One firm that always had a good reputation, and I knew all the partners, was Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, which had a marvelous history—first, in the early days with Hugh Garden and later with Paul McCurry and Al Bacci and two other people who, did magnificent hospital work. They all stayed on until they were in their late seventies, and it seemed to me this was a mistake. No younger person could see a way to become a partner or a leader. I don’t know if the firm is still going or not. And I think Graham Anderson Probst and White—the part that remained Graham Anderson—was a little bit the same way. I remember Probst and some of the other people lasting for a long time. I think an office has

181 to be changing. It’s been Holabird and Root and Holabird and Roche for ever how many years, and it can well be something else now.

Benjamin: Do you think that Holabird and Root has gone with the flow and adapted and changed over the years?

Holabird: Oh, sure. I love to go in and see lots of the young men and women working there. I think this is just great. I hope it continues that way and that Jerry Horn and Jim Baird and Frank Castelli and whoever else is there now—Jeff Case—will continue. Jerry is the oldest man there now. Everybody else is in their late thirties or forties, which is great. None of them seem to be involved the way I was with civic activities. Jim Baird will probably be the person. Jerry Horn’s been so dedicated to his work, and he’s a shy person about those things, but I think it’s good for the office to maintain a civic reputation, too. My father did, Root did and I did to a lesser extent.

Benjamin: Do you think the firm continues to be a moving force in Chicago architecture?

Holabird: As Bob Bruegmann said in his book, it never made a great, terrible splash, but, on the other hand, it made a continual, sound splash. We never had the Helmut Jahn design-type here. I don’t know if he would have been happy in our office or not. But the office has continued, and I hope it continues.

Benjamin: Do you think Chicago will retain its architectural strength as Holabird and Root has?

Holabird: Chicago architecture of the last ten years has been very different from what there was before. There was kind of a feeling in the fifties and sixties and seventies that you were building on a tradition, and I think we’re floating around now, trying to find what will be a new formality or a new philosophy or something. Right now it’s every man for himself, I think. My wife Marcia remarked this morning that many of the old buildings on Lake Shore Drive have interesting roof structures or things sticking out, and I said that they were part of the style of the building. The fact that you put a French mansard roof on

182 top meant at least the building had some of the details all the way up. But if you just put four funnels on top of a building like 900 North. Michigan or put up a little canopy like there is on top of one of the new hotels, it looks as if somebody just decided to put a little icing on the cake or do some funny thing.

Benjamin: Do you think those tops are arbitrary or that they serve a function?

Holabird: No. Somebody just thought they had to do something up on top here to make this building stand out in the skyline. That’s why the building by Epstein [150 North Michigan] across from the Cultural Center—I can’t believe those offices are that exciting with some sloping glass, and it looks kind of like a ski run from a distance.

Benjamin: Do you think it is unsafe?

Holabird: I always wondered what would happen if you didn’t make the ice come sailing down. Years ago if you put anything on top outside of a cooling tower and some louvers, you were considered in very poor form. Our Madison-Canal building with my wave guide tower, at least I figured that was a functional use of the roof. It will be very interesting to see what actually takes place in the next twenty years, how the city changes. I think architecture, in some ways, is more fun now. There’s more interest on the street level—all the cut granite and lots of different bronze shapes and decoration. It makes the pedestrian’s life a lot more exciting, which I think is what a downtown should be versus the Miesian lobby with nothing showing but glass and elevators. I’m sure the Daley Center and the Federal Center where there are political people using the lobby—it’s very, very open. It’s very difficult to develop deals, I would think, in those open glass lobbies. There’s no place to hide. The City Hall-County Building is much better. There are all kinds of dark places, although the building is pretty austere from the outside, too. I think if you’re going to make the downtown, you ought to make it interesting for people. They finally decided that you’re not going to buy everything from a tractor to a refrigerator at Marshall Field’s. You’re going to buy clothes and small things. I think the new Field’s store is great inside, and the windows of Field’s and Carson’s have

183 always been a pleasure to walk by. Walking through the stores is a delight, too, and that’s what I think a downtown should feel like. I think it’s kind of nice now that they’ve opened up so many of the cookie stores and the bread stores and the coffee stores. I think this is great. I’m not sure they can all survive, but it’s great and fun. You feel you can drop in anywhere to get something. Even in this neighborhood, up and down Diversey, we’ve got four or five Chinese restaurants and two espresso shops and a bakery, and that’s fine. They all bring other people in and give life and activity.

Benjamin: We’ve talked a lot about the bigger picture, and I want to bring the focus back to you before we end. If you look back on your long career, what do you feel has been your major contribution?

Holabird: I think with teaching, I helped bring lots of young people to realize some of their own power of expression. By giving lots of opportunities and standing behind people and supporting what they did on the stage and technically backstage—lights and sets and whatnot—I think I gave lots of people of various ages a feeling that they could do lots of good things. I think as an architect I was helpful in the office for office spirit, if nothing else, making people feel that they were important, keeping their good spirits up. Then for doing buildings that were most successful, from my point of view, were the things at Ravinia. There were complicated problems in which everything came to bat—the lighting and, basically, the sound, but then the comfort of the orchestra backstage, the problems of handling a floor for ballet, keeping the sight lines of the side audience in comfort, and creating the lighting and ambience of Ravinia. That was a marvelous thing. And so was the fun part of building a play building, which was the intramural and exercise building for college kids down at Champaign. I think we did make some contributions to public housing. Stateway Gardens has never had some of the same problems as Cabrini Green because instead of long corridors in the buildings, we gave each family a little court. They opened into their own little yard before they entered their apartment, even up above. Hopefully, I’ve set an example for younger people by being a capable architect and a good person. I hope I’m remembered as that. And as a giver of good parties.

184 Benjamin: Fun. Is that a legacy that you’d like to pass on?

Holabird: Oh, sure. At least I have three daughters; my three older daughters are great party-givers. They’re all warm and outgoing, and I think they have more virtues than I have. I think they’re more… I don’t mean righteous, but I think they just all know how to act and behave. That’s always a good feeling, that your own children are carrying the ball, too, for you. They think I’m getting pretty funny as I get older, but that’s all right. I don’t mean funny in a comic sense. Just probably getting a little weird, but that’s all right.

Benjamin: Would you change anything that you’ve done?

Holabird: You don’t know what would have happened. If I hadn’t gotten married earlier and had kept on in the theater, I probably would have been taking a crack at Broadway. I had two-and-a-half children—two children and another coming—and I was just hard put to sit down, because I figured I had to earn my living, too, right then and I couldn’t take the time. Myself, I could have lived very inexpensively and fought this out, but I was encumbered with a family, and I don’t think I would want to give up the family now either. There’s one thing probably that I would change. If my father hadn’t died when I was overseas, I probably would have gone back to the office much earlier and might not have had seven years’ theater experience. I don’t know. If my father had lived another ten years, the office might have been very different and might have given me the same kind of satisfaction that the theater did: there would have been more activity and more bright young people, and it wouldn’t have had that downswing that it had for ten years or so in the postwar period. But that’s always a “what if, what if, what if.” Again, if I hadn’t been married, I might have even stayed in the army for a while, because I was interested in that, and I might have gone to Berlin and stayed with the invasion at least for a while.

Benjamin: What lies ahead for you?

185 Holabird: I should be doing something now, but I am afraid, really, of getting involved because I think once I get involved I spend too much time, so I’ve been very stand-offish. I’d like to help kids at Parker with the scenery, but then again, I just know there would be lots of late nights and crawling around on my hands and knees, and I’m afraid to get started. And I think I ought to do some serious writing about my life, and I’m not sure if I’m man enough to get started on that. What I do do is write letters once a week or so to all five of my daughters. One of them says she wants to get the original—she doesn’t want a carbon—but I write them at other times, too.

[Tape 7: Side 1]

Benjamin: Why do you keep copies of the letters that you write your daughters?

Holabird: I have two families—an older family and the younger ones. I’m not quite sure why I kept a copy, except I thought maybe the younger ones would like to know what they were doing, later on when they grew up. Now when they’re in college, they’re on in my mailing list, but I still keep a copy. Each year I’ve made what I call a family album, which is pictures and programs and memorabilia, and then I’ve also included—usually there are at least twelve and sometimes fifteen letters that I’ve written during the year, which I’m sure, if you read them, would be very dull because they are about family affairs, but every once in a while, there is a great thought mentioned or what we’re doing. Anyway, when the children get older and I’m dead and buried, they can look through them if they want or throw them away. There are beautiful carbon copies of all the letters I’ve written. I write private and personal letters to all my daughters, but not as many, and I don’t keep copies of those. I have so many letters from all my children, I wonder what I should do with them. Now I think probably the best thing to do is to answer them and throw them away. But these others, I just thought they might be kind of a record of the family for the kids later on, if they choose, and if they don’t, they can certainly throw them away.

Benjamin: You’ve been the archivist of the Holabird family.

186 Holabird: My oldest daughter thinks that she should get the original. She says, “I don’t want copies,” so I try and remember to send her the original so her nose won’t be out of joint. As a matter of fact, she wondered after we had her, why we needed any more. She would have been perfectly happy to be an only child. Since I’ve had five other daughters, she thinks I ran rampant.

Benjamin: We’ve spoken a great deal about your life as an architect, a teacher, and a citizen involved in community activities. Is there was anything that you might want to add that we haven’t covered?

Holabird: Yes. I forgot a chapter of my life which just came to me. I do my best thinking lying awake at night, I think. I used to wake up and design buildings or solve problems by getting up. Anyway, I suddenly remembered that we haven’t talked about my years as a crusader for the Chicago River. This went on a for a year or a year-and-a-half about fifteen or sixteen years ago, and I thought it might be of interest as long as we’re putting down all the boring details of my career. One of the retiring partners, Mr. Bernard Bradley, wrote me a memo once. He was about to retire, and he set us all up for retirement and he said, “Somebody really ought to look into the Chicago River.” He had just read that some geographer had said that the whole reason for Chicago developing originally was the river and the fact that it was essentially a continental divide. The Chicago portage you walked over looked like flat ground, but on one side it headed to Lake Michigan and up the St. Lawrence Seaway, and on the other side it flowed down through the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. And essentially Chicago is a continental divide, or at least it’s a huge basin divide. It’s so flat it’s hard for people to understand, but that’s the way it is. This is how LaSalle and Marquette and everybody got down the Mississippi because they took the Chicago portage, which the Indians knew about, and went down the Des Plaines to the Illinois to the Mississippi, and so forth. At any rate, Bradley said years ago, during the 1850s and 1860s and 1870s, the river was useful. The photographs and drawings of Chicago show nothing but forests of masts because the lake schooners would bring in lumber and ore and everything from around the Great Lakes, and lots of passenger steamers were

187 going all over—to Milwaukee and to towns in Michigan along the shore of Lake Michigan. Anyway, the river was there first, and when the railroad came in, it followed the river valley so that the Illinois Central and the North Western and the Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul came in along the river because there was already a passage. So most of the tracks came in along the river. After the railroads and the expressways started to come in, they mostly came in along the rivers, too. When the river gradually lost its use, and it became mostly sand and gravel—a little bit of garbage and scrap steel—it was used mostly just for organizations like Material Service, and so on, for their yards. Bradley said, “You ought to take a look at it,” so Walker Johnson in the office and Tom Welch and I cruised up and down. We rented motor-boats and traveled up and down the North Branch, and we rented a helicopter and flew over it and took some movies. Tom Welch, who draws beautifully, made some sketches of what we’d seen. Probably the economics of the real estate was that this land was undeveloped and no longer really used and should be inexpensive. Since there was nothing on it, you could probably build whole new towns along the river. Also there are lots of the important streets in Chicago, the mile streets, that cross the river, and bridges, instead of being just a separation between two neighborhoods, the bridges should be like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. They should be business bridges so that the bridges are not only for transportation but for people to walk across. They could be connectors to the community so the community would kind of flow over. So we started to get together a whole series of plates—drawings of how you could build new communities on both sides of the river and connect them by a wide bridge, not a two-lane traffic bridge but one maybe two or three hundred feet wide so that the stores and pedestrian malls and shopping centers went over the river, too. Then we figured we really had to show kind of a town, so we looked at the turning basin at Ashland Avenue on the South Side. This is where lots of the barges now turn around and where schooners and whatnot would turn around. I guess they had to be towed up the river then because you couldn’t count on the winds always to take them up. In that area we went down and traveled all through, and there was practically no building whatsoever. As a matter of fact, it was a mile and a half from the Loop and it looked like a rural area. We said, “Here is where you could build a whole new

188 city—an in-town new town. If you were smart, you would do it for low- and middle-income housing. You could probably build prefabs and use the river to transport materials from a factory somewhere along the river and bring in whole pieces. You could design a town where houses were all along the river and any transportation was between the houses so you didn’t have cars traveling through.” We showed schools and communities, and everything else, and took pictures of the model. I became the great spokesman for this. I must have talked ten or fifteen times that year to all kinds of groups, from the AIA to commerce and industry groups, and I went up and talked somewhere in Winnetka and somewhere in Lake Forest. Some of these were evening things, and I became the great apostle—the Paul of the riverfront. With Welch’s drawings and some of the research that Walker Johnson and other people in the office had done, we had a great program which we thought was going to get somewhere. We called it River City. This was about ten years ago, before Bud Goldberg came in with River City. We said that the deep tunnel for the Sanitary District—now the Water Reclamation District—was going to provide for overflow sewage so it wouldn’t have to be flushed out through the river. That was going to improve the water quality. We thought people could have boats and everything else and that it would be a whole chance to revitalize the inner core of the city with lowrise, river-oriented buildings and activities. Goldberg’s River City was much more realistic, but it certainly wasn’t low- or middle-income housing.

Benjamin: Did Bud Goldberg know about your work?

Holabird: Well, he’d already done Marina City, for heaven’s sakes. Oh, sure. This was published in the papers. This was my only time to be the Harry Weese of Holabird and Root. Harry Weese used to come out once a year with some great scheme. He had islands in the lake, which was a marvelous idea, and he had floating marinas around Navy Pier. He was rebuilding the Burnham Plan, and whatnot. Harry was always doing this, but this was our one period of activism and we did the best we could. We talked to the mayor’s office and said, “Why shouldn’t Chicago do something for the 1976 two-hundredth bicentennial thing.” This must have been 1971 or 1972.

189 Benjamin: Was Mayor Daley there?

Holabird: Yes, Mayor Richard J. Daley. We talked to one of his bright young men and said, “Building this kind of a city, or a prototype, would be a marvelous thing for the bicentennial in Chicago.” Habitat had just gone on in Montreal, and we said, “Why couldn’t we build something,” except that was pretty special, and why couldn’t we build a much more common-man kind of city and show people how to do it. Phil Klutznick was interested, and he called us into the office. He said, “I’m probably a dummy, but this kind of appeals to me.

Benjamin: Well, he had experience with building a new city, Park Forest.

Holabird: He was a very bright man, but he said, “I don’t think there’s any way to do it unless you’ve got many tax breaks or something.” The financing of it was evidently impossible. That’s why I thought the mayor or somebody like that could do it. Once I went down to Washington and talked to people at HUD in the new town planning, and it turned out they weren’t really interested in anything dream-like like this. At that time my friend—he was a class ahead of me at Harvard—Eliot Richardson was the chairman. He was the head of HEW at that time—Health, Education and Welfare—and I talked to him a little bit. He kind of patted me on the back and said, “Good thinking,” but that’s about all. And Adam Yarmolinsky, who was a class behind me at Harvard, was a funny, little, bright guy from Harvard, and he became the spokesman and the brain behind a man from the Defense Department, so Adam Yarmolinsky was nobody to fool around with. He came and thought this was a good idea, too. He said that I was a great thinker at Harvard and that I was still a great thinker. Anyhow, we went all over the place and everybody thought we were just brilliant and interesting. So we had a lot of nuts call us up and say, “I’ve got a little piece of land on the river. Would you like to do something here?” Well, it turned out all they wanted was to make their factory look a little better, or something like that. It was a period of hope and possibilities, and we shone in the sunlight briefly. That’s why I thought I would tell you about this. I don’t know why I’d forgotten about it, because every once in a while the AIA has

190 some competitions on trying to make the riverbanks nicer.

Benjamin: Yes, it’s an ongoing concern.

Holabird: Our River City project was nice, and people are trying to do things along the river. Later on when Joanne Alter was commissioner at the Sanitary District, I turned to our same people, Tom Welch and some friends, and we made about eighteen drawings for Joanne Alter about what we could do. It turns out the Sanitary District, or Water Reclamation District, owns half the riverbanks up and down. And we showed, again, what they could do by tying these together and, at least, making pathways and bicycle trails and walkways and then zoning it in some way so that you could at least keep out some of the worst things, and if you did have bad things, planting trees and whatnot. We did this as a great freebie for Joanne, and I think she used it mostly for herself—she was getting reelected, and this was campaign stuff showing her heart was in the right place. Nothing ever came of that either, but at least we did it and it exists. Because of this somebody called us up from New Buffalo, and Welch and friends did some sketches of new town housing along a dammed-up Galien River, and we made some drawings of that. Then some other guys came in and talked about doing something on the North Branch of the river, and Welch made some drawings for buildings there.

Benjamin: Were those built, in New Buffalo?

Holabird: No. We did drawings for New Buffalo, Michigan, and then we did something on the North Branch in Chicago and the South Branch in Chicago for different groups who came in. We had all kinds of bright young men who were interested in what we were doing. It turned out nobody really had the financing or could figure out how to do it or how it was going to work. The only person who really eventually put it together was Bud Goldberg on River City. Then Harry Weese did some little houses right next to his warehouse on the North Branch, off Wolf Point, next to the cold-storage building that he converted. It used to be a cold-storage warehouse building, and he converted it into condominiums and offices. Anyway, that was our “riverbank shuffle.” We

191 spent a long time on it. We got blue ribbons for thinking and wanting to improve the city, but we got no money for it. The only dividend was that it got people thinking at least that we were considering the city and trying to do something.

Benjamin: There is work on the river now. Are any of those elements in the plan being considered?

Holabird: We made lots of specific proposals. I think Tom Welch or the office has lots of sketches that we made, and we have lots of slides of these things. Walker Johnson and Welch and I went all over the place, talking, and I think we have the equivalent of the slides. We still have photographs of the models, and I think we still have the films we took. We went way up and down the north and south branches and pointed out the fact that most of it was not used for anything useful. Here it could be a lovely body of water, and there was nothing on it except junk—steel, concrete, salt, gravel—and it was there because the land was cheap and you could use barges to carry the stuff in.

Benjamin: Had the firm been involved historically in other large-scale, dream-like plans?

Holabird: Mr. Root worked with Arthur Rubloff on the Magnificent Mile. Again, I’m sure the office didn’t get paid, but I guess Rubloff came to John Root, who he respected and admired, and the office made a whole series of sketches and models of the North Michigan Avenue thing. Rubloff coined the phrase, I guess, The Magnificent Mile, and eventually it has become that. It doesn’t look much like the early models of the thing, and they were trying to keep a low level along Michigan so that the scale would not be the way it is now with every building kind of built as high as possible. But we did that. That was before my time, so I don’t really remember that. That came in right after World War II—1948, 1950, in that area. I think that’s about the only times we were visionary. Skidmore has been visionary often because lots of people called them in. They did a Dearborn Street plan, and they did a downtown plan for Carson Pine Scott, and Bruce Graham, just before he retired, had us all working on various things to try to improve the expressways. The Magnificent Mile and

192 the river development were the two visionary times for Holabird and Root. The rest of the time we behaved ourselves—stuck to business and didn’t go shooting out our flights of fancy. Harry was able to do it all the time and was marvelous at doing it. He kept the upper floor of his office, really, as kind of a continuous exhibition of his great thinking about the city, which is just fine. You could come and see drawings of the marinas and of the islands, and of other things. It was great. Anyway, the riverbank plan was a part of our life—a very heady experience—which ended up with practically no tangible results, except perhaps to show people that we were trying to think a little bit beyond just bricks and mortar.

Benjamin: Do you think it was an actual possibility to be built?

Holabird: We really thought that, if people got on the ball, that you could actually show how to build inexpensive housing for people because the land was cheap, the river was available and the fact that you could actually start prefabbing lots of parts for this thing. Mostly you can’t do them because you can’t get them on a truck. You can’t take such large things down the highway, but if you could use barges along the river and bring sizable pieces of a house, it seemed to us this would make sense and show the world how to change the dumb home- building techniques that were going on. But nobody bent. I think for one of Mr. Klutznick’s associates we did a little housing for the elderly in one of the suburbs, and we had some other odds and ends coming out of it because somebody thought we were an expert in housing.

Benjamin: Over the years Holabird and Root has built a reputation for being expert in many areas. John, this has certainly been a pleasure for me, and it is important that we now have all this information in more permanent form. Thank you for your time.

193 SELECTED REFERENCES

Blaser, Werner, ed. Chicago Architecture: Holabird and Root, 1880-1992. Basel: Birkhauser- Verlag, 1992. Bruegmann, Robert. Holabird and Roche and Holabird and Root: A Catalogue of Works, 1880- 1940. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1991. ______“Holabird and Roche and Holabird and Root: the First Two Generations.” Chicago History IX, 3 (Fall 1980): 130-165. Chicago, The 225 West Gallery. Holabird and Root: the First 100 Years. Exhibition catalogue by Robert F. Irving, 1981. Holabird, John A., Jr. Interview conducted by the office of Holabird and Root, 1990. _____. Interview conducted by Masami Takayama, n.d. Clipping in file at Holabird and Root. Holabird and Roche and Holabird and Root Collection, 1880-1945. Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL. “Holabird and Root: Architects, Engineers, Planners.” Brochure of work 1958-1979. Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. Irving, Robert F. “Holabird and Root, Still Going Strong After 95 Years.” In land Architect XX (July 1976): 8-24. Reed, Earl H., Jr. “Some Recent Work of Holabird and Root, Architects.” Architecture 61 (January 1930): 1-40. Stamper, John W. Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Development, 1900-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

194 JOHN AUGUR HOLABIRD

Born: Chicago, Illinois, 9 May 1920

Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1942; M. Architecture, 1948

Military Service: United States Army Corps of Engineers, 1942-1945

Work Experience: Holabird & Root, 1948-1949, 1955-1987 Francis W. Parker School, 1949-1954 Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1954 NBC Television, 1955

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1974

Selected Service: Chicago Commission on Historical and Architectural Landmarks, 1981-1985 Trustee, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Trustee, Francis Parker School Trustee, Illinois Institute of Architecture Trustee, Ravinia Festival Association Board of Directors, Chicago Architectural Assistance Center Board of Directors, Illinois Institute of Technology Board of Directors, Park West Community Association Board of Directors, Ragdale Foundation

Selected Projects: Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, Illinois Ravinia Pavilion and Restaurant, Highland Park, Illinois Madison-Canal Building, Illinois Bell Telephone Company, Chicago, Illinois Intramural Physical Education Building, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois

195 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

150 North Michigan, Chicago, Illinois Breuer, Marcel (Leujko) 87 183 Brewster Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 48 225 Washington, Chicago, Illinois 99 Brownson, Jacques Calman (Jack) 17 333 North Michigan, Chicago, Illinois 5, Bruegmann, Robert (Bob) 65, 96, 182 23, 30, 34, 71, 73 Burgee, John (son of Joseph Z.) 24, 92 333 West Wacker Drive, Chicago, Burgee, Joseph, Jr. (son of Joseph Z.) 92 Illinois 157 Burgee, Joseph Z. 22, 24, 63, 66, 67, 90-92 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Burnham, Daniel H. 3, 10, 34 Illinois 89, 90 900 North Michigan (demolished), C.F. Murphy Associates 24 Chicago, Illinois 176 Cabeen, Richard 4, 30 900 North Michigan (aka Bloomingdale Carlhian, Jean Paul 172 Building), Chicago, Illinois 176, 183 Carlson, David (Dave) 14 Carson Pirie Scott & Company, Chicago, Adler, David 87 Illinois 149 Air India Building, Bombay, India 93 Castelli, Frank 182 Albers, Josef 44-45, 57 Century of Progress International Alter, Joanne 191 Exposition, 1933-1934, Chrysler Pavilion, Armour Institute of Technology (now Chicago, Illinois 68, 72 IIT), Chicago, Illinois 29, 87 Century of Progress International Art Institute of Chicago, Ferguson Exposition, 1933-1934, English Village, Wing, Chicago, Illinois 80-81 Chicago, Illinois 68 Arts Center, DePauw University, Century of Progress International Greencastle, Indiana 114-116 Exposition, 1933-1934, House of Arvold, Orrin 153 Tomorrow, Chicago, Illinois 69 Ayers, Thomas (Tom) 165 Chicago Cultural Center (formerly Chicago Public Library), Chicago, Illinois 123, Bacci, Alexander (Al) 181 147-148 Bach, Ira 176 Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois Baird, James (Jim) 153, 182 4, 8, 96, 97, 149 Barnes, Edward Larabee 82 Chicago Place, Chicago, Illinois 174 Bartsch, Helmuth 19, 25, 37, 49, 64-67, Chicago Stock Exchange (demolished), 80, 92-95, 99, 107, 117, 125, 144 Chicago, Illinois 178 Beeby, Thomas Hall (Tom) 156 Chicago Temple Building, Chicago, Illinois Bell Laboratories at Indian Hill, 25, 26 Naperville, Illinois 105, 138 City Hall/County Building, Chicago, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, Illinois 183 New Jersey 105 Civic Opera House, Chicago, Illinois 27, 33 Bennett, Richard Marsh (Dick) 180 Cobb, Henry N. (Harry) 83 Berger, Miles 165 Collins, Charles (Charlie) 15 Bilandic, Heather 79, 164 Conterato, Bruno 89 Blaine, Anita McCormick 102-3 Cook, Eugene (Gene) 63, 144-146 Board of Trade, Chicago, Illinois 5, 30, Costello, Ambrose 41, 57, 61 34, 97 Cret, Paul 9 Bradley, Bernard 32, 92, 95-96, 99, 107, Cromelin, John 14, 21, 25 111, 122, 124, 125, 132, 144, 154, 187- 188 Daily News Building, Chicago, Illinois 27,

196 30, 97 Goldblatt Building, Chicago, Illinois 156 Daley, Richard J. 190 Gordon, Edward (Eddie) 117 Daley, Richard J., Civic Center and Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois 3 Plaza (formerly Chicago Civic Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 27, 30, Center), Chicago, Illinois 17, 183 31, 34, 111, 143, 181 Dangler, Henry 87 Graham, Bruce 66, 91, 117, 125, 144, 179, Dedmond, Emmett 14 192 Dews, Peter 78 Graham, Ernest 33, 34 Diana Court Building, Chicago, Illinois Gray, Jack 165 19, 28, 72, 92, 97 Greene, Jeffery (Jeff) 114 Dinkaloo Roche 153 Greenwald Herbert 89-90 Dornbusch, Charles 14, 129 Gropius, Walter 43-45, 47, 87, 89 Dubin, David 171 Grunsfeld, Ernest Alton, Jr. 14, 73

Ecole de Beaux Arts, Paris France 8-9 Haas, Richard (Dick) 114 Edwards, Benjamin (Ben) 41 Hall, Gilbert (Gibs) 9-10, 30, 35, 70-71, 96 Ellwood, Craig 146 Hamburger University, Oakbrook, Illinois Esquire Theater 72 175 Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois 81, 179 Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 178, Harkness, John C. 82 183 Harold Washington Public Library, First National Bank, Minneapolis, Chicago, Illinois 156 Minnesota 64, 92, 99 Hedrich-Blessing 72 Fisher Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 36 Hedrich, Jack 72 Flagstaff, Kirsten 33 Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum 31, 138 Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Hemingway, Ernest 5-6 Wisconsin 25 Henry, David Dodds 108 Fortnightly Club, Chicago, Illinois 97 Holabird, Donna (first wife of John Augur) Fort Sheridan, Fort, Sheridan, Illinois 4 14 Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Holabird, Dorothy Hackett (mother of John Illinois 150, 177 Augur) 9, 12-13, 16, 20, 21, 39, 62, 74, 76, Francis Parker School, Chicago, Illinois 81, 180 11, 12, 19, 60-62, 65, 77, 99-104, 161- Holabird, John A. (father of John Augur) 2, 163, 186 5, 7, 10-12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 29, Frazier, Walter 131 30, 33, 39, 40, 47, 49, 56, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, Fugard, John, Jr. 37 73, 74, 86-88, 100, 147, 155, 161, 164, 182 Fugard, John, Sr. 37-38, 169 Holabird, Marcia Fergestad 132, 182 Fujikawa, Joseph (Joe) 89 Holabird, William (Bill, cousin of John Augur) 22, 39, 90-92, 95, 124, 133-134, Gage Building, Chicago, Illinois 35-36 169 Galvin, Christopher 164 Holabird, William (grandfather of John Garbe, Ruth Moore 176 Augur) 1-3, 4, 6, 7, 39, 75-76, 136 Garden, Hugh 181 Hood, Raymond 9 Garrett Theological Seminary, Evanston, Horn, Gerald (Jerry) 66, 89, 128, 144, 146, Illinois 6 148, 149, 151, 153, 158, 161, 175, 182 Gehry, Frank 155 Hudnut, Joseph 45, 47 Genther, Charles (Skip) 91 Hunt, Jarvis 36 Geraghty, Helen 69-70, 76-79 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 15, 20 Giedion, Sigfried 48 Hyatt Hotel, Kansas City, Kansas 142 Goldberg, Bertrand (Bud) 189

197 Illinois Life Insurance Building Chicago, Illinois 65, 111-113, 183 (demolished), Chicago, Illinois 71 Magnificent Mile, Chicago, Illinois 192 Intramural Physical Education Building, Maher, Philip 14 Champaign-Urbana, Illinois 65, 107- Manning, Harry 92, 95, 116, 124, 133 110 Manny, Carter H. 24, 166, 167, 172, 176 I Tatti, Settignano, Italy 167-168 Marquette Building, Chicago, Illinois 4, 123, 148 Jaffe, Christopher 117-118 Marshall, Benjamin 14, 37 Jahn, Helmut 126, 155, 175 Marx, Samuel (Sam) 14, 77, 80, 85, 129, 131, Jane Addams Homes, Chicago, Illinois 171 70 Matthews, David 108, 110, 122 Jenney, William LeBaron 3 McCormick Gardens, Chicago, Illinois 80 Johansen, John MacLane 82 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 33, 81 Johnson, Philip 24, 46, 140 McCormick, Robert R., Col. 104 Johnson, Walker 97, 123, 148, 150, 160, McCurry, Margaret 155 177, 188-189, 192 McCurry, Paul 85, 169, 171, 181 Jones, Bill 131 McLenahan, Bill 176 Jones, Robert Edmund 40 Melchior, Lauritz 33 Judson, Clay 20, 74, 100 Memorial Stadium, Champaign-Urbana, Judson, Sylvia Shaw 20, 28 Illinois 26, 142 Merchandise Mart, Chicago, Illinois 33 Kaufmann & Fabry 72 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 29, 45-46, 86- Kausal, John 91 90, 93, 149, 150, 164, 165. 171, 179 Keck, William (Bill) 172 Miller, Edgar 27-29, 70, 131, 132 Kirkpatrick, Clayton 165 Milles, Carl 18, 19 Klutznick, Philip (Phil) 190 Monadnock Building, Chicago, Illinois 23 Kohn Pederson Fox 157 Monroe Building, Chicago, Illinois 22, 23 Kuh, Gertrude 102-103 Montgomery Place, Chicago, Illinois 174 Moore, Edward 15 Lake Point Tower, Chicago, Illinois 88 Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois 16, 92 LaSalle Hotel, Chicago, Illinois 6 Mumford, Lewis 48, 120 LaSalle-Wacker Building, Chicago, Murphy, Charles Francis 166, 169 Illinois 30, 36 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Nagle Hartray 174 Jeanneret 90 Nagle, James (Jim) 167 LeMoyne Building, Chicago, Illinois 23 NBC Tower, Chicago, Illinois 157-158, 174 Lichtmann, Samuel (Sam) 178 Neiley, Robert (Bob) 42 Linn, James Weber 15 Netsch, Walter 144 Lipp, Franz 103-104 Niemeyer, Oscar 25 Loebl, Jerrold (Jerry) 85-87, 171 Northern Trust, Chicago, Illinois 98 Loebl Schlossman 126, 140 Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Lohan, Dirk 89, 156, 165-166, 175 127, 138 Northwestern University Technology London Guarantee Building, Chicago, Building, Evanston, Illinois 28, 66, 70, 82, Illinois 14 127, 128 Lubin, Donald (Don) 123 Northwestern University, Law School, Luckman, Charles 72 Chicago, Illinois 128, 139, 175 Ludgin, Earle 77-78, 117 Norton, John Warner 14, 15, 27, 132

Madison-Canal Long Lines Building, Oakbrook Village Hall, Oakbrook, Illinois

198 152 Rubloff, Arthur 192 Otis Building, Chicago, Illinois 141, 178 Outer Drive East, Chicago, Illinois 105 Saarinen, Eero 105-106, 149 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 68, 100 Saarinen, Eliel 9, 18, 19, 29, 34 St. James Episcopal Cathedral, Chicago, PACE Associates 66, 89, 91 Illinois 150 Palmolive Building (Palmolive/Playboy St. Paul City Hall/Ramsey County Building), Chicago, Illinois 5, 30, 36, Courthouse, St. Paul, Minnesota 19, 27, 134, 157 72 Passonneau, Joseph (Joe) 117 Sanderson, John 128 Patrick Sullivan Homes, Chicago, Schipporeit, George 165 Illinois 104 Schlossman, Norman 85, 169, 171, 172 Pei, Ieoh Ming (I.M.) 46-47, 57, 156 Schmidt, Garden and Erikson 181 Pereira, William (Bill) 72 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 98, 179 Perkins & Will 18, 91, 111, 126, 140 Shakespeare Garden Apartments, Chicago, Perkins, Lawrence Bradford 172 Illinois 74 Petit Trianon de Versailles, Versailles, Shaw, Alfred (Al) 14, 15, 33, 37, 129 France 71 Shaw, Patrick (Pat) 37, 97, 140 Pook, Gerrard (Gerry) 23, 32, 63, 95, Shaw, Rue Winterbotham 15 111, 135, 144-145, 147, 152, 154, 160, Simonds, Ossian Cole 3 171 Skidmore, Louis 68, 192 Pomaranc, Joan 176 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 111, Pritzker, Robert (Bob) 164 126, 127, 144, 157, 192 Promontory Apartments, Chicago, Smith, A.O., Building, Milwaukee, Illinois 89-90 Wisconsin 25, 72 Prudential Two, Chicago, Illinois 174 Smith, Adrian 174 Pure Oil Building, Chicago, Illinois 37- Smith, Solomon A., II 34 38 Smith, William 169 Solfisburg, Roy 114, 153 Racquet Club, Chicago, Illinois 36 Standard Oil Building (now Aon Building), Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois 20 Chicago, Illinois 140 Rand, Sally 35, 70 State of Illinois Building, Chicago, Illinois Ravinia Festival Park, Highland Park, 175 Illinois 116-120, 123-124, 161-163, 184 Stateway Garden Apartments, Chicago, Rebori, Andrew (Andy) 35, 36, 49, 68, Illinois 38, 82, 184 69 Statler Hotel, Los Angeles, California 26, 31 Richards, Harper 129, 131 Statler Hotel, Washington, D.C. 26, 27, 31, Richardson, Eliot 190 70 Ripple, Fred 149 Stevens, Ashton 15 River City (project), Chicago, Illinois Stevens, Thomas Woods 68 189, 191 Stone, Edward Durell 18, 81, 140, 149 Robie, Frederick (house), Chicago, Streets of Paris, (Century of Progress Illinois 81 International Exposition, 1933-34), Rockefeller Center, New York City, Chicago, Illinois 35, 68, 70 New York 179 Stubbins, Hugh 140 Roche, Martin 3, 6, 10, 136, 170 Student Center, University of Illinois, Rogers, James Gamble 100 Chicago, Illinois 123 Root, John Wellborn, Jr. 8-10, 14, 16, 17, Sullivan, Louis 3, 35-36, 149, 180 20-22, 26, 29, 30, 51, 62, 67, 76, 81, 82, Summers, Gene 165-166 90-92, 129, 147, 182, 192 Susskind, Arnold 59

199 Sutherland, J.A. 21 Yarlmolinsky, Adam 190 Tabler, William (Bill) 31, 125 Tacoma Building, Chicago, Illinois 3 Tata Center for Fundamental Research, Bombay, India 93 Taussig, Meredith 176 Tavern Club, Chicago, Illinois 14-16, 27, 37, 85, 86, 129-131, 172 Thompson, Rolland 42 Thorshav & Czerny 64 Tigerman, Stanley 17, 146, 155 Travel and Transport Building (Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933-34), Chicago, Illinois 69

Union Station, Chicago, Illinois 31 Union Station, Cleveland, Ohio 31 Union Station, Washington, D.C. 31 U. S. Gypsum Building, Chicago, Illinois 157 University Club, Chicago, Illinois 6, 25 University of Chicago, High Energy Physics Building, Chicago, Illinois 149 University of Chicago, Law School, Chicago, Illinois 149

Vinci, John 123, 175 Virginia Polytechnical Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia 152 Von Kurowsky, Agnes 5 Von Newmann, Robert 57

Washington, Harold 176 Water Tower Place, Chicago, Illinois 174 Weese, Benjamin (Ben) 113, 172 Weese, Cynthia (Cindy) 86, 113 Weese, Harry Mohr 189, 191, 193 Weissbourd, Bernard (Bernie/Barney) 90 Welch, William 132, 152, 188-189, 191, 192 Weren, Theodore (Ted) 42 Will, Philip, Jr. (Phil) 173 Wollman Memorial Rink, New York City, New York 180 Wright, Frank Lloyd 29-30, 34, 48-49, 90 Wright, Quincy 15, 20

200