ORAL HISTORY OF JACQUES CALMAN BROWNSON
Interviewed by Betty J. Blum
Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1996 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface iv
Outline of Topics vi
Oral History 1
Selected References 266
Appendix: Resume 268
Index of Names and Buildings 270
iii PREFACE
"It has been said that a lot of people at IIT were under the influence of Mies—I cannot imagine a better influence… Mies's buildings in steel and glass are only the beginning, not the end of the road. The possibilities are endless—he has opened up a horizon for us."
It is well known that Jack Brownson is an architect-builder with a deep and abiding interest in how things go together. His training began early when, as a young boy, he helped his grandfather build barns, sheds and outhouses to survive the Depression, a time he remembers as one of the best of his life. After building several small houses to earn tuition money to study architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies van der Rohe, some years later, Jacques built his own home for his master's thesis, an award-winning steel and glass structure in Geneva that drew media attention to his talent. He is best remembered in Chicago as the chief designer—Jacques would much prefer to be known as the builder—of one of the most prominent and admired public buildings in the city using the Miesian vocabulary, the forceful and elegant Richard J. Daley Center.
Like his mentor Mies van der Rohe, Jacques not only built but also taught: first at IIT and later as chairman of the department of architecture at the University of Michigan, where his educational approach closely followed that of another of his mentors at IIT, Ludwig Hilberseimer. After directing a building program for the Chicago Buildings Commission he moved to Colorado to plan an educational campus in the heart of Denver, again taking his cue from Mies's plan for the IIT campus. Although Brownson has been in Colorado for more than twenty years, the imprint of his training and thinking from his IIT days is so indelible, he has been called a Chicagoan who works in Denver.
Surrounded by his allied interests, airplane models he has built, his well-equipped workshop and garage where he reconditions antique Porches, Jacques and I met in his home from December fifth to the ninth, 1994 to record fifteen hours of his first hand recollections. Jacques speaks with authority and humor, often in great detail about events and people of consequence to his work and career, about his ideas and opinions of architects and
iv architecture, then and now, and about the architectural community, all set in a social, economic and technological framework of the day. Our sessions were tape recorded on ten ninety-minute cassettes which have been transcribed, reviewed by both Jacques and me, and minimally edited to maintain the flow, tone and spirit of Jacques's informative and at times humorous narrative. This oral history is available for study at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago. Brownson has left a national and international paper trail beginning as far back as his student days when his work began to attract attention as one of the most promising young architects in the United States. References that I found helpful in my preparation are appended to the text.
I thank Jacques for willingly clearing his calendar and sharing his reminiscences in our intensive recording sessions, some of which were very demanding. I am grateful to him for his cooperation and to both he and Mrs. Brownson for their hospitality. This oral history was supported by a bequest from the estate of Norman Schlossman, with whom Jacques associated with on the Richard J. Daley Center job, and to whom the Department of Architecture is especially grateful for support. Thanks go to Joan Cameron, our transcriber, for her care and skillful contributions in shaping this document.
Betty J. Blum August 1996
v OUTLINE OF TOPICS
Early Years and Family 1 Century of Progress International Exposition 13 Technology Then and Now 18 Financing Brownson’s Tuition 23 Studying at Armour Institute of Technology, 1941-1942 25 Mies van der Rohe’s Office 34 Opinions of This and That 36 Works Progress Administration 43 World War II: Burma, China, and India 46 Reflections on the War Experience 59 Married, 1946 62 With C. F. Murphy 64 Back to the Illinois Institute of Technology 65 About Hilberseimer and Mies 65 Work for James Speyer 71 This and That 73 The House that Jacques Built 77 More About Hilbs and Mies and Planning Issues 79 Work and Study at IIT 93 The Popular Mechanics House 95 Teaching at IIT 100 Work for Bruno Conterato 111 More Teaching at IIT 113 Master’s Thesis: Building his Glass House 115 Plan for the South Side of Chicago 142 Work for Naess and Murphy 149 Continental Center 159 Chicago Civic Center 169 Illinois Bell Competition 203 University of Michigan 205 Public Building Commission of Chicago 217
vi American Institute of Architects 229 Denver and the Auraria Higher Education Center 235 Reflections and Opinions 257
vii Jacques C. Brownson
Blum: Today is December 5, 1994, and I am with Jacques Brownson in his home in Denver. Jacques, you were born seventy-one years ago in Aurora, Illinois, on August 3, 1923. You studied with Mies at IIT for both your master's and your bachelor's. While you were a student, you attracted not only the attention of your fellow students and instructors but also national recognition for construction of your master's thesis, your steel and glass house in Geneva. From the beginning, you seemed to pursue a multifaceted career—that of an educator, an architect and also an administrator of large public projects. In the early seventies, you moved to Denver where you are today. Perhaps in Chicago you are best known for your design of the award-winning Daley Center, building and plaza. One of your colleagues has said about you, "Jacques is a builder. He has a deep concern for how things go together." Your reputation as one of the most respected exponents of the Miesian vocabulary has been indelibly written in architectural history. Could we begin, as far back as you can, to tell your story in your own words?
Brownson: Well, I think, first of all, Betty, that to go back and explore this thing with any person, I suppose, you always get a little hesitation when you think about all of the influences and the people that one comes in contact with over his lifetime. As you remarked, I was born in 1923, and the one thing I remember my mother always saying was, "You were born when Warren G. Harding, the president, had died." For some reason I think Warren Harding's death probably was more important than my birth at that time. But anyway, that's not really so, but it was one of the things that I remember. You have to know about the history, particularly of this country, of the time immediately after the First World War and all of the things that were going on worldwide—the work by many of the artists that we know and the movements in architecture, the Tribune Tower competition and all of the different kinds of activities that
1 were happening. I might just give you one indication of the influence of the First World War on me, and that was when I was in high school. I graduated in 1941 from East Aurora High School, and I had always been interested in architecture. Aurora, Illinois, was a city of about 50,000 people—maybe a little smaller at that time. I had never been out of this town of Aurora, which is about fifty miles west of Chicago. It was a rather interesting town because it was the headquarters of the Burlington Railroad, for one thing, with extensive shops. It was one of the first cities in the United States to become fully electrified. It was also involved in the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin railroad, which was the interurban railroad that was the dynasty of Samuel Insull. I was always interested in building because my father was in the retail buildings lumber business. See, it was a retail lumberyard. When I was born shortly thereafter, we lived in a town called Roselle, Illinois. But anyway, I had a mechanical drawing teacher called C.I. "Pop" Carlson. I always liked to draw, and I didn't know anything about architecture and I didn't know anything about art. I kept saying to Pop, "I like to build things, and I think I'd like to study architecture, but I really don't know anything about it. I don't know where to go." Pop said to me, "You know, I have a friend who I haven't seen since we were in the Navy together in the First World War. He's an architect in Chicago. I'll call him and we'll go in and see him." So, one day we went in Carlson's car, and we arrived at 333 North Michigan Avenue in the office of Jerry Loebl. Jerry Loebl and Pop Carlson were shipmates in the First World War. Pop said to Jerry, "Jerry, Jacques would like to study architecture but he doesn't know where to go or what the schools are or what's involved with that." Jerry Loebl said, "There is only one school in the world to go to for architecture, and that's right here in Chicago. It's headed up by a well-known architect named Mies van der Rohe. That's the only place to go." Well, I subsequently found out that Jerry Loebl was one of the people who was instrumental, along with John Holabird and John Root, in bringing Mies to this country and finally getting him connected with IIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was then Armour Institute. And Jerry Loebl reminded me of that occurrence when we were working on the Daley Center, then the Chicago Civic Center. He said, "I knew you'd come back to haunt me.” He said, "After all of these years here you are, and I directed you to IIT. Well, I
2 guess I've got to accept some of that responsibility for that building, right?" I said, "It appears that way."
Blum: It looks like it was good advice.
Brownson: But anyway, I didn't have any contact with Jerry Loebl after that meeting until we all came together on the Chicago Civic Center, then the Daley Center.
Blum: Jacques, the way you tell this story, was this at the end of high school?
Brownson: It was at the end of my high school years. That was in 1941. It must have been early 1941 or maybe late 1940 or so. I don't exactly remember the date.
Blum: But, if I heard you correctly, you said to your father, "I enjoy building things." When did you discover this?
Brownson: Oh, that goes back a long way. When I was, I think, twelve or thirteen years old, I used to build a lot of models and things like that.
Blum: You mean like kids do, little airplane models?
Brownson: Yes. My father had a friend who was a patternmaker who made patterns for industry. You know, when you make a casting, you have to make a wooden pattern. From that wooden pattern you make the sand molds, and there are a lot of technical aspects to it. I learned that a foot is really not a foot. You never know what it is because a patternmaker has rules that compensate and are measured to shrink when you make a thing depending on the kind of material he is working in, be it brass, aluminum or steel or cast iron or whatever it is. Let's say that you are making it out of aluminum, which shrinks substantially, you'll have a ruler which is much longer than a foot and it's graduated accordingly in order to compensate. So when you measure up one inch you may be measuring off one and a thirty-second or some other dimension. So I became aware of that when Mr. Johnson, who was the head
3 of Johnson's Pattern Works, allowed me to work in his shop. He had these wonderful tools, you know. That was in the heart of the Depression. You're talking about in the mid-1930s. I worked there, and he used to come around and he would tell me certain things, how you do this and do that using different tools and things. He wouldn't let me use any of the big power saws or things like that because he was concerned about my fingers, I guess. He also had two sons. He had a younger son, and he had an older son named Larry. Larry was deaf. I could never figure out why, and finally one day, I asked my father, "Larry is deaf. How did he become deaf?” Evidently, this didn't happen early on. This is a very late thing, you know. Well, my father always kind of pushed that aside. So, I kept asking my father. I was fourteen, fifteen years old, I guess, or something like that, and finally my father said, "Well, Larry had syphilis." The reason I mention that was, it was an awakening of this other side of life which you just aren't exposed to, particularly at that age in the thirties, because it was not as open then as it is now. But anyway, I learned a lot in that cabinet shop. Then as I got interested in building and I would be making drawings in Pop Carlson's class, we had our own blueprint machine. We would put our drawings, make tracings, and hang them out in the sun, you know, and expose the paper to make the exposure. Then we'd wash it and make a blueprint. That's where this old saying about architects, "Oh, you make blueprints." People think that that's what architects do. They make blueprints. It's got nothing to do much with the buildings. But anyway, it was the height of the Depression. And now I'll go back. My father was kind of a—I always called him a "high flyer." In the heyday before the crash in 1929—I was six years old at that time—I remember that he had this fancy Stutz convertible automobile.
Blum: Stutz Bearcat?
Brownson: Yes, one of those. He was a real—I call him a "high flyer," you know. He and another group of men had a series of three wholesale stores. They manufactured doors and different windows. A millwork shop, it's called. He and this group went out and founded Roselle, Illinois. I haven't been in Roselle lately, but I understand it's…
4 Blum: Roselle is now Schaumburg.
Brownson: And Schaumburg and all that. We lived in a small house. I had a wonderful time during that period. The Depression was the most rewarding time, I think, that I ever had because of the opportunities to do things. But anyway, as a little kid I was pulled in a wagon out to Schaumburg. All there was in Schaumburg was a crossing, and there was a little store on the corner. That was it, you know. My father had a lumberyard in Roselle, Illinois, and a millwork shop where they made millwork and stuff. There was always a lot of activity around this lumberyard. There was a bunch of old buildings around the thing, and there was always a lot of going in and out by what I now call Elliot Ness trucks. Al Capone had a stash of prohibition booze in one of these buildings, and they used to come regularly and pick this stuff up and haul it back to Chicago, because Roselle was out in the sticks. It was way, way out, Roselle and Schaumburg and all of those areas. That was country. But anyway, you'd see these guys going into this barn and then they'd be coming out with this—you've seen those old trucks; they're very square and chopped off, front fenders—coming out with this booze.
Blum: Did you know what was happening or did you wonder about why they were always going in and coming out with boxes?
Brownson: My father told me what was going on. Then the other thing that he enjoyed was baseball and he was a big Cubs fan. He used to take me to the ball games, and on the way back from the ball game we used to stop at a speakeasy called Lingell's Tavern which was on—what is the name of the road that goes west there?
Blum: Irving Park?
Brownson: Irving Park, yes. It was called Lingell's Tavern, and the Cubs players used to come and hang out there. There was one guy that my father would talk to, and that was Hack Wilson. Do you know who Hack Wilson was?
5 Blum: No.
Brownson: Hack Wilson was the greatest shoestring flycatcher. He played in the outfield for the Chicago Cubs, and he was a great shoestring catcher. He would come up and he would bend over and scoop the ball up. Well, the reason that he had gotten so good at that was because he drank so much beer and he had this big stomach, you know, and it was the only way he could really play baseball. But he was great. Anyway, Hack Wilson used to hang out at Lingell's, and so that was part of thing. So much for that.
Blum: Jack, you're talking about, say, the thirties. Do you have any recollections of the city at that time?
Brownson: Of Chicago?
Blum: Yes, what it looked like.
Brownson: Yes, I think mainly I remember the El, certainly, the old elevated which didn't really change until after—I think it still hasn't changed a whole lot. And the kinds of buildings and all of the people around. Also just the congestion of the people going to the ball games and all of the different kinds of people with their—well, most of them were rather raucous fans at that time.
Blum: Did you ever go downtown to see the Loop?
Brownson: No. We had a Model A Ford at that time, which was what my father was driving. But anyway, Betty, that was the heart of the Depression. Before that came, the stock market crashed. My father was building a house for our family in Roselle. If I remember right, it was up on a hill. He was building this house, and we used to go out there and look at it. They would be working on it, and I remember playing in the sand pile or walking around the house. And then the stock market crash came and my father lost everything. I don't really know what was all behind that but, as I said, he was
6 kind of a high flyer. He lost everything, and we ended up moving into the garage of this house during one summer. The construction had stopped, and the only place we had to live was in the garage. There was a dirt floor in the garage, and all of our things were there. My brother, who is four years younger than I am, is still in the retail lumber business. He's a retail lumberman. We lived in that house, and so finally it got so bad that the bank evicted us from there. I remember we loaded everything in the Model A, and we ended up going to Mendota, Illinois, which is where my mother's parents lived. Their name was Klinefelter, "little field." They had been farmers and very frugal, and they built this house for themselves in town and they moved into town. They had this marvelous, big porch—am I talking too much about this aspect?
Blum: No, please go on.
Brownson: Since talking to you about doing this oral history, I got to thinking back about some things that happened to me. But they had this big porch. It was a typical, square, two-story house with a parlor, a dining room and a kitchen. The technology of the kitchen consisted of a big cast iron, black stove which was fueled by corncobs. The place to keep the food was a round device that you would crank up and down. It went down in a big area like a cistern, you know, to keep the perishable things from spoiling. When you wanted something like milk, you would turn this crank on the side of the wall and up would come this box with the butter and the eggs, and I don't know what else she had in it. They had a root cellar where they keep of all of these things. Everybody would sit on the porch, and there was only one member of the family who had a legitimate job, and that was my Aunt Pearl. That was my mother's sister, and she was a kind of accountant or bookkeeper or whatever you called them in this little grocery store. Nobody else had any kind of a job. My grandmother took in boarders. Now, this was after the stock market crash. It was in the early 1930s. My grandmother took in boarders who stayed there. Well, there were some interesting guys who came around at that time. One of them was the itinerant movie projection guy. He traveled around, and in the park when it got dark he would set up a screen
7 and show the movie, and all the people in the town would come to see the latest movie. He would stay there at the house, and he showed all of the latest movies. With my grandfather was where I really got started learning how to be a carpenter, because we would travel around to the various farmers that he would know and build things. We built a lot of outhouses, and we built a lot of barns and sheds and all of this stuff.
Blum: This was when you were about ten years old?
Brownson: About nine or ten years old, yes. We would build, and I would go along and help him. Everybody was trying to stay alive, and so the farmers, in exchange for my grandfather's work, would pay him off in whatever they had to pay.
Blum: Food?
Brownson: Sweet corn or food or whatever it was. But the interesting part was the butchering time in the fall when they would butcher the pigs and make the sausage and all, because it was predominantly German, a Pennsylvania Dutch enclave in that part of the country, and they would make all of these different kinds of things. But the thing, I guess, that I'm trying to say is that you had to make these things for yourself. You made your own food. You had to go and carry the stuff to make the fire with and you had chickens out in the back and you had a little garden that you lived off of. You had to kind of "make do" with things, you know. The big thing was rabbits. I'll bet we ate more rabbits because we'd go out hunting and they would come back, and that was the only meat that we would have because that was the only meat we could afford. Then the other thing is, my grandmother was always very sympathetic to people who were down on their luck, and anybody who would come to that house, she had a little back porch that you used to come through. You'd take your boots and stuff off there. Then you'd go in, and there would be a little sink to wash your hands and one of those rolled towel things, you know. But there was always somebody eating on that back porch. There were always these guys. One day someone said, "How come there is always somebody here eating?" I said, "My grandmother would never turn
8 anybody away." "Oh," he said, "your place is marvelous. Did you look at the tree in the front?" And so I went out to the front tree, and there was a mark on the tree. That was a stopping place where you could get something to eat. That lady was always good for a meal.
Blum: That's a nice reputation to have.
Brownson: There was also in that area—no longer because it was all cut down during the Second World War—but in that area was probably one of the largest stands of American black walnut outside of the Ozarks. It was just tremendous. There was Black Brothers, who made sawmill machinery and things for the walnut industry there. Well, then when the Second World War came along, all of these M-1 rifles that we used in the Second World War all had American black walnut stocks on the back. The best wood was all sawed up, and the walnut stands in the United States were decimated by the Second World War. It just wiped them out. But then there was an orphan who lived there in my grandparents’ house. He was an old orphan. He was an old man but, as I say, he was an orphan. He had a room there. He stayed there. He had a place way out in the country, and he would collect animals—raccoons, possums, foxes. My grandfather, they were talking one night and I was there and my grandfather said, "We'll just build you a little thing on a wagon bed and we can pull it down there to the woods and you can live in it and have it down there." So, we built this trailer, which I suppose was a house trailer, that he hauled down to Amboy. Another part of this whole story concerns LaSalle, Illinois, and Troy Grove. One of my very famous forebears—I don't know where he fits in—Wild Bill Hickok is a part of the Klinefelter-Hickok- Troy Grove legacy. Wild Bill Hickok's father was very active in the underground railroad during the Civil War, and there were a lot of blacks who came through. My grandmother was always supplying meals for these guys. The Hickoks at Troy Grove, and that's where my grandmother—my grandmother was a Fahler. Her maiden name was Fahler, Clara Fahler. The Hickoks and that whole family some way are intertwined. I spoke a little bit about my exposure to syphilis—not my exposure…
9 Blum: I understand, your awareness.
Brownson: …but my awareness of syphilis also was my awareness of the gay community, because I had two gay cousins who I knew were a little different from the rest. I didn't know at that time why. But they were big into antiques. They were the Aiken brothers, and they ran a gigantic farm down in Troy. They were extremely wealthy. Their mother was a sister of my grandmother. She was a Fahler and married an Aiken. So anyway, these two brothers, in addition to operating the farm, were also in the antique business. One of their claims to fame—and I remember going there as a young kid—was these two cousins bought all of Sam Insull's furniture in Chicago, and it was all stored in this barn down in Troy Grove, Illinois. During all of this time, my father is writing letters, sitting on this marvelous screened porch in those old wicker rockers, and just going from bad to worse and no work. There was nothing. It was just devastating for anybody. There just wasn't any work. So finally, one day he got a job selling, of all things, asphalt roofing for some company—Certainteed or one of them. But anyway, they had a roof that was in big demand. It was kind of a blue colored roof that everybody liked, and they sold a lot of it for some reason. But the problem was that as soon as they got in the sunlight it turned a hideous green. So my father became a persona non grata in the area for his lousy roofing. So he got some other job, and I forget what it was. He was something in the building industry. Anyway, he got his first Model A car. He was traveling, and all of a sudden he arrives back at home and he looks like he has been in a prizefight—absolutely just clobbered, bleeding and his clothes were all torn. My mother said, "Clyde! What happened?" He said, "I got hit by a cow."
Blum: A cow?
Brownson: He said, "A cow jumped over the fence and he came right at the car. You have to go down and take a look at the car," which we did, and the car was absolutely demolished. It had been hit by this cow. The other thing, thinking back about my grandfather, I still have on the wall some of my grandfather's tools.
10 Blum: Your grandfather was a very important influence on you.
Brownson: Well, when I say that it was the best time that we ever had, I was with him continually and he was showing me all of these things and we were going all over together. He had this Model T Ford, and the Model T Ford had what was called coil boxes. They were little square boxes that would generate the spark that would fire the spark plugs. Well, if you had a Model T, you also had a lot of replacements because they get damp. Some would work, but they wouldn't all work at the same time. Henry Ford was great. You'd pick one out, and then if it didn't work you'd go and pick another one and try that one, and so gradually you would find one that would work. And my grandmother, she had these boarders, and she used to put out the breakfasts. You couldn't believe the breakfasts. It was a groaning table. It was stuff that was on that table for these boarders. But anyway, she would be at breakfast, and my grandfather's name was Joel. She'd say, "Joel, I want to go to town today." "Yes, Clara." So Joel would go out and get the car all cleaned up and get the right coil in. On each pilaster of the Model T Ford there was a little place for a glass vase that you could put a flower in, and so he put a little water in there and he'd go out and clip a flower out of the garden and stick it in there. My grandmother always wore purple clothes. Everything was purple—the dress, the whole works. She would get in the back end of this thing, and it had that—what's that kind of velour stuff? It kind of pricks at you when you sit on it. It's like the old horsehair upholstery. It does the same kind of thing. So anyway, she'd get in the back and Joel would get in the front and off they'd go. That wasn't all of the time, but when we would go out to the country, we went on a lot of picnics—an unbelievable number of picnics—and there were wild black cherries. They're very small. I don't know if you've ever seen those wild black cherries. They're about the size of a peanut. So we'd put a bed sheet down on the ground, and then I'd climb up and shake and the stuff would fall down. She made this wonderful jam from that, and that was part of the thing. Also, that was a big area—and still is around Mendota—for growing sweet corn. Del Monte has big, big sweet corn farms there in which they furnish everything to the farmer, and he is, in
11 effect, a kind of tenant farmer, really.
Blum: Where is Mendota?
Brownson: Mendota is still right out through Aurora. You go down and you go about another forty miles. So it's about ninety miles from Chicago. One of the things that I became aware of—it wasn't Del Monte at that time. I don't know who it was, but they had this big canning plant, and in the front these big wagonloads of sweet corn would come down, pulled by horses. They'd come down the street to the parking area, you know. So you'd go out and get them to throw you a couple of ears of sweet corn, and you'd get enough sweet corn for the day. I'll never forget that. I suppose part of my interest in the environment today comes from this period. But these tremendous stacks of fermenting corn husks and corn and sweet corn cobs and the waste coming out of it. The waste effluent was thrown into the creeks, and I remember when we would go down to the country the fish and everything would be dead. The stream would be running like corn syrup. And smell, oh. Every year, "Well, they're canning sweet corn," and all of this stuff. They destroyed everything with that stuff. But I spent a lot of time in the woods, just going around and becoming a part of it, through the fields. It’s interesting, even when I was teaching at IIT, while I was living out in Geneva when I was building my house, I would always drive down that road which goes right through the center of the Morton Arboretum. State Route 53 bisects Morton Arboretum. Arthur Myhrum was the architect who did that wonderful little restaurant there at Morton Arboretum. That is a very nice building. His wife is also very active in architecture. But even when I was going in to school, I would plan so that I could take a sandwich and go into Morton Arboretum because it is such a spectacular place, just to see that amount of nature. I'm sure it's still there.
Blum: It sounds like all of your recollections, or at least what you've talked about, are of country, your early experiences of country, of building, of living very close to nature. All of these, it seems to me, came together, in a way.
12 Brownson: They came into focus at IIT, at Armour.
Blum: When you selected architecture, were you beginning to pull it all together at that point?
Brownson: I didn't know. I knew what interested me, but how I got to Armour, as I told you, was just pure chance.
Blum: Did you have the money to go somewhere else?
Brownson: Oh, that's another part. I'm glad you reminded me of that. Let me talk about paying for this education. I enrolled at Armour Institute, IIT, in 1941 in September. I'd never lived in the inner city or the ghetto. I became a member of Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. Now, it was the Depression. We didn't come out of the Depression until that war started and everybody went back to work. Franklin Roosevelt would never have brought—and my father was a staunch Republican just as I'm a staunch Democrat now. But he was absolutely against Roosevelt. If it hadn't been for the war, we wouldn't have come out of that Depression because it was the war economy that brought the economy back together. Now, in 1932—I'll go back a little bit—the Century of Progress fair in Chicago…
Blum: Yes, you were what, about ten years old?
Brownson: I was about ten or eleven years old. So, what was my big impression of the fair? The Denver Zephyr.
Blum: Was that the train?
Brownson: The train, the Denver Zephyr, and Henry Ford and mechanical devices. At that time we lived in Aurora. We'd moved from Mendota. My father then got a job as a clerk in a retail lumberyard, and we rented this two-story house. Twenty-one dollars a month was the rent. There was a gigantic cistern in the basement, which was where the water was, and my mother, being from the
13 farm originally, all the clothes had to be boiled. She had these two big, copper wash tubs, big, you know, in which all the clothes go once a week, and they would be boiled because they weren't pure unless they were boiled. And they were washed on a washboard, you know…
Blum: I remember.
Brownson: …and a hand wringer. Then they went out on the back line to dry. In order to make a little extra money I would get jobs mowing lawns, but right across the alley behind us Jack Ford lived. Jack Ford was the chief engineer for the Burlington Railroad. He brought the train on the maiden run from Denver to Chicago in which the Denver Zephyr pulled into the fair. It was on the radio. Do you remember when the Voyager flew around the world, Bert Rutan's Voyager, nonstop? Jeana Yeager, this very petite young woman was the co- pilot, and Dick Rutan, who was Bert's brother, was the pilot. Bert was a designer. In fact, that airplane on the wall that I made, that's called LONG- EZ. But that's one of Bert Rutan's designs. How did I get off on this airplane business?
Blum: You were talking about the Denver Zephyr having arrived in Chicago.
Brownson: Okay, and it was the same kind of thing as when he flew around the world. You'd get these reports, "They're now over Zimbabwe," or "They're now over Napoli," or they're now someplace else. Well, this Denver Zephyr as it came across, "The Denver Zephyr is now reported to be in Omaha, Nebraska, proceeding on schedule and coming into the Chicago World's Fair." This reporter gave a report every five minutes…
[Tape 1: Side 2]
Brownson: And they reported this train, you know. It was in Galesburg, and then the crowd at the fair was all standing there. My father had taken me to the fair because I was the kind of handyman around the Ford residence. I'd wash the walls and scrub the floors and mow the grass. I knew Mr. Ford, the chief
14 engineer at the Burlington Railroad, and so my father took me to see him arrive with the Zephyr. This was the beginning of the diesel revolution in transportation. The significant thing was that when Jack Ford—have you seen the Denver Zephyr? It's at the Museum of Science and Industry, parked out there. It is small. It is a small train. Have you ridden the TGV from Paris to Lyon?
Blum: No, I haven't, not yet.
Brownson: Well, Doris and I took the TGV from Paris. That's a big train compared to the Zephyr, which is so small. Usually on steam locomotives, when the engineer gets off, they've got the bib overalls, they've the big gauntlet gloves, they've got dirt and smoke and stuff all around. Jack Ford gets off of the Denver Zephyr in a business suit. This is the significant industrial change in the United States in this method of transportation. Now these engineers are highly skilled—I don't know whether they were any more or not, but it's a different way and no longer is it taking a sledge hammer to do things, but more of a thought process in building this device that is reliable and that can go at high speeds. It changed transportation.
Blum: Did you have any sense of this significance at the time?
Brownson: I don't think at the time, no. I think this comes back to me. Part of it is in looking back. Maybe I did and maybe I didn't. Probably not, at that age.
Blum: What impressed you then?
Brownson: But it was very impressive, all of the crowd and the hoopla and the shining, silver streamliner.
Blum: There is a painting of that engine that Arthur Dubin owns, and it was in the “Chicago Architecture and Design: 1923-1993” exhibition at the Art Institute.
Brownson: I think I may have seen it. You mean in that architecture exhibit that Stanley
15 Tigerman installed, that whole exhibit there?
Blum: Yes. It was in the transportation corridor.
Brownson: Sure, I think I saw that. But it's interesting to go down to the Museum of Science and Industry and see that train and go through it. I think there were a lot of influences along with nature.
Blum: Jacques, you were talking about the Century of Progress and being taken with this Denver Zephyr. Did you look at all at, say, the housing section?
Brownson: Sure.
Blum: Do you remember seeing the Keck houses?
Brownson: I remember seeing the Keck house, the Crystal House.
Blum: And Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car?
Brownson: Right, and all of those kinds of things. I liked that kind of adventure that was going on, and I was interested in those things. The other thing was the Henry Ford exhibit.
Blum: What was that?
Brownson: Well, that time was the beginning in the way of plastics because this was when Henry Ford brought soybeans to the United States and started to make all of these pieces for cars out of soybeans. Henry Ford was the one who introduced soybeans to American agriculture, and it became the basis for making Bakelite and some of these other so-called plastic materials. Now cars are two-thirds plastic. But Henry Ford saw the potential of soybeans for this source of protein. Of course, the thing they're still working on with soybeans—it's very poisonous in a raw state. It's a very poisonous plant and it's only through heat, by roasting it, that it becomes usable and it converts
16 into a protein.
Blum: Was there an exhibit about all of this?
Brownson: Oh, yes, an extensive exhibit where Ford predicted that an entire car was going to be made of this material. I'm digressing a little, but Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Ford come into this picture with the dam and power plant at Muscle Shoals. Henry Ford wanted to buy Muscle Shoals from the federal government, and he hired Frank Lloyd Wright to make the studies to build, call it a mega-factory that ran from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Detroit, Michigan, which would be the largest single manufacturing operation on the face of the globe. For some reason, the federal government would not sell this dam and generating station to Henry Ford to do this. Wright came in in a number of places during this whole era. But that thing with soybeans was a profound step in this country. The whole state of Illinois is covered with nothing but soybean fields now. All of the different things that are made out of that bean—it is just beyond belief what the chemists have done with it. It brings up a whole series of things in education during that time prior to the Second World War. When you think about Fermi working there on the South Side under the stands at Stagg Stadium on the first chain reaction. You know, Dunbar Trade School comes into this picture because the industrial shop boys made all of the carbon blocks for Fermi. I said that the black students made all of these carbon blocks that were used in creating the shield for this chain reaction under Stagg Stadium. These things start to come around in various ways, how it opens up.
Blum: Were you impressed with the newness, the new look of the Keck house? Or didn't that really even faze you?
Brownson: I think one of the things certainly was its newness. You had to look at it as not really understanding what's going on.
Blum: Well, you were pretty young at the time.
17 Brownson: And not comprehending. But as you reflect back on what was occurring at that time, and the question of the effect of the sun on buildings that George and Bill Keck did, that was for the United States. And it also brings up what was going on in other elements of education. My brother-in-law, who is ten years older than I am, was from Iowa. He studied physics and subsequently became chairman of the Physics Department at Annapolis at the Naval Academy. But the whole study of physics was so elementary in this country that physicists of any stature had to go to Europe in order to get any kind of education as to what was going on. When my brother-in-law graduated and had a doctor's degree in physics, the only job he could get was cutting meat in a butcher shop because nobody needed any physicists. For what? They didn't need them. And so, there was a reflection. The whole country was very primitive. One of the things that I think will come through when you look at what I'm talking about is that there was no technology breakthrough. Actually, when you go back to the World's Columbian Exposition in the late 1800s, there was more going on at that time, and it wasn't until the Century of Progress that it started again to open up some horizons. But there was a no-man's land in between there.
Blum: So you're saying between the fairs there was a hiatus?
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: Do you think each fair broke new ground or at least presented the new ground that had been broken?
Brownson: Broke new ground and new ways of looking at things. You were talking about people who were doing things. Also, take a look at aviation and what was going on. This was another thing with my father. As I said, he was a very staunch Republican, and he was always saying something about "that guy Roosevelt"—what he was doing, and all this. We were just going to go from bad to worse. Well, we used to get gasoline for this Model A Ford in Aurora, Illinois, at a little gasoline station run by Mike Cavalli. Mike Cavalli's Phillips 66. It's up on the west side of town, a little station. Well, Mike—and I guess,
18 well, a lot of people—were great admirers of Mussolini. "Oh, man! Mussolini! He knows how to make the trains run on time. Look at all of the wonderful things that are going on in Italy," and what a great thing was happening. At the time of the Century of Progress, there were all kinds of things happening. There was General Electric, and then there was this diesel propulsion start. There was this thing on housing. Then where I got off on this Mussolini thing was that Mussolini sent over Count Balboa with the planes that landed in front of Buckingham Fountain and taxied up. They got out of these airplanes in front of Buckingham Fountain, Balboa Drive. They had flown, but where is this place that they came from? All of these farmers are there at the fair. What is this, these airplanes all landing on the lake? You think about Chicago and the vitality of that city—you were remarking about Buckminster Fuller and the effect of Chicago and the Kecks. Then you had the Pullman Company and the first snowmobile. Do you know that the snowmobile that was built at the Pullman Works was for Admiral Byrd to take to Antarctica? What year was that? I can't remember what the year was, but Byrd wanted a machine that could go around Antarctica when he got there, so the Pullman Works designed and built this glorified snowmobile. It was brought down State Street and all of the politicians were there. It was given a big sendoff, and it went down to Antarctica and it went down the ramp and got stuck in the snow. It's still sitting down there, stuck in the snow. It never moved.
Blum: Was that at the same time as the Century of Progress?
Brownson: Something right around that same time.
Blum: That's a funny story.
Brownson: And in aviation—I belong to the Experimental Aircraft Association up there in Oshkosh—you know, the so-called home builders—and when you look at all of the different kinds of things that were done in aviation—I have two pictures here. They just wheeled out the 777 Boeing, you know. This was in the Denver Post. Here is a small article that shows this marvelous airplane, which is a great achievement, actually. And then in contrast, you see these
19 lousy houses that they're peddling in the countryside. All over the world, I think, is full of these lousy houses. They're not even safe to live in because they're such fire traps. Nobody pays any attention, and some of these things are going to burn one of these days. But there is nothing going on. It's kind of like we're in no-man's land right now. Relatively few things happening. The New York Times Sunday magazine has an article. I think it's by Herbert Muschamp, isn't it? He took over from Goldberger.
Blum: Right.
Brownson: Well, Muschamp got a big computer—I think it's Palladio; Cyber-Palladio now. You get software. You just plug that in and you press a button. I got in a discussion one day with some computer guys here about this CAD drafting. I remember going with Bruce Graham who wanted to show me his office at Skidmore, and so we went over to Skidmore's office when they were on Monroe Street. We went in, and all I could see were these green machines. I couldn't see any people, just machines. And you would hear this clickety- click-clack-clack. I was kind of making a joke as I said, "Bruce, you've really got a lot of senior citizens working in here." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Yes, there must be. I hear their false teeth clacking."
Blum: He probably didn't appreciate that.
Brownson: I said, "I don't see anybody, but I see all of those screens. I couldn't work in here. I just couldn't do it."
Blum: Are you drawing a contrast between the thirties and now, to say there was really a lot of new things happening then? And today, with all of our technology, we're not moving ahead.
Brownson: Yes. Take a look at what was going on in cities. You know, I don't like to generalize, but architects are cake decorators. That's what our profession has turned into is cake decoration. I remember at the University of Michigan Albert Kahn did all of the buildings up there. What did he do when he built
20 the library? Well, he outdid the Doric, the Greek Doric column. He turned it upside down. He put the entablature at the base.
Blum: Instead of at the top, like a capital?
Brownson: And the base, you know, is backwards. It's the same thing. The architects are pressing these buttons, and it's all canned for them. I think they really haven't learned to know what to do with this technology that we have to work with.
Blum: Do you make your last statement as a person who studied under Mies and really learned how to put things together? Are you saying it from that perspective?
Brownson: I think what I'm talking about is trying to look at it as trying to define what the problem is today in our cities. The Tribune had this Cabrini housing design competition, and I submitted a proposal for Cabrini. In fact, I've got it on my desk here. Here is a problem. It's a social problem, and the architects come up with all kinds of gimmicks as to how to solve it in an architectural way, but it's not an architectural problem. Yet, fundamentally, building of cities is probably the most intriguing of all architectural problems. Koolhaas is building a new city that I think is at the French side of the beginning of the Eurotunnel. I don't know what it is that he is doing. But to show you how things come around, Moholy-Nagy, as I said, or maybe I didn't say, but when I came back from the Second World War, back from China, I had some time. School didn't start until September, and I think I got back sometime in April or March or the early part of the year. I couldn't get back into school, so I went to what was then called the New Bauhaus that Moholy had. It was on Dearborn, wasn't it?
Blum: Yes, it was in the old Historical Society building on Dearborn.
Brownson: Konrad Wachsmann was there. I took some courses with Ralph Rapson. But one of the things that I remember about it was Moholy's idea that anybody could be a painter or was painting by the numbers, you know? Anybody
21 could be made a commercial success, I guess, out of this painting by the numbers. So he had these, and he said, "Just give somebody this board with numbers on it," and then you're sitting on the other end of the telephone someplace else and you call him up and say, "Put such and such a number paint in such and such a number square," and you make all that, and he said, "You can paint over the telephones on this thing."
Blum: I didn't know that was his system, but what I did understand about Moholy's approach is that you can bring out creativity in people. This doesn't sound very creative, but maybe it was at the time.
Brownson: It was the same thing, because it has a lot to do, like, you know what a psychodrama is when you get a group of people sitting around together and they start out, and you say, "Well, take a common black telephone," and it starts out as a telephone and somebody ends up making a black pizza or something else out of it down the road as it circulates around. So it's a similar kind of thing.
Blum: What was your feeling about this approach to design?
Brownson: I think it really is trying to define what the problem is. I'm very much involved now in this whole question of zoning in the city, and I want to take you down and show you Auraria which I built when I first came out here. But it's a question of defining what the problem is. This street in front of our house here was a relatively quiet street when we moved here twenty-five years ago. Now it has more traffic on it per day than Interstate 70 has on it through the mountains. The traffic is just—16,000 cars a day go by on this street. It's completely changed. Nobody wants to face the problem of these automobiles and the new kind of city that needs to be built.
Blum: What do you mean, the new kind of city that needs to be built?
Brownson: That could be built if we could start to define what these problems are.
22 Blum: But hasn't Denver in the last twenty-five years or in the last ten years—and you've been here so much longer—experienced a spectacular amount of growth?
Brownson: Oh, yes.
Blum: Well, isn't that the reason for this problem or what you're calling a problem?
Brownson: Yes. Oh, one thing I didn't cover in this pre-Armour Institute, or IIT, segment was how I was able to pay for school because it was the Depression and we didn't have any money. We didn't have a car; we didn't have a telephone. So I said to my father that I would like to study architecture, and I would go to IIT. I said I'd come home on weekends and stay in Chicago through the week. He said, "Well, I don't know how we're going to do that, with the money." But there was kind of an awakening going on in the country. There was a need for some houses and some other things. One day he came, and he said, "Well, I'll tell you. We'll buy a lot and we'll build a little house and we'll sell it, and that will pay for the tuition for the first year." He had a friend by the name of Rudy Solfisberg, who was a journeyman carpenter, and so we bought this little lot and we built a house, twenty-four by twenty-eight feet. My father said, "It has to sell for no more than three thousand dollars. That's the total—lot, house and everything." Three thousand dollars. So we went out and started. Rudy did all of the intelligent work and layout and all these things, and I was really just kind of an apprentice. I would have been probably sixteen at that time. Then we built the house, and did all that kind of thing, and then we sold it and that paid for my tuition. The house has been added to now, and it has grown and changed.
Blum: So this was a way your family planned to raise the money to send you to school?
Brownson: That was how we raised the money to go to school. From there we then built another house after that one, so we built two houses. The next one, as always, gets a little bigger. But they're both still standing, and that paid my tuition to
23 go to school. Of course, then I got two years in at Illinois Institute of Technology.
Blum: Jack, before we go on to IIT and Mies and the rest of it, your name is spelled J-A-C-Q-U-E-S, the French way. How did that happen?
Brownson: Well, I'm named after plywood.
Blum: What do you mean, after plywood?
Brownson: I'm named after plywood, indirectly.
Blum: Would you explain that?
Brownson: When my father was involved in the retail lumber and sash and door business and so forth, he had a very good friend by the name of Jacques Willis, from Chicago. Jacques Willis was the promoter par excellence of plywood. When plywood first started and was invented and brought together, he was the one that went around and told everybody it was the greatest thing. It was going to solve all of the problems. Everybody was still, if you remember the wood houses, nailing up diagonal sheathing on the outside of these things which, again, is very primitive misinformation on engineering. They think like a farmer who puts a fence post in and puts a couple of diagonals in to hold it upright. Jacques Willis kept saying that if you nail this big sheet of plywood up it becomes like a sheet of stressed skin and becomes very strong. He had a demonstration where he would have one laid up with these diagonal one-by-six boards that the carpenters all used, and they would sheet with plywood. They would call it "sheeting the house." It's really "sheathing," but they called it "sheeting," you know. So then he built one panel like that, and he built one panel with his plywood and put some turnbuckles between the two and tightened it up. Of course, the plywood panel would pull the other one right over to it because it was so much stronger. Well, he and my father were big friends, and so when I was born my father thought, "Well, I guess I'll name him after my friend." So
24 that's how I got his name. He's around Chicago, Jacques Willis, and he was another very flamboyant, super salesman.
Blum: Here I expected a big story about French ancestry back to Louis or something.
Brownson: Oh, no French connection.
Blum: But everyone calls you Jack, don't they?
Brownson: They call me Jack. I get somebody who will call up, "Jay-que Brownson?" Well, that's me.
Blum: That's funny. When you did get to IIT, and you said you spent two years there the first time, what was your impression? Mies was there, this figurehead of the modern approach to architecture. Did he become your hero immediately?
Brownson: No.
Blum: How did it all happen?
Brownson: In fact, as I said, I'd never been to the ball game at Wrigley Field. My mother was afraid of a big city. She wouldn't have anything to do with it at all. So I didn't know Chicago. When I first came here that September of 1941, I was eighteen, and I walked up those steps to the Art Institute. I walked into the Art Institute, way back to Blackstone Hall. Do you remember that?
Blum: Yes.
Brownson: I don't remember what time, but there was a sculptor working there, building the big horse. He worked for months and months and months there. You crossed that bridge and you could look down into that section.
25 Blum: Into the lower level. Yes, I remember.
Brownson: And then we'd go on back. That was where the headquarters of the architecture school was, down in the back on the lower level, in the art school of the Art Institute. There was an Art Institute guard by the name of Joe Wagner, who was in charge of not only the Art Institute School but there was also some relationship to looking after the architecture school. He was a big, fat guy, and he liked to imbibe in some of the spirits of Chicago. So one of the jobs that the younger students always had was to go over and pick up a package for Joe at one of the local places where they sold stronger drink, let's say, and haul it back. Joe was a roly-poly guy who sat behind a desk and kept an eye on everything. But the freshman ended up, when you come into the Art Institute you go up that grand staircase, then you turn, and then you go west again. You keep turning left as you come up the staircase. I think this fantastic exhibit is there now.
Blum: The architectural fragments?
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: This is on the second-floor landing.
Brownson: Then you would turn and go north again. You'd make a right turn. You'd come up to the top of the landing and make a right turn, and there was a little, narrow stairway that went up to the attic. That was where our freshmen classes were, under the skylights.
Blum: Were these freshman classes?
Brownson: Yes. George Danforth was my instructor. I must say that was, again, a real plus because he had a way of working with students and working with people that was very good. There was a sense of quality, as Bernard Berenson would say, that started to come through even very early on. What does somebody eighteen years old know about quality or anything else?
26 Blum: Well, George wasn't much older than you were.
Brownson: No, not really. Maybe he would be, what, four or five years older?
Blum: Yes, but not much more.
Brownson: Anyway, he would talk about what were good tools, how you pick out good instruments, how you check your triangles to see that they're square or not, what are good pencils and what are Conté pencils, and what are running a wash of these things? There was also a very skinny guard at the Art Institute at that time who was stationed right at the base of those stairs, and I subsequently found out that he was a poet, evidently, of some stature in Chicago. But anyway, later on I talked to him and he told me he was a poet, and I said, "Why do you work here?" He said, "Well, this is an ideal job." There weren't many people around at that time. It was very quiet. And so he said, "I can think and I can sit here and walk around and think about my poetry. It's ideal work and I get paid for doing it." So anyway, we went up there, and what was the first assignment? It was some kind of a building that they gave us to do. Of course, Danforth had been impressing on us this sense of quality in making the best of all of these things. So we were working night and day, and it was hot. Oh! And the sun coming through those skylights. And dirty. You were really working under terrible conditions. You'd have these big Strathmore boards. We always had to work on Strathmore. That was the material, you know. Now it's ten dollars a sheet, I guess. But anyway, we got all done and they were going to exhibit these things, and so in marched the upperclassmen. They had these gigantic, big, grease pencils, and they'd say, "What about this?!" And they drew on our drawings. We had this attitude that we're real architects. We are artists. You know, "We're the top of the line, and you can destroy our work?" And this went on. It was Tom Burleigh—I talked to Tom at one of the meetings in there. He had this pencil, and he said, "What about that?"
Blum: And he scribbled it all up?
27 Brownson: He couldn't see anything of the drawing anymore with all of this.
Blum: Did Mies or any of the real instructors come in and critique your work?
Brownson: I don't think I saw Mies the first two years. Well, I saw him, but that wasn't part of the—and I didn't see Hilbs. I saw Al Mell. He taught construction. And then there was Danforth. And who else was there? I really remember another one was Krehbiel. Do you remember Alfred Krehbiel?
Blum: He was an artist, wasn't he?
Brownson: He was an artist. He taught freehand and life drawing. We didn't realize it at the time, but he would have all of these plants and bouquets and things in wine bottles because he hung out at the Cliff Dwellers. And that's where he got all of these wine bottles, and he would come in. It was in freshman drawing, and he said, "Watch the voids."
Blum: Watch the what?
Brownson: The voids. Well, I thought he was saying, "Watch the boids”—the birds—and I didn't want to say how dumb I am.
Blum: And you were looking for the birds?
Brownson: I can't see any birds. But he was talking about something that is Krehbiel's way of teaching. He was really good. He was almost like the Greek guy who taught drawing at the Art Students League in New York. It was the same kind of way of looking. What he meant by watching the voids is that it's the negative spaces which are so important in making a drawing, and it didn't come back to me until six years later, I guess, when I came back, what the significance of watching the voids was. And the voids are the consequences of space, that spatial concept which is so important in architecture, which is one of the things that very few of us have—that sense of space which is so all-
28 consuming for architects. You look at the Pantheon, you look at Chartres Cathedral, you look at Hagia Sophia, you look at St. Mark's, it's space, you know? Krehbiel would talk about that. In fact, later on when I came back after the Second World War and Danforth asked me if I would teach descriptive geometry and beginning drafting I started to think about that, and there is a story about Spencer. He was the head of the engineering and drawing department at IIT.
Blum: Henry Spencer?
Brownson: I think it's Henry Spencer. He wrote the classic book on drafting, on all of the aspects of drawing. I was teaching descriptive geometry and, a point that's oversimplified, descriptive geometry is this point in space. You can generate almost anything. Two points makes a—connect the two and you get a straight line. But it's the definition of the point in space. You can look at it as having six sides—top, bottom and the four sides that you look at. So you define this point in space. We always worked on twenty-by-thirty sheets. The final drawings were made on twenty-by-thirty Strathmore board. But all of the beginning drawings were made, and we had forty-two-inch T-squares because we used thirty-by-forty Strathmore. We had these big triangles, and we had big drawing boards that we worked on. So for engineering drafting Spencer said, "I don't understand what you're trying to do," and so all of his students are coming, and they had, if you ever looked at them, they were taking descriptive geometry, they had these little things that would take an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of drawing paper, and they had these tiny, little, minuscule T-squares and little triangles like that. I said, "We're interested in more than just the technical solution to the problem. We're looking at the concept of space, and the drawing brings in a whole series of things. It's that sense of quality, of making a fine drawing. It's a realization of how you compose that kind of thing, because you can put it in many different ways.” Now the computer does the same thing. You can look at it from all sides, so you can make any kind of decision. But once you make that decision of what you're doing, then that starts to define what the final object is going to be. And I said, "Those are the kinds of things you want to get
29 across very subtly to the students." I said to Spencer, "The thing that I can't understand about the technical drawing…”
[Tape 2: Side 1]
Brownson: "So," I said, "the technical aspects of your book are excellent. It's a good source." In fact, I've got a copy upstairs or somewhere. "But," I said, "one thing I can't understand is why are you so shaky when you sketch?" They had a technique for sketching which was a series of short lines about an eighth or a quarter of an inch long. I said, "You've got a point here and you want to go someplace. Why don't you just go there with one line?" That's the same—who is the guy in the New Yorker who draws those shaky cartoons? I can't remember his name. But anyway, that was the difference between the so-called technical aspect and where it transcends the technical aspects of the work which you still have to base it on. If you look at one of these movements, for example, of a landing gear on one of these big jets landing, when you think about all of the spatial concepts of the movement of that thing through space, there are very few architects who can draw it because drawing now is all done with a CAD computer. This is the problem. I give this talk down at CU [Colorado University] every once in a while about being able to draw these things, that you should be above just pressing number sixty-four and out it pops with a screen that we can look at it from all angles and all that. But you take a look at this unbelievable sketch of Mies's of the concert hall which he made on a very little sheet of paper one day. I think he made it for Werner Blaser as they were talking about this concert hall. That tells you more about a concert hall than all of the most elaborate—you know, working drawings are simply a way of transmitting an idea. You get it down so somebody else can put the thing together, so a craftsman can do it. But it's that thought process that's behind it that's so important.
Blum: In your drawing class with Mr. Spencer, was that what he was trying to communicate with these small lines?
Brownson: No. We were up in Old Main, the freshmen. When I was teaching freshman
30 drawing and descriptive geometry, it was up on the top floor of Old Main, which is right next to the railroad tracks.
Blum: This is the original Armour Institute building.
Brownson: Yes, the original building. Spencer had his office up there, and he was at one end of the building. The technical drawing, engineering drawing as it was called, was separate. We just ran into one another in the hall or something. I had no connection with him other than using his book as kind of a reference book. No, I never had any courses or anything from him. But the way that engineers sketched it out, it's the same way almost if a doctor makes a drawing of one of your organs. He can do a pretty good job at it. He can go around like this, and he knows where things are and what to do. But you get him trying to say what he wants in a hospital, to plan a hospital, it's not there. That's the difference between an architect who is an architect and the other guy who is a hacker. It's in being able to define what that space is.
Blum: When you were at IIT for the first two years—this was 1941—was there a large student body?
Brownson: No, there was a very small student body. I forget what the number was, but very small. But now, as I said, the architecture courses, the drawing courses, were held at the Art Institute. I think that is a real loss, that the school was separated. A lot of people may disagree with this, and this is the battle going on in architecture. Is the architect really an artist or is he a builder? What is his real goal? You take somebody like Frank Gehry. Gehry would rather be an artist than he would an architect.
Blum: Do you disagree with that?
Brownson: Yes, I do. I think Corbusier would rather have been a painter than an architect, and that came very late in his career. You know, Mies made this marvelous watercolor drawing of the Farnsworth House. I don't know if you've seen that or not.
31 Blum: I have not.
Brownson: He made this watercolor drawing on tracing paper, and he was an unbelievable draftsman. But I think every human being wants to be something other than where their true abilities lie. There is a bit of Walter Mitty in us all, you know.
Blum: But, Jacques, I know that your interest and skills are well-founded in construction and building, so I understand where you're coming from. But why do you disagree that the role of an artist is more creative in the sense of being an artist than being practical in the sense of being a builder?
Brownson: What was that word you just used? Creative? There is no such word.
Blum: What do you mean?
Brownson: To be creative is to make something which doesn't exist. And all of the things that being an artist, whoever it is, are all floating around out there and are only waiting to be discovered. Discovery, yes. This was the discussion we used to have with Hilbs. Everybody would say, "I'm going to be creative." Hilbs said, "Just write your name."
Blum: What did he mean?
Brownson: No two people write their name the same way. That is being creative. It's unique. It's one of a kind. But the rest of the stuff is out there. Do you know Jorge Borges, the Argentinean Nobel writer who wrote the book Seven Nights? He was a Nobel laureate. He's dead now. He went blind in his latter life. But if you want to read an interesting series of articles about civilization—the Greeks have no word for "culture," you know. There is no word in Greek vocabulary for "culture." "Padiea," which is "life" is Greek life. Werner Jaeger, the German, wrote these three volumes on Greece, about Greek life—the padiea, life. Everything is in Greece, you know. It's all there,
32 everything. Rostovtzeff was an historian at the University of Wisconsin, and then he went in his latter years to Yale. He wrote two volumes, one is Greece and the other is Rome. I don't know whether you know those two volumes.
Blum: I don't.
Brownson: He talks about the relationship and the difference between Athens and Sparta and the difference between the Cretan house and the house on the mainland; how the house on the mainland was a fortress with little openings, and a little opening at the top to let out the smoke. The houses in the islands, protected by the sea all around them, generated a different kind of life and an openness, because the only thing they had to protect was the shore and not the house. But the house on the mainland of Greece had to be a fortress. You couldn't have big openings.
Blum: Just to get back to where we started with this, are you saying that this was a response to conditions and materials and a situation, and no one did anything out of their head which is what you would have thought of as being creative?
Brownson: I think mainly what we're probably talking about is a question of semantics. But when you really analyze the word “creative,” to create, did Michelangelo create Moses when he carved Moses? Did he create the paintings on the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel?
Blum: Did he, in your opinion?
Brownson: No, they came from that spirit of Michelangelo of bringing all of these things together. They were all floating around somewhere. This is the way I look at it, but these whole things, all these artists, it's all floating around out there, and they're able to bring it all together in their own way, using their own experiences and their own kind of impulse on the thing.
Blum: Isn't that the creative aspect? Would you accept that that is a creative way of
33 combining things, of putting things together in a new way?
Brownson: Well, we could talk a long time about this. To me it's a kind of discovery. Immanuel Kant talks about it, Nietzsche talks about it, Plato talks about it. We talk about the influence of Europe on the arts, but what is the influence of the Turkish Empire and impulse, and the question of the Mongol hordes as they came into Spain and brought change? When I climb to the top of Gaudi's church and look at that, I say, "Where in the hell does this come from? Where is this spirit?" It has to come from someplace. That is the thing that I have a quarrel with architects about. We seem to think that we know better than anybody else how all of this stuff comes together, and that's not so. Architects have relatively little influence on what's going on. There are a few major kinds of buildings that are brought about, but we don't build cathedrals. Why don't we build cathedrals? An architect cannot do anything that the epoch doesn't warrant. He didn't create the industrial revolution. He didn't create the Gothic revolution. He didn't create the Egyptian dynasties. All of these kinds of things have an importance to and have a reflection on his work, but what I'm talking about, he discovers those things. They become part of his spiritual way of looking at things. I suppose you could say, "Yes, that's being creative," but how many generations are there between our time and 5000 B.C.? Each generation stood on somebody's shoulders; somebody will stand on my personal shoulders. But Mies stood on somebody's shoulders, and who influenced Mies? What's that guy's name who did the turbine factory and all that stuff? [Peter Behrens] But we each build on what came before. We just add our little part to it. Did the painter Dove create abstract art? Picasso made the breakthrough on—you can get into that discussion with cubism, but did the horrors of Spain create Picasso's art form or what? I'm talking about the world-shaking painting of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"—the maidens. I think one of the things that's happened is—you know, I never worked in Mies's office on the drawing board.
Blum: Did you ever have a wish to do that?
Brownson: No. I worked in Mies's office on building the model for 880 and 860 [Lake
34 Shore Drive]. And who taught me how to solder?
Blum: Who?
Brownson: Naum Gabo.
Blum: How did that happen?
Brownson: One day we were working in Mies's office when it was on Wabash. Well, in order to cut a piece of wood or something, you would open the main door where it went into Mies's office and you would run the board through the saw and out into the corridor, which was upsetting to the other tenants. Then when you got done cutting, you would shut the door. We built 880 and 860 right there in the main entranceway to Mies's office. Ed Duckett worked in Mies's office on a steady basis, and I was teaching, and Ed asked me if I would help him on building this model, so I did. I worked on building the model, and one day I was working away there and some guy comes in to see Mies, and he said, "You haven't done much soldering, have you?" I said, "No, I really haven't," and he said, "Well, here, let me show you how to do that." And it was Naum Gabo.
Blum: Did you know who he was then?
Brownson: No, I didn't know it until after he left. He showed me how to do these things and how you soak up—do you know what a heat sink is? That's where you solder, you get the heat and the heat warps things, so you have to have a heat sink. The heat wants to go to the cold, which is the second law of thermodynamics, I guess. But anyway, Gabo showed how you can soak the heat out of the joint so it doesn't warp it. I still use that technique today when I'm working on sheet metal.
Blum: Don't most architects have that kind of training?
Brownson: I don't think so. See, that's another thing in these architecture schools. The
35 school didn't like soft pencils because they weren't precise enough—you know, these big, black, felt-tipped pens—or the paper called bumwad. Do you know what bumwad is? Bumwad is that yellow, cheap, crazy paper. It's the cheapest stuff that you can buy. It's called bumwad.
Blum: Is it like tissue paper?
Brownson: Yes, it's like tissue paper. There were a couple of things that used to really get Mies and Hilbs turned off, and that was bumwad and chipboard. Now, if you go to these architectural schools they use this gray, cheap, cardboard they cut out to make models. Their buildings look like chipboard. You look at them, and that's where one of the problems is. They say the modern architect doesn't—they're because of this lousy chipboard, which is only a surface. It has no structure to it. It's easy to do. It's the same way with building cars. If you look at this Porsche that Kommenda built, it is made out of sheet metal. It is made out of sheet metal by actually taking the sheet metal and forming it, hammering it and actually working with it to create these kinds of forms. If you look at the so-called Harley Earle school of design—he was the head guru for General Motors—that is the clay school of cars. The cars are made out of clay. If you look at them, you can see every sculptor's tool used for shaping clay in the modern automobile. All of the forms are there that are based on the tools. Now, in the cathedrals—the Milan cathedral is disaster from a couple of standpoints, and one is that it was committeed to death. The best records of any of the cathedrals is the one in Milan. There were meetings over and over and over again. It's really a weak building. If you look at Chartres, which is a remodeling job done in twenty-five years by about eight different guys working on it, eight different master masons, each with their own foot measurement. Each one had a different foot measurement for the thing. But you look at the cathedrals in France, and then the English took this thing over. They became so good at carving this soft limestone, which is like butter. You can work that stuff. You can take a knife and scrape it. Now, let's look at Durham Cathedral and think what you have to do when you work in granite. You can't work granite like you can sandstone. The details are different, and it's interesting to look in Florence. The Pitti Palace is a stone
36 building. Then go over and look at one of the Medici buildings. The material has all to do with it and how you're working with it.
Blum: So are you saying that years ago people were well trained in their craft?
Brownson: Oh, yes.
Blum: And today architects are no longer well trained in their craft but they're using different materials and responding to different conditions and programs and situations?
Brownson: Well, the difficulty I have is the transformation that's going on. Where is the position of the architect in building something? What is their contribution to this process? Where do they enter into it?
Blum: Well, Jacques, you are in the best position to answer it from your own experience. Maybe it's changed. Maybe your ideas have changed. But when you were the head designer at Murphy and you designed this spectacular building, the Civic Center? What was your role?
Brownson: I didn't design it; we built it.
Blum: You built it, but you didn't just put it there.
Brownson: We'll get into the question of building the Civic Center, but there are some other very interesting things. I'm surprised that nobody has really picked it up because I firmly believe that architecture is based fundamentally in structure. That is something, of course, that Mies believed in very strongly. But the question is, what is structure? What is that thing called structure? What makes a structure? I used to travel around when I was working and go to look at these big suspension bridges. I went to see the Veranzano Bridge under construction. I went up to the Mackinac Bridge that Steinman built across the straits. I studied the best one in New York City, which is the George Washington Bridge. I'm talking about a post-bridge after Roebling.
37 Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge is much more Romanesque than the George Washington Bridge. The very heavy supports that come up at each end, and the cable, in effect, the catenary is draped across those. The Washington Bridge is a steel bridge that uses the techniques of working with metal. The towers are all—and it was originally supposed to be covered with stone. They ran out of money and didn't cover it, fortunately. When you're in the Cloisters, the interesting thing about going to the Cloisters is to sit in the garden. There is that medieval garden on the one side, and you can look out and you can see the Washington Bridge, and you can look the other way and you see the Cloisters. You look at that contrast and see the changes that took place.
Blum: The difference?
Brownson: How can the architects today waste their time on cake decoration? That is all that this profession has become.
Blum: What is the relationship between structure and decoration?
Brownson: This question of structure is so important. It's got nothing to do with decoration but structure can become decoration, too. It can become very decorative. Everybody cites what the Greeks did. In fact, there are cases where the temples were built out of wood, the columns and all that. They rotted out and they replaced them with stone because they ran out of wood, quite frankly. They cut everything down in the countryside. They talk about even the wood pegs, and they carved them in stone. You talk to most architects today—I think one of the reasons why I became so disillusioned about this thing, it's become, like Henry van de Velde said, newness and novelty, where the French say ennui. They're so bored. Or Frank Lloyd Wright says it in a much grosser way. He said, "You know, the American architects"—he talked about the Americans at the time he gave this lecture—he said, "You American architects, you get an idea and you kick it in the ass and run the other way. You don't stick with it."
38 Blum: Didn't Mies express a similar idea when he said that you don't build new architecture every Monday morning?
Brownson: Yes, every Monday morning you don't make new architecture. But what have we done? The administration talks about IIT as a prime example.
Blum: A prime example of what?
Brownson: I suppose I should bite my tongue now, but they like to collect trophy specimens at IIT. They make a big fuss over Mies. They don't really understand what it was. They don't understand what that school was. They don't understand what Hilberseimer was. This book, In the Shadow of Mies, that's a misunderstanding about Hilbs. There also was a misunderstanding that came through on the Hilbs exhibit that he was proposing this necropolis of a city.
Blum: Do you mean in the drawing where all the buildings were very large and lined up in a row and looked the same?
Brownson: But was he proposing that or was he just saying, "Boys, that's what it's going to be if you're not careful"?
Blum: What was he doing, in your opinion?
Brownson: I think he was saying that's what you're going to end up with if you're not careful and don't start to think about the consequences of your work. We've got one going up here in Denver by Michael Graves, a library building. In many ways it's like Mussolini modern. It's so clumsy and so contrived and so tricked up. There isn't any trick that's in the books that hasn't been tried in that building.
Blum: Jacques, some of the things you're saying are a response to your experience and to what's happening today. Probably everything is factored into your ideas today, and you sound very critical of the architectural profession.
39 Would you comment on that?
Brownson: Well, I think I am critical, but not in a personal way. There are many problems with our cities and with the kinds of buildings and things that we need. All societies start to get bored with what has been going on. It seems that you get to a certain point, which I have heard other of my colleagues say, "Well, what else can we do? A lot of the possibilities have been tried. We've got steel skeletons; we've got all of these other kinds of ways of doing things. What else is there but to, and I use the term, “paste on” the architecture on the outside? Frank Lloyd Wright called it the wallpaper, and here was Wright, working on this kind of spatial concept. Some of the things he was involved in were the Usonian houses and building affordable dwellings. I sit in on zoning meetings, and I know that this Cherry Creek area [Denver] is the hottest area in the United States in terms of the return on the dollar investment by investors. The Cherry Creek Shopping Mall generates more money than any other shopping center in the world, I guess. I don't know. But anyway, they're talking about, "Well, we're going to make affordable housing." Affordable housing? Three, four, five hundred thousand dollars? Rents which are two, three thousand dollars a month? We haven't even started to define some of the problems, like the greenbelt cities we're trying to explore, like Frank Lloyd Wright and his Usonian houses, with what we have. What is the role of this industrial technology as it gathers steam? How do those things affect the kinds of things we're building? Have you seen the international terminal at O'Hare Field with the big arch? I know there are a lot of political pressures in how these things come about, but it doesn't seem like a very nice arrival to a major city when you come into that building.
Blum: Jacques, many architects that flourished after the war and followed Mies by using his vocabulary—new architecture, contemporary, call it whatever you want—shared the hope for a bright, new world. There was to be a better future, and it was symbolized by a new kind of building that Mies’s work epitomized. Many people who thought that at that time have become disillusioned, thinking the promise didn't materialized. The promise was there, but it didn't happen that way. What you're saying strikes me in that
40 vein, maybe disillusionment. And today, you're saying, it doesn't have any social meaning, any moral content, but it did at that time. Is that what you're saying?
Brownson: No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that there seems to be a failure to understand and to set your sights high enough. The opportunities are here, the kinds of things we need are here, but it doesn't seem that anybody can get at that problem. I don't think there is any reason to be disillusioned. I'm not disillusioned. What I'm railing against is this thing that has crept in under the guise of architecture where you are now pasting facades on buildings rather than letting the needs for these things generate a new kind of building. We spent over four billion dollars—almost five billion dollars—on a new airport in Denver, and we spent I forget how many millions of dollars on art, much of which is kitsch.
Blum: Art for the airport?
Brownson: For the airport. I think millions and millions of dollars went in. One percent of the cost of the building had to go into the art. So everybody is swarming all over this pot of honey out there. All the artists want a part of it. They want to work. I can understand that. But we built the most archaic, old-fashioned airport that you ever saw. Oh, it's bright and shiny and new—the same way with Cherry Creek. I said, "You're building a future slum, only it's got fresh paint on it now. It is no different." You can't breathe the air because it's so polluted. They get no sun, so most of the buildings are all dark. But that doesn't make any difference because everybody is working night and day, and they only get home at night so they never see the sun anyway. So what difference does it make? The problems with water that we have. All of these kinds of things should start to generate a new response. We should have an airport here in the West, in the United States, which reflects how an airplane is truly used. You don't land and then turn around again and run it like a Honda taxicab or something. These are big, technical devices to move large groups of people from one place to another. There is a kind of mobility involved in it. And yet, you build an automobile with a three, four hundred
41 horsepower engine in it, to do what? You can't use it. They tout zero to sixty miles per hour in six seconds. Where are you going to go? You can't drive it that fast.
Blum: Do you think the technology is just sort of ridiculous for itself because it’s not really being applied in a way where it's useful for people?
Brownson: It is without connection to how the human being actually is using all of these things. An airport out there—there is no way to get to it. Nobody thought that maybe there should be some kind of mass transit or something to go in it. In Frankfort, you can get on downtown and get off there at the airport.
Blum: Do you think this is only an American problem?
Brownson: No, it's worldwide. It's all over. But I'm saying that those are the interesting things, and I don't see that kind of thinking coming out of the schools. Today it’s not like the post-World War II era, coming back to school—all of these GIs who had been all over the world, coming back and sitting down and talking about what we were trying to do. I suppose I should write to the IIT administration and say, "Why don't you go back to your library and take a look at some of the things that were written about what were the possibilities?" Nobody likes change, you know. Somebody tells me I can't have a cup of coffee in my favorite spot, I'm going to protest. We don't like change. But change is inevitable. You've got to face that. When we get into the discussion about Auraria, you'll see that when we started Auraria I knew that we didn't have a solid program, and I'll tell you how the buildings evolved from that.
Blum: When you were at IIT the first time, was there something in the teaching that you received that instilled you with this idea of importance of structure, the appropriateness of material, the appropriate use of whatever technology was available? When did that happen?
Brownson: That didn't come about in the first two years. That came about after the war.
42 The important things in the first two years were, first of all, I didn't really know how to draw until I really got acquainted with certain engineering principles, graphic statistics, descriptive geometry, life drawing and being able to put it all together. Over there is an ink—I call it calligraphy—by Tony Candido, a New Yorker. He studied architecture at IIT. It's the question between the hand and the brain, of the thought processes that guides the hand. But there were some important things in that beginning part. If you're going to be a writer, you have to have a vocabulary. You have to know the alphabet. If you're a poet, you'll express that vocabulary a certain way. If you're just writing a business letter, it's another way. It uses the same vocabulary, but it's the spirit that drives that. It's the way somebody sees things. Ortega-y-Gasset in his book, The Meaning of the University, writes that a medical doctor is not a scientist. A medical doctor knows the art and science of medicine. He knows if he gives you an aspirin, that's going to do a certain thing. If he does something else, he's going to get another thing. There's a lot of touch-and-go with it, but he's not out there prodding into the causes of all. He's too busy trying to keep somebody's finger from bleeding or falling off, and, in a way, he’s a kind of technician. He makes use of the science.
Blum: But some doctors are in research exclusively, are they scientists in your opinion?
Brownson: That's right.
Blum: So they're doing what you say the practitioner in his office doesn't have time to do.
Brownson: And the practitioner doesn't require the same kind of training that the scientist does to do his work. That is the mistake that these architecture schools are making. They are not giving students the fundamental, basic requirements of the art and science of building that an architect needs to know. Right away they want to start to do a lot of research and all of these other kinds of things, and what are you going to do? Like Mies said, are you
43 going to invent a new architecture every Monday morning? It can't be done.
Blum: Jacques, it's always been my understanding that among the schools of architecture, at least in the United States, there are those that are a hands-on experience, such as IIT, and there are those that are more theoretical—Harvard, Yale, Princeton. They give very different kinds of training, and I would imagine that the people coming out of them would approach the field in very different ways.
Brownson: Well, that's right, and I think that there is room in education for these various points of view if they are based on some kind of solid introspection of what's going on. There is not a frivolous approach to it.
[Tape 2: Side 2]
Brownson: I thought last night after our session that there was one thing that I wanted to bring up because it comes back later at IIT also. In 1938, and I would have been fifteen years old then, I came under the influence of the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. The way that came about was—and I'm sure you know it and other people know it—they took architects and artists and technicians and they tried to give them some kind of work. They had architects drawing all of the buildings around the town and making a record of the town's buildings, and they had the artists teaching. Well, anyway, they started a program in Aurora, Illinois, where they would take young people from the high schools, and after class, in the evenings and on Saturdays and on weekends, they would instruct them in doing various things. I was interested in doing that. I took a course, I remember, from a cartoonist in drawing cartoons. The other one was some shop courses in working on building different things. Then I also came in contact with aviation mechanics. They had a big Curtiss-Wright nine-cylinder radial engine which was on a big stand in this old building, and the instructor had us take the motor apart and then put it back together again. Also at that time the WPA was involved in making the first agricultural atlas of the land in the United States. This comes back later with Hilbs because that atlas was used in the
44 planning courses at IIT. So, I wanted to get that in because these things had an influence on me later.
Blum: Well, it certainly is evident today, sitting in this room with your model airplanes and your interest in rebuilding old cars. You were at IIT during the early part of the war. There was knowledge and certainly awareness of what was happening in Europe. What was the atmosphere on campus among the students?
Brownson Absolutely. In fact, it's interesting, the conditions during that time, in 1941 and 1942, came back to me through Marta Moeller. She was Mies's secretary, or the secretary of the school. She was the real taskmaster. I'll tell you, she ruled everything, including Mies, I think. But anyway, we were one step ahead of the draft, and everybody was wondering what was going to happen to them with this thing, particularly after December 7th when we declared war. Everything was in kind of a turmoil, and I remember a kind of very frivolous atmosphere, a kind of laissez-faire way of looking at things. There was a lot of partying. There was a lot of wondering how serious all of the things we were studying really were, whether they had any meaning when the reports on the war kept coming back, particularly in 1942. You know, we were really wondering as young people—and I faced this problem which I can talk more about when we discuss the University of Michigan and the Vietnam war when I was teaching. It was a similar thing—we really didn't know where we were. We had no clear picture, and so consequently what do you do? You kind of take it day by day and try to find what you can out of it. But you cannot be really serious about the kind of work that you're doing.
Blum: Did you think that you were going to serve in the service?
Brownson: Oh, I knew, there was no question about that. In fact, I volunteered before I was drafted. I knew I was going to be drafted, so I volunteered because I wanted to get into the Army engineers. I wanted to do something and so I applied, with my background, for service with the Army engineers. That's how I got in the engineering corps. I could have been a cook or something
45 else, but I wasn't. Yes, I talked to you a little bit about the zip code 606. The 606 was my exposure to the fleshpots of Chicago. There was a 606 Club on Wabash.
Blum: Was that like Club Alabam?
Brownson: The 606 was a girlie show club. We can talk more about the girlie clubs, because it involves Max Beckmann, after the war when I came back, and about North Clark Street which was also notorious. But anyway, we used to hang out at the 606 Club. I don't know how we did that. We certainly weren't of age.
Blum: Was this when you were first attending IIT, before the war?
Brownson: Yes, during that early period. That 606 Club was so notorious that it became the first three digits for the zip code for Chicago.
Blum: Are you sure of that?
Brownson: I'm pretty sure of it. It's a romantic kind of idea, and I think that the historians in Chicago—you can ask some historian about that. But anyway, that was my understanding, and I'll tell you more about the 606 Club after the war because it was also involved then.
Blum: Would you talk a little bit about your war service? I know you were in China, Burma and India. That's quite a wide swatch. You said you joined the Army engineers to continue your interest.
Brownson: Well, as I said, we were all one step ahead of the draft. Everybody was just one step ahead of the draft. I remember we used to discuss it a lot of times at the school, particularly with the upperclassmen, who were much more vulnerable to going immediately than I was. I had a little leeway in there at the early part of the war. But the upperclassmen kept talking about where they were going and how were they going to make use of their education and
46 what they were going to do. So we discussed that thing, but when I realized that I was going to have to go, I went and enlisted, as I said, because I wanted to work in the Corps of Engineers. I didn't realize, I think, what being on the front lines all the time with an outfit like that was really like. I looked at it as though you were engineering something. Well, that was the least of what the engineers were doing. So anyway, I volunteered and I ended up in Michigan and then down in Camp Claiborn, Louisiana, for basic training. It was so hot they said, "One thing about taking basic training at Camp Claiborn, you're never going to have to go overseas because you're all burned out. You've just been worked to death. You're going to stay in the States." Well, the next thing we knew we were on the train for I don't know how long up to Monroe, North Carolina, for more combat training, and then over to Hampton Roads, Virginia, and on to a troop carrier, this gigantic boat, which was loaded five litters high. Each bunk was maybe twelve inches or so between you and the guy above you. He was right in your face all the time. But they were double- loaded, so we took off from Hampton Roads down through the Caribbean. There was a lot of activity with German submarines at that time, so we never went in a straight line. We would zigzag continually and then change course, night and day.
Blum: Did you know where you were headed?
Brownson: No, we didn't know where we were headed for. We thought we were headed for someplace in Africa or in that section, but we realized what was going on when we entered the Panama Canal. We went through the Panama Canal, and we had the usual crossing-the-Equator and all of these kinds of ceremonies. At that time I was very young, and here I was on this troop carrier. Then we realized that we were headed for someplace in the Pacific. We ended up going, and the next stop was Melbourne, Australia, to pick up a load of goat meat and oranges. So now where are we going? We took off from Melbourne and went around the southern part of Australia and ended up in Bombay, India. The reason I'm saying all of this is because of the effect—I didn't realize it then—of this very crowded troop ship, heavily loaded. We got to Bombay, and I had never experienced that number of
47 people on a street in my life. You would walk down the street, and you were surrounded by humanity. It was one mass of people. I remember they were building something there near the dock, and they had a one-sack cement mixer and this continual line of women with little baskets that would come by the cement mixer. The guy would give them a little pile of cement in their basket, and they would go up and dump it in the forms and keep walking around. It was a human conveyor belt, you know? It was better than any mechanical system. It was continuous. You can move a lot of concrete that way, if you had the humanity to do it. This comes back later on in the building of the Ledo Road. Then the other thing is that we wandered around and began to realize the conditions under which many of the people lived. We'd go through the bazaars, and I'd never experienced anything like that. As I said, I hadn't been out of Aurora very long, in Chicago, and I didn't really understand all of this mass of humanity. Then I ended up at some club someplace down on the wharf, in one of the areas. It was, I guess, some kind of a British club. Anyway, they had these fantastic chairs with big, long arms that went way out. Maybe you've seen them. They're big, long arms that go clear out like that. When you went to sit down you'd have to kind of work in and then work back and sit down. I'm sitting like that, and this limey comes by. We called them limeys, you know.
Blum: What is a limey?
Brownson: A limey was an English soldier because, I guess it goes back to lime juice or to lime squash or something. But anyway, the drink involved was gin and either lime squash or lemon squash or one of those squash drinks. So to this other soldier I said, "What are these crazy chairs?" He was there, and do you remember those shorts that they had? They almost came down to their knees. "Oh," he said, "that's the only way you can tolerate this climate. You put one leg on the arm like that and the other leg on the other arm like that, and the air circulates right around your crotch." So this shows you functional architecture as a functional design.
Blum: Did it impress you as functional at the time?
48 Brownson: No, we had these same kind of suntan pants on. We didn't have that. So then we took off from Bombay by railroad, across…
Blum: What were you doing in Bombay? Did you just stop there to go somewhere else?
Brownson: No, the ship unloaded in Bombay. All of the troops disembarked, unloaded, and were assigned to this railroad train. We took our gear and all of our stuff, got on the train and started out, heading north. We didn't know where we were going and headed north up across the country towards Burma. I remember looking out the window and seeing the Brahmaputra River and all of this stuff coming down the river that had just been thrown in. I remember seeing a body floating by in the river, and all of these kinds of things and wondering about that. Then you would stop at a railroad station, and they would come up to the car and say, "Bakshee, bakshee!" They were looking for a handout.
Blum: What does it mean, money?
Brownson: It means "give me something." Yes, "Bakshee, bakshee." I was being exposed to another side of the world that I had had no contact whatsoever with. I had no idea it even existed.
Blum: This little kid from Aurora was growing a lot.
Brownson: Well, yes. You didn't have any other choice. So then the other thing was, so here goes this troop train, and all of a sudden the troop train stops in the trees out in the middle of the jungle. "Okay, boys, refreshment time." And this guy comes out and he's got this big, long—what do you call those sticks they always carried, the colonel, you know, the colonel always carried these kind of crops?
Blum: A walking stick?
49 Brownson: Crops, like a riding crop, and they'd always be hitting their thigh with it. "Okay, boys, we're going to have something."
Blum: It sounds very British, not American.
Brownson: It was British. The train was under British control. So we're thinking, "Ah, something nice and cold," and we marched up this trail, up through the jungle, got in this little clearing there, and here are two or three big cauldrons full of hot, steaming tea.
Blum: Now that's British!
Brownson: This is the first exposure to the British mentality, and here was the refreshment, hot tea. And it is so hot, you can't stand it. But anyway, we kept on going and we ended up at Ledo. Ledo was the railhead, the end of the railroad, and it even got to the point on the train that you could hardly sleep, it was so hot, but any place that you could get horizontal. So we finally ended up at Ledo. It got a little organized and we got into some camps and things like that. That was where all of the material came in from the ports in India. It came in from Calcutta, Bombay, and it was the beginning—see, the problem over what the strategy was. You can read the whole strategy in Barbara Tuchman's book on Stilwell [Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45], which is a marvelous documentary of what was happening in China. The Japanese were pushing down through Burma, and they were actually into India when we got there. We would see them coming back from the front, these, well, we called them chindits and Australians with their folded-up hats or caps, or those ten-gallon hats only one side is folded up, and Merrill's Marauders and all of the guys coming out of the jungle. They were really beat up. They had been living in the jungle for months. So we were on the way up to this area up in Myitkyina because Myitkyina was under siege at that time. The idea was that the pipeline which came from Calcutta carrying fuel, aviation fuel and fuel for all of the vehicles, was to go through the Himalayas through the valleys of the hump, into Kunming,
50 China, because Kunming was to become a main attack base for the B-29s against the Japanese. Our job was to build the Ledo Road. We would go into the jungle with our equipment and build the road so that we could get the trucks and the necessary supplies over into China eventually and connect up with the Burma Road which was coming the other way through Kunming. Before the Ledo Road was completed, which wasn't almost until the end of the war, the C-47s, which were actually oversized DC-3s in the civilian era, were flying everything over the hump into Kunming. They were carrying gasoline and fuel and everything to supply this thing on the other side of the hump. Alongside of the road—and I suppose actually it affects my thinking about aviation in a way—we were building landing strips for the Flying Tigers, for the fighter pilots. There were two things that we used extensively. One was panels of steel that were about twelve inches wide and maybe ten, twelve feet long. They were used, and they had holes in them about so big that lightened them up. They were just snapped together to make a runway for landing these planes. So we could go in, and overnight we would have a landing strip. We would keep jumping up along the road, and we would keep building these landing strips. The pipeline group was bringing the pipeline up, and the railroad battalions were bringing the railroad lines up. We were in the front, building these bridges in front of the road builders so that when they got to a place where they had to cross over there was a bridge there. You never know what effect some of these things have on you, but we used a thing called a Bailey bridge, named for an English engineer. It's a very famous bridge, Bailey bridge, and it was made up in prefabricated panels that could be handled by four or six men. They were all welded together, and they had holes in them where a pin could go through. You could connect these panels and make a bridge of the carrying capacity necessary. You could put them together, three or four or however many wide, and stack them up one on top of another. And depending on the span that you wanted to go across the river or the gulch or whatever it was, you engineered the thing accordingly based on Bailey's bridge panels. This was the way we kept leapfrogging all the way into China. One of my jobs was to determine as we built these things—I was a technical sergeant, what was called a T sergeant. It's just below a master sergeant. One of my jobs was to determine the size of
51 the members that we had to use, the number we had to put together, and we would build them on the shore. You'd have two big rollers that you would put on the bank, and you would build this thing all on the shore. You would extend it out, back down however far, and you would do that based on how far you thought it was to the other side of the river. You also had to have a launching section to get all of these men on there and start it rolling, and to have enough momentum so that you could launch it across on the other side. Okay, so here we had this one which was a pretty good span. I'm putting all of these things together, and somebody comes up to me and says, "Are you sure it's long enough?" I said, "It's long enough. Let's go." And so we started to roll this thing, you know, and we gave it a big push and it fell right down in the river down below. This guy said, "I told you it wasn't long enough." But that was the technique that we used in building all of these bridges. This Bailey bridge was an amazing development. It was used all through Europe. The Army engineers made extensive use of it. There must be Bailey bridges, I'm sure, all over the world yet that are sitting there. We had an interesting time. Then the other thing was beer. We got one case of beer a month. That was our rations, and it would come in. Of course, it was hot, so we'd always con one of the pilots into loading up the C-47 with the cases of beer and flying it around up high and cooling it off. It would be a little cool, and he'd get back down and it would be fairly drinkable. So in the meantime, somebody would go out fishing. We did grenade fishing.
Blum: What kind?
Brownson: Grenade fishing, with hand grenades. We'd go upriver, and we'd throw a couple of hand grenades in the river. They'd explode and the fish were stunned and they'd come floating down and the guys downstream would catch these things and so then we'd have a big fish fry. By that time the beer was cold when the pilot came back down. Well, it really wasn't cold, so here is old Jacques, who said, "Well, we can fix that." How do I remember these things? I had this other friend of mine, Peter Zombeck from Brooklyn, who was something else—a typical Brooklyn guy. I said, “Come on, Peter. We're going to build a refrigerator. We've got to cool it. It's very simple. We've got
52 these Diamond T trucks. They've got an air compressor on them, and we can charge that up. I know enough about how we can build one of these. You know how to make a box, some kind of an insulated box out of something? You build a box, and I'll build the refrigeration thing with this compressor.” So I went down to Digboi [India]. This was the main motor pool, and one day I took this trip and went down there. I don't know how many miles away. I went and said, "We need a Diamond T dump truck," which I knew had a compressor on it. "I'd like to get one for Company C." He said, "Oh, we don't have any." I said, "What do you mean, you don't have any? I see a whole field full of them out there." He said, "Yes, but they don't run." I said, "What do you mean, they don't run?" He said, "Somebody has taken all of the compressors and the copper lines off of them, the air brakes. There are no brakes on them. They stole all of the stuff to make stills."
Blum: To make liquor?
Brownson: To make stills. They took all of the copper brake lines to make stills to make alcohol. Well, anyway, I finally got all of these parts together some way, and we built this thing. We had it sitting there in the middle of the trees, and we started this thing up. Everybody is standing around. They've all got their beer in the cooler, waiting for it to get cold. Every time I'd open the box up it got hotter inside the box. These guys would look in there, and it was getting hotter and hotter and hotter. The damn beer was boiling almost! They'd like to run me out of town. It never did work.
Blum: You were quite an asset to Company C, weren't you?
Brownson: I'll never forget that.
Blum: Between the Bailey bridge miscalculation and the refrigerator that got hot, beneath it all, you were really learning by making these mistakes.
Brownson: You know, the monsoons would come, and for months it would do nothing but rain, just rain.
53 Blum: Was this in India?
Brownson: India and Burma, as we went up into Burma. And the other thing is that we made extensive use of native workmen, of the Naga tribesmen. We were located in an area that became known after the war as the Golden Triangle. I don't know whether you've ever heard of that. The Golden Triangle is where all of the heroin comes from, and it's controlled by a group of thugs, local Naga people. They grow poppies and they ship heroin down, and almost all the world's supply of heroin comes from this golden triangle in Burma. But we never had any problem with drugs in the Second World War. The drug that we had was alcohol. That was a worse drug. We had these workmen, and we would go along and they would invite us down to their village. I remember one night we were going down, and I could hear this thing and it sounded like "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The tune was "Onward, Christian Soldiers" because the missionaries, I found out later, had been there years and years before. They made some kind of an alcoholic brew that tasted awful, but anyway, they were roasting meat and when they cut it, it tasted pretty good. Finally, I said, "What is this? What kind of meat?" Monkey. We were eating roast monkey. They had these monkeys on the spit. But the system on building the road was where you would call out entire villages. You would have women and children, and they would be sitting there, breaking stone—I see it every once in a while on a documentary—breaking it all by hand and making road gravel. Then there were these gigantic rollers. There were stone rollers as big as this room, pulled literally by a half a mile of people, pulling this roller back and forth, preparing the base for these air fields. So, okay, all of a sudden the war shifts gear. They start to shift the B- 29s around from Saipan to bombing Japan, and they decide, well, they're going to move some of us engineers to do some other work, building barracks and other kinds of thing over in Kunming, China. So they take a load of us on a C-47, and we fly hump over the Himalayas and land at Kunming, China. So what do I get assigned? What kind of a job do I get? They found out that I had some engineering and some other things, so all of a sudden I got a notice one morning that said, "Brownson, get over, the general
54 wants to see you." I said, "The general wants to see me?" So I went over, and actually it was the colonel, and part of his staff and the general was there. The general's name was Cheeves. He was in charge of the base at Kunming. He was building a headquarters for the Asia command, I guess. What it really was was a palazzo for himself. So they said, "Sergeant Brownson, we want you to go over there. We've got a Chinese architect, and we want you to go over and speed that job along and look after it and see that it gets done. Anything you need, let us know and we'll get it for you." Sure, they'll get it for us because the general was flying in bathtubs, bidets and all kinds of luxuries. He was flying it all in on these transports. He finally, I think, got clipped for this thing. So anyway, I went over and reported to where they were building this thing. It was a big compound wall and this big house, and I looked at it and it was shades of Frank Lloyd Wright. Pretty soon the architect shows up, Yen Liang. Who is Yen Liang? He is a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright's from Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Blum: What a small world!
Brownson: So he designed this thing. He was the architect, and we did this thing. We built fireplaces and big reception halls. The kitchen, of course, had a whole series of woks in it. But anyway, Cheeves wanted to have running water and all of this stuff in this compound and he wanted to have everything working just right, so he would fly in all of this plumbing gear. I don't know where he got it, but after it was all connected up, you had a big tower with a thing that gave you the pressure, The water was up high, so with one of these gasoline pumps you'd pump the water there and then you'd have the pressure. But the problem was that all of these Chinese valves and pipes and everything were like sieves. They were full of holes because the castings were so bad. So the water would be going all over everything, and you'd be fighting this thing. And the graft. The other thing that I learned about the Chinese was that the Chinese workmen were great gamblers. When they were building something, they would first build themselves a little house, and they had a little cooking place. That was where they lived, and they would gamble all of the time. They were continually gambling. They were always stealing stuff
55 and selling stuff in order to maintain their gambling habits. Anyway, that was one of the things.
Blum: Did working on that house further your interest in architecture?
Brownson: Oh, sure. I was always interested.
Blum: Or engineering more than architecture?
Brownson: Yen Liang was interesting, and I got to see a part of China which is not only the normal peasant, but also the other side of the Chinese life where you had all of the banquets. I can never forget those banquets that we had that just went on and on. And there was the hot wine. You always drank cold wine as an introductory drink, but once the grease started to flow—I'm talking about the Peking duck; you know, Chinese food is loaded with fat—then you switched over and the wine became hot. It was all warm wine so it wouldn't congeal in your stomach. So I became acquainted with that side of China and going to all of these fancy houses in the compounds. Werner Blaser wrote several books on Chinese houses, and we've talked about that, the magnificent houses. From the outside you'd look at these adobe walls, but then inside there were fantastic gardens and fish ponds, and the relationship between the house and nature and the exposure it had. The Chinese house, of course, is the forerunner, before the Japanese era.
Blum: Were there things that you picked up from this experience that have served you in good stead over the years?
Brownson: Oh, sure. I think the question of gardens and orientation. The sunlight, the use of water, the ponds and other kind of things had an influence. Some of those gardens in Kunming were just exquisite. Yen Liang, whom I talked about, comes back in the United Nations. I'll jump ahead a little bit about when I went to New York to help put the Mies exhibit together in MoMA. I was in the garden at the museum, standing there. They had a little food kiosk. That was before the elaborate part that was built later on. But I'm
56 standing there and getting something to drink, and someone taps me on the shoulder and I turned around—my God, Yen Liang! I said, "What are you doing here on the East Coast from Kunming, China?" He said, "I'm a part of the Chinese delegation. We're building the United Nations"—you know, the Secretariat Building. He said, "Would you like to see what we are doing?" I said yes. He took me over there, and he showed me all of the different proposals and the kind of things that were happening. During the same time as setting up that MoMA exhibit, we had an opening night party at Mary Callery's. Do you know who Mary Callery is?
Blum: I know who you are talking about.
Brownson: She was the sculptor and was a friend of Mies's, a friend of Picasso's. In her apartment I met Wallace Harrison at that time. When was that, 1947 or so, that exhibit? But anyway, that's where the China experience comes back to me in New York. It's a small world.
Blum: Were there other engineering or architectural influences that you brought back with you that maybe you made use of at another time later in your career?
Brownson: I'm sure there were, because one of the things, whenever I go into a city, any city, I like to explore and see what's there. But in Kunming the notice came—well, first of all we went through when the atomic bomb was dropped. Then came the notice that the Japanese for all practical purposes are being defeated. So then the shooting starts in the Army. Man, it was like gunfight at the OK Corral. Everybody has their guns out, shooting and banging around. So we all head out for the graveyards so we don't get shot. We all had to protect ourselves so we didn't get shot. It was bad enough during the war, but here these guys, everybody is shooting their guns.
Blum: The victory celebration was going to kill you.
Brownson: The victory celebration. The interesting thing in China—of course, there are
57 no woods or anything else around there, but there are these mounds, this whole section. It's a graveyard, you know. The other thing that was interesting about Kunming was that I spent a lot of time up on West Mountain. West Mountain in Kunming is the religious area where the big, big Buddhas and temples are. There is a lake there, and it's a very exquisite part of the country, particularly the rice paddies and the terracing and the whole way that the space looks. In the morning you'd have that fog and that ethereal light that would come across.
[Tape 3: Side 1]
Brownson: What with the change in direction of the war in the Pacific and the fact that there were other directions that were going to be taken, we were a group of maybe eighteen or twenty who were selected to go into Shanghai. We were to take over the city before the formal surrender to be sure that the services and the requirements were kept intact and moving so that a transition could occur. So we were loaded on a DC-4, I guess it was, and we ended up taking off from Kunming for Shanghai. Nobody had ever been up there before, and the pilot said, "I don't know where the airfield is, but keep your eyes open. If you see something, we'll take a look at it." So finally we landed at the airport in Shanghai, and who was there to meet us? A great big fat German guy who we subsequently found out belonged to the Shanghai German Bund—he was a part of it—inviting us to a dinner that evening. The Japanese were in the city, and for a few days before the Seventh Fleet came in, we had the city to ourselves. We would go into a bar or a place, and we'd simply sign our name and have whatever we wanted. We had the run of the town. At night you'd have all of these Japanese troops marching by with their guns and everything going down the street, and here we are, riding in a rickshaw, a couple of us, out on the town.
Blum: It doesn't sound like you were still fighting the war.
Brownson: Yes. Anyway, the Seventh Fleet came in. There was a big White Russian contingent in Shanghai. I lived in an apartment on Avenue Joffee in the
58 French quarter. It overlooked the racecourse, and there was the Whangpoo River. I lived there in an apartment with a Chinese woman and her French husband. They housed me and gave me a room.
Blum: How long were you in Shanghai?
Brownson: I was there for about three or four months. So then we went around to survey the buildings and see what conditions they were in. We went into this big hotel which was right on Bubbling Well Road next to the Whangpoo River, and there wasn't a radiator or a pipe or anything in the place. The Japanese had just literally stripped Shanghai of all the metal and had hauled it back for armaments. But then the Seventh Fleet came in and unloaded this tremendous arsenal of materiel. It was piled as far as you could see, all kinds of equipment, because the Seventh Fleet was getting ready for the invasion of Japan. When the bombs were dropped—the formal surrender hadn't taken place; it was a couple of days before then—the war was over and there was a transition period. I remember going into this one place. We ran across all of these files of people that the Japanese had made dossiers on to know...
Blum: Chinese?
Brownson: Chinese, and particularly the Europeans. There were a lot of Europeans in Shanghai, and they were in a way, I suppose you might say, under house arrest. Then after that transition took place and the formal surrender—I forget how long after that—I was put on a small aircraft carrier that had been converted to a troop carrier, and we went back and ended up in Fort Lewis, Washington. Then from Fort Lewis, Washington, across the northern states, Montana and back, on what was the Great Northern Railroad, back down into Wisconsin to Camp Grant, and then from Camp Grant I was discharged and ended up back in Chicago.
Blum: As a result of that experience, being in a totally different part of the world, did it in any way change your intention for architecture?
59 Brownson: Well, I don't know whether I can—I'm sure that it did, primarily because I became aware of the world, that there was all of these other people in it. I would never have been conscious of that if I hadn't have taken that journey. When I look at the world map over here and when somebody tells me about China, I know what it is. I saw a documentary a few weeks ago made by the BBC which is really pretty scary when you look at what the capability of a billion people is in terms of their being able to make things. There isn't anything that they weren't making that we were making, that the so-called West was making. Then when I was talking about the Buddha and I was talking about the Oriental experience and this tremendous number of people, the populations and the different kinds of food and the living conditions, I'm aware now of this other side of things which you never become aware of unless you circulate a little bit.
Blum: Do you think it only influenced your attitude regarding physical conditions?
Brownson: What do you mean by physical conditions?
Blum: The houses people live in and places they go, and how cities work and things of this sort, and the differences.
Brownson: Yes, I think it's about how cities work and how people are living and what their daily kind of activities are and what they do morning, noon and night—the different seasons that you're aware of, and living in the jungle with leeches and rains, and the reflection on the Hindus. The other group is the Parsees, which are the untouchables in India. Probably the wealthiest group in India is the Parsees. They own practically everything, but yet they're the so-called untouchables and are of a lower caste than anybody else. They're almost down to—I forget what that last caste is. But anyway, this too comes back again to me. It's interesting how I can bring up these memories. I had two students from Calcutta at the University of Michigan. One was a Parsee and the other was of the Hindu caste. The Hindu wouldn't touch the same drawing board or the same piece of paper or the same pencil as the Parsee at the University of Michigan. They spoke to one another, but he
60 wouldn't touch him. Several years later when I came to Chicago, one day I’m sitting on a bench on the Daley Plaza there, and who comes along—the Hindu's name was Rom—I forget what his full name was. The other was the Parsee. Here they come, walking down the street together. I said, "Well, what are you two guys doing now?" Rom was working, I think, for Skidmore, and I don't know where the Parsee was working. He said, "Oh, we live together. We got an apartment together here." I said, "You wouldn't even touch one another a few years ago. What happened?" "Well," he said, "you know, we've got to stick together. We're from India."
Blum: There was a bigger threat out there than just one against the other.
Brownson: Yes, so it completely changed around their loyalties.
Blum: When you were at the University of Michigan and saw such a thing happen, were you more understanding of the differences because of your experience?
Brownson: Oh, sure. I had one with which I got into a lot of trouble at Michigan in the graduate school. I accepted for the graduate school a really nice young girl from Bangkok, Thailand. I can't offhand remember her name, but she was just beautiful. Very petite, and maybe that's what struck me. I don't know. But anyway, she had these wonderful drawings with her that she had made, and she showed me her drawings. She could barely communicate with me. We could look at the drawings, but she couldn't speak English at all. She said she wanted to study architecture, so I accepted her. About three or four weeks later, after school had started, I got a call from the dean of the graduate school. He said, "What's the idea of accepting her? You can't accept somebody who doesn't speak English at the University of Michigan. That doesn't meet the qualifications here." This was about 1966 or so. I said, "Well, you know, in architecture you really communicate through your drawings and through the visual aspects of it. She'll learn English. It will rub off on her from the other students. She won't have any problem. She's very intelligent and all that. Besides, the cost is almost nothing to the state of Michigan to have her study here. We spend more than that on one of those lousy bombers
61 over there in Vietnam and we accept it." "Well," he said, "I want you to know, this is never to happen again." I said okay. But she was one of our best students and made marvelous drawings. There are two ways of communicating. A lot of times I say that the Western people—and I'm not talking about the American West, but people in the West—are visually illiterate. We communicate through words. We can't tell what is good or bad in terms of the visual experience. We accept visually things that you really shouldn't accept. So she turned out to be exceptional on that thing. She was a good student.
Blum: When you left the Army, what was your intention for yourself?
Brownson: I wanted to go back to school. Well, it was to go back to IIT.
Blum: After the war you were married in 1946?
Brownson: I got married right away. In fact, our honeymoon was at the Stevens Hotel and I went to class that morning.
Blum: You were really on an accelerated course.
Brownson: There is kind of a funny story about our wedding. That night after we had been married, we came to Chicago to the Stevens Hotel. I'd always heard over the years of a place in Chicago—you may have heard of it, too—St. Hubert's Old English Grill. It was located across the street from where Stanley Tigerman built that Chicago Bar Association Building on Plymouth Court. Right across the street was this place. It was referred to as St. Hubert's Old English Grill. I'd heard about it, that it was famous for mutton chops. So I said to Doris, "Let's go over to St. Hubert's and just try that." So we went over and sat down in this room and ordered all of this stuff and ate all of these things. When the bill came for this thing, I didn't have enough money to pay the bill. There were no credit cards, and I didn't have enough money. Pretty soon this swarthy waiter comes over to make the collection, and I kind of snickered a little bit and said, "I really don't have the money to pay this
62 whole thing. I can maybe bring it to you tomorrow." So he went over in the corner, and there was a big round table with a bunch of very swarthy guys who I subsequently found out—the head guy at the table was Phil "The Waiter" Nitti, the big hoodlum from the mob. This St. Hubert's Old English Grill was the mob headquarters for the Chicago mafia.
Blum: What a wedding night choice!
Brownson: So the waiter goes over and takes this bill, and he shows it to this guy there, to Phil "The Waiter" Nitti. He shows it to him, and I heard him say, "Give the kid a pass."
Blum: Did you tell him it was your wedding dinner?
Brownson: No, I didn't. But he looked over at us, and we looked pretty young. Then I supposed we looked like we were just newlyweds. We must have had some new clothes on or something. Anyway, "Give the kid a pass."
Blum: Well, that was a gift from Phil "The Waiter" Nitti to honor your wedding.
Brownson: Doris and I and the bunch used to hang out down on Taylor Street at an Italian restaurant. They had one table in the middle that was the communal table where they would gather, and then they had these booths and things. People from the school would go down there. Good spaghetti. And so, we're drinking this Chianti Classico and living it up and having a great time with the spaghetti, and for some reason I put my hand up, talking, and I go like that and it hits the spoon in the spaghetti and the spaghetti goes up over and lands down in the booth behind. "Mama mia!" This guy jumps over, and he's got this shiny polyester suit on. The waiter knew us because we'd been there so often, and he takes this guy's suit coat off. He takes the mozzarella cheese and he puts it on and puts it on—the guy is looking at him—to soak up the spaghetti sauce, and smoothes it all around like that, and takes the napkin. "It looks good to me," and puts it back.
63 Blum: Oh, what wonderful memories you have.
Brownson: We had so many good times in Chicago. Another story was the Corona Cafe. Do you remember the Corona?
Blum: I do.
Brownson: Well, Old Man Moroni. During that time at IIT right after the war, I used to go in there, and I would get a bowl of soup. Old Man Moroni would put the bread on, and then the waiter would come around. But finally, Old Man Moroni came around, and he said, "Why you don't eat anything else but soup? You eat up all my bread, the butter, all the other stuff. You don't buy nothing." I said, "I don't have any money." That was at the marble counter where all the cab drivers ate. And then in the front part Moroni had those convertible tables. When the lunch hour came, he would pull that pin out of the support and raise the table up and put the pin back in so it was a stand- up for lunch. No tablecloths, nothing. When at night you would come, and Old Man Moroni, being the good businessman he is, he drops the table down, puts a white tablecloth down, and it becomes a place. He had two boys that eventually took over the place, and the two boys decided, well, they're going to improve it and they're going to build a new Corona. Did you know the old one or the new one?
Blum: I'm not sure. Probably the new one.
Brownson: Well, the old one had the kitchen right in the middle, and then it served both ways. At night, even when the fancy part of the restaurant was open, you could come in and at the old white marble top, there were cab drivers, there were guys from the Tribune, there was a real bunch of riffraff, all of us coming in there at night, because the food was good. It was out of the same kitchen, only you paid four or five times more in the front room than you did in the back room. So anyway, while I'm working at Murphy, the two young Moroni sons decide that, well, it really isn't a good enough image for them because they'd been to college and they should have a little more. The old
64 man had died and left them the restaurant, so they're going to redo it, and they come to Murphy to build a new restaurant. I guess that was about 1959 because that's when I went with Murphy. We had a German, Karl Wegner. He could make a drawing instantaneously and schmaltz it up. He was a German SS trooper, very Teutonic. I just couldn't stand him, you know. He was always talking about being involved in Poland with the SS troops and all that. But anyway, he would whip up these drawings, and he did the new restaurant that subsequently changed and went broke. Murphy was a great salesman, you know. Murphy Sr. was not an architect. He originally was the secretary for Ernest Graham and got grandfathered in. But Murphy was a wonderful person, and I'll tell you some stories about him. Anyway, he had some job for an office building. I forget where it was in Chicago. Karl made the renderings of the building on the outside. So he makes the rendering of this thing with some people walking in the lobby and all of that stuff, and Murphy takes the drawing and goes to this meeting. He comes back, and he says to Karl, "Karl, the client says no sports clothes. They all have to have business clothes." Okay. So, Karl would go in the back room and ten minutes later he's back and all the guys have on business suits. Murphy was always impressed with somebody who could do that so instantaneously.
Blum: Before you got to Murphy, you came back from the war and you went to IIT. You said that so many of the things that you had experienced prior to IIT came together at that time, the second time you went to IIT.
Brownson: You asked about seeing Mies and Hilbs. The first two years I really didn't see them. I guess I ran errands or something, and I remember one of the errands that I ran was when they gave me something to take up to Mies's apartment on Pearson Street. I didn't know who Mies was, and I didn't know anything about it. They asked me to take this package up, so I took this package up and I rang the bell and I went up—oh, God, this is terrible—and Mies answered the door. Yes, it was Mies. He was very gracious. He said, "Come in," and so I gave him the package. He didn't say anything. I looked around, and I said, "When are you going to move in?" to his apartment. It was so spartan. Subsequently, when I really got to know him and I spent a lot of
65 time with him, here were Klees and Braques and all of this stuff on the walls. I looked around, and I said, "When are you going to move in?" He just looked at me.
Blum: Did he laugh? Did he take it in good humor?
Brownson: Well, he didn't say anything, and I left. But he's probably thinking, "Here is this veteran and listen to him."
Blum: When did you attend the Institute of Design?
Brownson: When I first came back from the Army, as I said, I couldn't get into IIT because it was for the fall season, so I went with Moholy. Moholy got me over to Ralph Rapson, and I worked a little with Rapson.
Blum: What did you do with Rapson?
Brownson: We drew up some houses and some drawings of things in the class there. He was very good. He was a good teacher. I got to know Moholy only as a visual presence and from the few things that he said. And the fact that he always carried a conventional black metal workman's lunchbox and he always rode the streetcars. That's when there were only streetcars. Then there were double-decked buses on Michigan. The bus experience was interesting because one day I was on this double-decked bus, and the bus caught on fire. It had smoke on it, and somebody yelled, "Fire!" There was this bedlam of people popping out of the bus I was recalling this years later in a discussion I was having with Hilbs, and Hilbs said, "See what I told you, people aren't rational."
Blum: Jacques, you had been at IIT for two years before the war, you had gone into the Army, and for a very short while attended the Institute of Design when you returned. How had IIT changed when you came back? Had it changed?
Brownson: Well, of course, there was much more going on because during the first two
66 years, war was imminent, and I'm sure that there were a lot of thoughts about the war on the part of Mies and Hilbs and Peterhans. But, as I said, I didn't know then. After the war Mies became quite busy. There were the buildings for the IIT campus going on, starting to be built, and there was all of that work and it was much more intense. There were always a lot of itinerant architects and, as we called them, visiting firemen coming through, and there was much more awareness. We would go with Mies, and he would take us around to show us things. Erich Mendelsohn came with us. Mendelsohn had done or was planning a synagogue. The Jewish synagogue down there in Hyde Park was done by Alfred Alschuler, and so we went down there with Mies and Mendelsohn at that time. Another time Eero Saarinen came. Mies's comment afterwards about Eero Saarinen was that he could sell iceboxes to the Eskimos. Mies wasn't so shabby as a salesman either. Anyway, after the experience at the Institute of Design, I went down to—I think it was in the Gage Building. I think they had moved after the war.
Blum: Mies's office?
Brownson: No, this was the school. It had been moved from the Art Institute to the Gage Building, across the street and a little farther north. Marta Moeller was really tough, and I said, “I'd like to enroll for school for this coming fall.” She said, "I'm sorry. We just don't have room for you." Mies was sitting over at a desk over in the corner, and I said, "Well, I was here before the war, and I would like to come back." She said, "Ja, but you weren't very serious. You were playing all the time. No, we're sorry, we can't take you." Evidently, Mies must have heard this conversation, and he got up and he came over and he said to Marta, "Well, Brownson was here." He always called everybody by their last name. He said, "Brownson was here before the war. Maybe we ought to give him another chance."
Blum: Were you a goof-off before the war?
Brownson: Oh, sure. We were all goof-offs in that whole era.
67 Blum: Had the experience of the war changed your attitude?
Brownson: Oh, we were going to rebuild the world. We were building, and we would talk about it. We would talk about city planning. We had all kinds of ideas. There was all of this ferment going on, there was the exhibit coming up at the museum, there was Frank Lloyd Wright, and there were all of these things going on. There was a whole new era about what could be done, the work of Bucky Fuller, there were the Lustron houses and all of these ideas about Levittown and all of these kinds of things going on. So there was a real energy that existed. Also I started to become much closer, particularly, to Hilberseimer. Hilbs's comment, my whole life, all of the time from Hilbs was, he would always say to me, "Brownson, why don't you listen?" I never worked in Mies's office other than building those models. A lot of the models that you see in Hilbs's city planning book I did.
Blum: You mean you did the drawings?
Brownson: Well, I not only did some of the drawings but the models. I did a lot of models for Hilbs. Hilbs gave me a key one day on his key ring, and he said, "Can you fix this key so that I can recognize it? It's for my apartment. Can you do anything with it so I can recognize it?" I took the key and I simply ground it into what looks almost like a Gothic shape. It was a round key, and I ground the edges off and across the top and rounded the corners. I gave it back to Hilbs, and Hilbs said, "Oh, a Gothic key." I didn't think of it until he mentioned it. But I did a lot of things like that. Anyway, in that group after the war, there was Bill Dunlap. This was a wild, wild, wild time.
Blum: Had you received your bachelor's?
Brownson: No, no. I was still a junior. I was only a junior when I came back. There were seven in my class. Carter Manny was in it. There was another guy who gave it all up and went into biology. He became very good at it. His name was McKinsey. There was Bill Daley. He became a very successful architect in Omaha. There was Bill Dunlap, and there was another young guy, Ralph
68 Harla, who played the violin and ate bananas.
Blum: That's a curious combination.
Brownson: Harla and I worked together, really, under Bill Dunlap for Jim Speyer. I'll tell you the story about the Salvation Army and Jim Speyer. But anyway, when I say it was a wild time, now it comes back to the 606 Club again and the Rialto Theatre. Do you remember the Rialto burlesque house?
Blum: Well, I remember the name, yes.
Brownson: Okay. Bill Dunlap and I had part-time jobs. My part-time job was hiking cars in a parking garage on Wabash, and Bill Dunlap was an usher at the Rialto Theatre. He got us into all of the girlie shows. Well, Bill Daley became a great admirer of the strippers. Daley had an apartment up on Elm Street or one of those streets up there, because his family evidently had money and he had this fancy apartment. Bill Daley always had it full of these strippers, these girls. Dunlap and I were there. I don't know whether Carter participated or not, but anyway, these parties went on and on. Bill Dunlap was also pretty wild. Dunlap had a place off the alley—I think it was near the Ambassador East Hotel or something. We used to gather at his place. He had his bathroom floor, the entire bathroom floor, paved with foam rubber falsies. They had a Beaux-Arts ball down at McCormick Place. I don't know what year that would have been, but anyway, Dunlap commandeers or hires a bus and loads it all, and Doris is with me and the wives and all of these strippers and Daley and everybody, and we all ended up going down en masse in that. I still liked to have a lot of fun, so I had gotten hold of one of these miniature motorcycles—they're about so high, you know—so I'm wheeling around the McCormick Place on that floor at this Beaux-Arts ball, and one of the strippers comes up and stops me, takes off all of her clothes, and hops on the seat behind me, riding around. Dunlap was really impressed, boy.
Blum: I don't know, Jacques. Maybe Marta was right. It doesn't sound to me like you were very serious, even after the war.
69 Brownson: I was. I was serious about it. But let's get back to the question of the school.
Blum: You know, it is sort of legendary that Caldwell gave an entire semester’s classes in which students drew bricks, brick walls in different patterns. Did you take that class?
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: With your interest in construction and how things go together, how did you feel about that class?
Brownson: It was an excellent class. It was first rate. There was a problem with IIT—a thing that Hilbs and we all talked about and something that I even used when I gave a seminar down at the University of Colorado not too long ago—was about the significance of time. That course of Caldwell's was all- consuming in terms of the intensity of the course and the amount of time that was required. As I said to these students at Colorado, if you take your four or five years at school, take those multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five days multiplied by twenty-four hours a day, that's your total time budget. That's all the time you have. How are you going to spend it? You've got to eat, you've got to sleep, you've got certain hygiene needs, you're going to goof off some, and you're going to do all of these things. What's the real cost in terms of it? We always talk about the cost of everything, eventually. What is the real cost of your education in terms of that hourly expense? You don't have very many hours left. Then vacations come in, and you've got all of those other kinds of things. The amount of time that you're in school is extremely short. You have to think about how you want to spend that time. It's not only the time that you spend in school, but what kind of work are you going to get? As an architect there are going to be many things that you have to know. Hilbs said to Caldwell, "You can't take all of the students' time in the school. There are other things." At the same time that Caldwell was teaching construction, that course was going along with the course in community buildings and residences that Hilbs was working on in the
70 beginning, and it was very good. You would work on how to plan a school, then you not only had to plan it but you were also then going to build it. You've got the construction aspect of it. Caldwell simply soaked up a tremendous amount of time, and we were always concerned about the element of time that was involved because it's a finite thing. Time is finite. Consequently, the thing gets back to what is important in a curriculum for an architect to study. If you're an administrator in a school, how do you make up the curriculum that Mies and Hilbs and Peterhans and Mell did, how is that put together so that it's in balance? What is the significance of the work that you're doing? You can't learn everything in school, you know. It's impossible. I was not only going to school and subsequently teaching as a graduate assistant and then on the faculty, but I was also working for Jim Speyer. Did you know I worked for him?
Blum: No, doing what?
Brownson: I was a draftsman and working for Jim Speyer. It was a very important part of my education, really.
Blum: On what kind of jobs?
Brownson: Well, we were working on houses. We built a house for the Harrises, who were with the Harris Trust and Savings Bank. We built a house for the Roses. Who did we build the big horse barn for, a marvelous horse barn up on the North Side? Was that the Smiths? Was that the family from Northern Trust? Did you know Lenore Tawney?
[Tape 3: Side 2]
Blum: Jack, your last statement was somewhat provocative. You said that Jim Speyer did a project for Lenore Tawney but off tape you said he got in trouble with it. What was that all about?
Brownson: Well, again, when I say "trouble," that's in how you look at it. Lenore Tawney
71 wanted to redo her apartment or her townhouse up on the Near North Side on Elm or one of those streets up in that area. Anyway, as I said, Bill Dunlap, Ralph Harla and I worked for Jim, and Bill Dunlap really took the lead in running the office and organizing the work. Dunlap said, "We've got to get some very accurate measurements of this building." I think it was three stories. He had what's called a brace and bit, which is a thing that drills holes, and he said, "You go up on the roof, Jacques, and drill a hole from the roof down through the ceiling on the floor below. I'll get this long steel rod and we'll just drop it through the hole and we'll mark it off and it will give us some accurate dimensions. Then when we get down to the next floor we'll drill another hole and drop the thing down until we get all the way down to the basement. Then we'll have accurate dimensions." Well, in effect we had a hole all the way through the house, from the basement clear up through the roof. And so, when Lenore Tawney came back that afternoon she looks, and here are these two yokels, Dunlap and Brownson, and they've got a hole drilled all the way through her house, clear up through the roof. Well, that was the beginning of it. Then the plans were done and it was a very nice plan that Jim did. Jim Speyer had a real talent for material, for space. He had everything. He really knew, and he taught me a lot of things about how to do things in terms of the visual aspects. What he liked about me was the fact that I was a good craftsman and I made good drawings and I did these kinds of things. But on the other hand, I was still very lacking in all of these things that Jim Speyer was so good at, and he could see that in all of the things that he did—to me, anyway. So, he made this very nice plan for Lenore, and for some reason, I guess the amount of time, because we put in a lot of time—I don't know what the whole circumstances were—but Lenore Tawney found out that Jim Speyer was not a licensed architect. Maybe that came about when they tried to get a building permit or whatever it was, and so she became very bitter towards Jim over that thing. I don't think that building was ever remodeled at that stage. But that's what I mean when I say he got in trouble with it, and I don't know what the final outcome was.
Blum: Do you know if Jim ever got a license?
72 Brownson: No, I don't believe that he ever did get a license. There was an interesting thing at IIT, and I heard it from several friends of mine. They said, "We can never do it as good as Mies can do it." There was always that kind of idea that they could never achieve that level of accomplishment. That also had a kind of chilling effect on people in order to go ahead and get their license. Also at IIT—and Mies really was very outspoken to us about it—we were all so very standoffish in terms of the school. We separated ourselves from the rest of the activities of the school, but that's not new because all architecture schools are like that. They're a funny bunch of people over there, you know, those architects that operate a little differently than anybody else. We didn't participate in things like the American Institute of Architects. We weren't very active in the AIA. We were, I must say, kind of aloof.
Blum: Did you think that you were sort of an elite group?
Brownson: I don't know whether it was a question of elitism or whether it was more just the fact that we did odd things. When you think about the kinds of buildings and what we were proposing and the open houses that we held and the things that we were doing, it was different than what was going on in the city. There may have been the feeling that, well, they're just going to kind of look down their noses at us, so why should we waste our time with them?
Blum: Do you think it was a defensive attitude?
Brownson: It may have been a defensive attitude, very much so, on that. But I know that we didn't participate as we could have. We should have taken a more active part in what was going on. I think that there was a criticism about Hilbs, which I don't think is entirely warranted. In that book, In the Shadow of Mies, it reflects that very few of the graduates participated in the planning process. But that's not entirely so because some of those graduates became very active in the planning of New York City.
Blum: Graduates from IIT?
73 Brownson: From IIT, yes. They were very active worldwide with the United Nations working on world housing problems. I often say—it's just a feeling I have—but we had a number of students from Central and South America. The discussion of Hilberseimer about the problems in these countries and the kinds of discussions that were held with the students, I am sure, had a very important influence on the direction that many of those countries have taken. It's quite similar if you look today at what's going on in Mexico with Salinas, and now—who is the president-elect or the new president? [Ernesto Zedillo] One was educated at Harvard, and the present president was educated at Yale. This has started to bring this country out of a very dark period. We talked about agriculture, we talked about the devastation of the rain forest, we talked about the environment. In 1941 they were talking about that, I remember, and we talked about it extensively when I came back. Because most of us were veterans, we talked extensively about the worldwide planning problems. When you look at the theses that were done by the planning department, that whole idea of a written thesis and the documentation and the putting-together of those things, that was Hilberseimer. When you look in the library at the proposals for Hawaii, you look at the ones that were done in Europe, the ones that were done in Central and South America, those are significant documents for any graduate student to do. As far as I know, and there may have been since I left, but I don't believe there was ever a doctor's degree granted at IIT. There were people who came to study for a doctorate, but Mies and Hilbs could never come to think that the work was sufficient to warrant giving somebody a doctorate degree. And Hilbs jokingly always said, "Ja, in the Republic of Hilberseimer, when you're born you get a doctor's degree. Then if you work real hard you can get rid of it."
Blum: That's his wisdom.
Brownson: From that standpoint I think that the school really made important worldwide contributions. Let me say another thing, which I don't want taken the wrong way, but about how IIT was different from other schools, and I'm talking now about IIT as a totality. To my way of thinking, the IIT
74 administration has no strong program to recognize their graduates. Harvard keeps in communication continually with their graduates.
Blum: Most universities do.
Brownson: Other universities do, but outside of a telephone call from IIT asking for money for the alumni fund, I have never once received any kind of communication as to what I was doing.
Blum: Why do you think other schools keep in touch with their graduates?
Brownson: I think because they realize that by staying in touch with their graduates on that level it means that they can get more support for the school. I think that a lot of us graduates of IIT look at what's going on with the administrations—Henry Heald was the last one. Henry Heald invited us to his house. His wife was big in the women's temperance league. She was one of the leaders. What was that group that was against drinking?
Blum: The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the WCTU?
Brownson: The WCTU in Chicago. She would invite the students down to their house in Hyde Park, but none of the other presidents would do that. We never had that close connection with the school. They talk about giving a little recognition of the planning department, the IIT Planning Department—I think this is one of the really stellar things in any school that I know of, this school of planning. It was always looked upon by the administrations after Henry Heald as a bunch of theoretical people living in an ivory tower and not recognizing—because planning is difficult to understand. It's not very entertaining and it's not very—what am I trying to say?
Blum: It's not glamorous.
Brownson: It's not glamorous. But yet, the planning department is something that has an importance. It's the way our cities come together, it's the way we have the
75 possibilities to live in the cities, it's what can be done with our cities, and yet it is one of the things that they try to negate. In fact, my understanding is that IIT now would even like to abolish the planning department, and there is a question whether physical planning, which is the actual physical relationships of buildings, in a city has any meaning at all, or whether it isn't purely just an economic problem that should be handled in a place like the University of Chicago. We always had that conflict between the University of Chicago group, which was led by—he just died not too long ago—and IIT. But when you think about planning, the most significant planning that occurred in the United States was with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Now, let me say some of the things which maybe don't have a lot to do with the current kinds of things. I think that a real mistake that is presently being done in this country by the federal government is a lack of understanding of this importance of the physical planning of not only our cities but our regions. It all goes back to the work of Hilberseimer. When we take a look at the Tennessee Valley Authority, what they did in terms of the three most important areas—health, welfare and the safety of the people—was profound. And when you look at what was built and how it was handled and the whole direction of changing a thing which was slowly disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico, as it drained that way, that decision by the president of the United States to do something about it has affected us and has become a monumental bureaucracy, admittedly. But we have problems going on in this country that have to be faced. We have the problem of the Mississippi River Valley, which Hilberseimer talked about extensively. The problem here is one of the largest moving bodies of water in the world, elevated ten, twelve, fifteen feet above the surrounding land and flooding it all out when a devastating thing happens, or under drought conditions when we're not getting adequate rainfall. And yet nothing, that I can see, is being done by the planners for these kinds of areas. We are not building communities, and we should start to think about how we're going to live with that. Those were the kinds of things that the IIT planning department was so involved in.
Blum: Were they involved in it when you were a student or only when you became an instructor and was on the faculty?
76 Brownson: No, I was involved in it as a student, also.
Blum: Were there actual classes in planning that Hilberseimer taught?
Brownson: Yes, and Hilberseimer put together, for Jim Speyer's sister Darthea, who was working for the United States State Department, a worldwide traveling exhibit of planning in the USA that traveled all over the world. There were people coming, as I said before, from other countries to talk about these kinds of problems that existed.
Blum: Jacques, as long as you've mentioned that exhibition in the context of planning, because that was the title of the exhibition, weren’t you represented in that exhibition by your house in Geneva?
Brownson: No, it wasn't the house in Geneva that was involved. It was a small community north of Geneva, Illinois, on the Fox River. Originally, it was a small group of summer cabins. I can't remember right now, but the interurban lines out of Chicago brought people from the city, and there was some kind of a prize that was given where you got a small lot that you could build a house on. But the problem was that after the Second World War it became a real slum because the people who had come north from the South to work in the industries found housing in these sections so that they could go to work in the Fox River valley which is heavily industrialized. This area supplied a lot of the war machinery and parts that were needed during the war. They lived there in these very primitive houses that didn't have adequate sewers and didn't have adequate water. Many of them didn't have any electricity, and it was a slum area. I took up that problem with my class, when I was teaching, to make a plan to see what could be done for that area in terms of planning, and that was what was in that exhibit.
Blum: Well, maybe because it was in an area close to Geneva, perhaps that was what I misunderstood.
77 Brownson: That might have been, yes.
Blum: But you were in this exhibition along with people like Gropius and Neutra. What was the thrust or the underlying premise of the work that you did for this exhibition? Were we showing the world what Americans were doing? What was it specifically you were showing?
Brownson: Well, we were talking about how you can make more livable communities, and this was a reflection—actually, when you say I was a part of this whole group at school, we were all thinking in that way. But one of the other significant parts of Hilbs's direction or pointing things out was that he made these population pyramids, and they're published in his book. I don't know whether you know what a population pyramid is.
Blum: Would you explain what it is?
Brownson: In other words, a normal—I don't know whether anything is normal—but a population curve used to be based on a very wide base. When people are born, in the age group, let's say, from zero to three or four years old, there is a very heavy population, and as the attrition of that population grows, relatively few people reach the apex of the pyramid or the triangle. And so, the old people are there at the apex. That was the way that nature took care of that progression. Hilbs was showing what had occurred under an industrial civilization or how this population graph that had the wide base would gradually diminish into the middle of the pyramid and then would widen out and become wider at the top as the population got older. Now, we're talking about studies that were made before anybody that I know of—maybe there were a few people concerned about this, but certainly there were no planning schools interested in what was happening with the aging population. Then Hilbs showed that it appears that this population pyramid is going to turn upside down, where we're going to have a very narrow base and we're going to have a lot of old guys like me hanging around.
Blum: Because of the improvement of medicine?
78 Brownson: And public health, pure water and better food. I think the big thing was not so much the medicine part but the public health aspect of it—the food, the water, the hygiene, the awareness of that. Another thing you have to also look at is—Jane Addams and Hull House comes into this thing. Why was Hull House founded? It was because Jane Addams realized that these young girls coming into the city didn't have the most elementary understanding of how to live in an industrial society. They didn't know how to take care of themselves. They didn't have an adequate social life. They didn't know how to prepare food accordingly in a city. These were the kinds of things that Hull House was giving to these students, some semblance of how to exist in a city, in a community.
Blum: Are you saying that this planning exhibition was showing the world how people could live in communities, but showing it through the buildings, the housing?
Brownson: That's right.
Blum: There was a review of that show in a publication that was a communist-run publication in France, and the conclusion of that review was that given the same conditions, given the same problems, there is a universal solution. Do you agree with that?
Brownson: I didn't see that article, and I'm not sure what you mean by "a universal solution."
Blum: Well, if France, for instance, has the same conditions and problems as we do, the same solution as might apply in the United States would apply in France, would apply in Africa, would apply in China.
Brownson: Oh, yes. Fundamentally, yes. I say that, and I'm sure other people are going to really disagree with me. But this was another thing about Hilbs. He talked about principles. Principles. He didn't talk about actual solutions as such, but
79 he talked about principles. Let's just talk about those principles. We started in the first planning class with making a kitchen. He would ask the students, “How would you make a kitchen?” and each student would start out with his or her experiences—how he watched his mother, or if it was a girl or a woman in the class, how her mother used the kitchen. Like I was talking earlier about the cookstove in the way of the refrigerator, this was my experience that I had at a certain time. But each one had his own experience. How did the student, then, reflect those things? So then Hilbs would ask the question about making this kitchen, and everybody invariably put the kitchen sink in front of the window in the kitchen. Hilbs would ask the student, "Why do you put the kitchen sink in front of the window? What's the reason for it? Is there a reason that you put the kitchen sink there? How much time do you spend at the kitchen sink? Do you ever make any cookies or pies or anything else there? How much time do you spend doing that in the kitchen? Are you right-handed or left-handed?" "Why do you ask me if I'm right-handed or left-handed?" "Well, how do you pick up the dish when you wash it?" This may have been before dishwashers. Do you like to be able to see whether it's clean or not? Then where should the drainboard be once you take that dish out of your hand and you set it down? Are you going to cross over?" The kitchen was not the primary reason, but to get the student to think about what was going on. Now, the same kind of probing kept going through when we start to talk about density. How many people should live in an area? They also talked very grandly, particularly at the University of Chicago about how many people should live on a square mile? Well, who can comprehend what a square mile is, you know? Most people have no concept—well, we're going to have eighty thousand people live on a square mile, or we're going to have twenty thousand people live on a square mile. You'd ask somebody, "What does that mean? How big is the lot?" "What do you mean, how big is the lot?" "How much space is each one going to have if they're going to live at that density?" "Well, I don't know." Hilbs said, "Why do you tell me that we're going to live eighty thousand? Maybe that's a right number, but on what principles are you basing this kind of statement?" Supposing we said that everybody is entitled to have sunlight in their living room. Can you understand? Do you want sunlight in your living room?"
80 Some people would rather have afternoon sun in the living room. Some people I know would like to have sunlight all of the time in these rooms. The student would say, "Oh, yes, I like sunlight. Yes, the sunlight is nice." "Well, how are you going to determine how much sunlight you like?" Now the student starts to think and the plan evolves. He hasn't thought about where the sun comes up or where the sun really goes down, and he further hasn't thought about where the summer solstice or the winter solstice comes in. Now, today is the sixth of December. The winter solstice is on the twenty-first of December, and then the sun is the lowest in the sky. If you have a room and you say that you are going to have sunlight in that room on the twenty- first day of December, and he said, "Let's say that you're going to pick a certain hour that you want to do it, what time would you like to have sun coming in?" "How is ten o'clock?"—and I'm oversimplifying a little—"Ten o'clock in the morning until two o'clock in the afternoon?" That's four hours of the day you'd like to have some sun in your room on the twenty-first day of December. What does that mean? That means that you can't build something up that's going to cast a shadow which, as Leonardo said, is going to be two-and-a-half times the height of that building. You can't build a building up that is going to shut off the sunlight to your room, to your house. Now, what does that mean? If you sit down mathematically and start to look at this thing it starts to determine what the consequences are of a density where you have two or three people to the acre—and Hilbs would use acres all the time or hectares—two or three people to the acre, ten people to the acre, twenty people to the acre, one hundred twenty people to the acre, eight hundred people to the acre. It has consequences if you're going to say that each man is entitled to sunlight.
Blum: So are you saying the sunlight is the principle that determines the density or how many people live in a certain space?
Brownson: Right. There would be all kinds of discussions, and the students would say, "I don't want that much sunlight." Hilbs said, "That's fine, but set your standards then. Do you want no sunlight or do you want all sunlight or what do you want?" That’s a principle. Then you can start by angling the buildings
81 a certain way, by making buildings in different shapes. I built a house that my daughter has now. I built a little house that is on a very small lot, and I set up the criteria that it was to have sun from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon on the twenty-first day of December. You cannot do it if you make an L-shaped house at right angles in which the major axis is north and south. You cannot get sun after ten o'clock in the morning. But you can as soon as you make an angle to part of it, and that angle then starts to determine the form. You generate the form from the principle.
Blum: So if I understand you correctly, you are saying that whatever the principles are determines the form, and, therefore, whatever culture uses the principles, they will lead to the same solution. Do I read you correctly?
Brownson: Yes. This goes back, I guess, to Henry van de Velde. He wrote a paper called "Newness and Novelty." In it, I believe, he discussed, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a spoon is a spoon is a spoon. Why is a spoon the shape that it is? And I'll go back to China. The Chinese have a certain kind of spoon that looks almost like a boat. It requires you to hold that spoon in a certain position in order to keep the liquid, or whatever it is you're carrying, from falling out. Now, you're going to change that spoon, as we know. There are all different patterns you can make, but fundamentally it is a kind of vessel to hold something, and the principle behind it is that if it isn't shaped that way, the contents will fall out. You can put gewgaws and you can put little curlicues and you can decorate the top of the spoon and you can put all kinds of things, but fundamentally it's that spoon.
Blum: Jacques, are you of this persuasion because you studied with Mies, and fundamental to your general understanding of Mies is that the structure determines the form? Is what you're saying about planning that the principle determines the form?
Brownson: What I'm saying is that these principles that go back so far, they are eternal. There are principles that are reasonable and they make sense and I can accept them. It's the same way if we talk about the Lion Gate. Do you know the Lion
82 Gate?
Blum: At Mycenae, yes.
Brownson: Right. What's important about the Lion Gate? Why is it such a great architectural statement? You have to have an opening in a wall. Then you have to span from one side of that opening to the other. You have a thing called a lintel that goes across. How could a civilization discover so early the principles involved in spanning between two support points? They realized that if you loaded a stone—stone being a material which cracks relatively easily when you load it—that you have to reduce the amount of load that is on that lintel or on that stone that spans across, so they get into the principle of corbeling. Now, corbeling is simply extending out from one point, gradually moving over and closing up the distance between two sides. This is exactly what they did in the Lion Gate on both sides. They corbeled this thing out. Now they have a triangular space, the load of which is no longer on the lintel that goes across, and the two lions in relief come in and infill. So there is, in effect, almost no load on that stone that spans across, and they close the opening up. That is a principle. That's not a form; that is a principle. Now, how you take that principle and what you do with it, then you get into the question of architecture. But the principle doesn't change. When Mies retired, they held a meeting at the South Shore Country Club and gave him a tape recorder and a couple of cigars or something like that after all of these years of work. That evening we ended up in Reginald Malcolmson's apartment in Hyde Park. A tape must be around someplace because we evidently had the tape recorder turned on, but the discussion got into sunlight. As I was just talking about sunlight and the importance of sunlight in a dwelling, that night Mies and Hilbs got into this discussion about the importance of sunlight in a building. Hilbs said he thought it was very important that you have proper sunlight in a house, and that's very nice. And Mies said, "That's fine for a little house, but you can't do that in a big, multistory building." Hilbs said, "Ja, principle changes with the number of stories." You can say you don't need sun. I know some people who have medical problems with sunlight, with lupus or whatever it is. Some people don't like sun. In fact,
83 Hilbs never walked on the sunny side of the street. He always walked in the shade. He talked about the sun, but he always walked where it was shady, which is normal. People do that, you know. It's one of the things I like about this house I have here. It's really just a bungalow, but all of the rooms are oriented to the south. The living room is oriented to the east, and I can sit out there early in the morning and I get the east sun and I watch that sun as it changes early in the summer, as it starts to come around. All of the principal rooms of this building get sunlight all of the time. Now, what's happening in our cities today is that small bungalows like this, and the street is full of them here, people are buying these and they're building what are called pop tops. Have you heard that term?
Blum: No.
Brownson: They'll buy a house like the one that is next to me here, which is a one-story, two- or three-bedroom house, and they'll take off the roof, pop the top and put up another story. Now, if they do that next to where I'm living, they are going to shut off all of my sunlight, and the question is, should they be permitted to shut off my sunlight? We know the classic case in Florida between Morris Lapidus, the architect, and the Fontainebleau Hotel and the hotel that's immediately to the north of the Fontainebleau, which was built first. Then they built the Fontainebleau Hotel, and the Fontainebleau Hotel shut out all the sunlight to the adjacent hotel's swimming pool. Now, who wants to go to Florida without sunlight in the wintertime? Out comes a big court case, and the court decides, "You can't shut off that man's sunlight," and there was some kind of settlement. I don't know what it was. But those kinds of questions have nothing to do with the architectural form of things. They generate some things. It's like whether you're standing, or whatever you're doing, there are certain things that are dependent on where you stand at any time as to how you see it. So then Hilbs talked about sunlight in these rooms. He also believed something—if you look at Mies's plans, Mies had this kind of open plan. He proposed it for 880 and 860 [Lake Shore Drive], and the mortgage people wouldn't approve it. They had to have separate bedrooms with doors on it. Hilbs was a strong believer that everybody should have his
84 own room. He would ask that same question about the bedroom. You've got two boys. Each one can't have a separate room. You've got to have one bedroom for two boys. How should it be? How small can you get it? What's the smallest bedroom you can make for two boys? And so, you'd go through different things. What do they do in the room? If they go to school, they've got to have a place to study. You've got to have a desk, a place to hang your clothes, how they make the beds—all of those kinds of things, and how the bedroom goes together. What happens with the different placement of the window in the outside wall? What are the consequences of the placement of the window in terms of the light? Are you right-handed or left-handed? How does the light affect where you're working? Then you go through all of these different kinds of things, and, in effect, that evolves a way of thinking about the whole house, and when you come into it how you circulate through it. You don't want to drag all of your lawn-mowing equipment through the living room in order to cut the grass. You don't want to bring in all of your groceries in some oddball way. Do you want cross-ventilation? It gets a student thinking about what the problems are and starting to analyze them and what the principles are.
Blum: It sounds like a process that you could apply to anything, whether it's a mile square or whether it's an inch square.
Brownson: Exactly. We used to say, "You start with a kitchen and you end with the world." That's how egotistical we were, how grandiose our ideas were. But then you start to think about how the city works, and these things come up. I'm very active now in this whole question of pop-tops, and we've got this over-building going on. We're building buildings that just never see the light of day. They built one of these big apartment units, and they set all of the air conditioning units out in the yard so the noise affects everybody in the neighborhood. So you ask the question, should kids be able to go to school without having to cross major streets? All of the mothers will say, could we have that? Then you start to talk about the community…
[Tape 4: Side 1]
85 Brownson: This kind of thinking about a problem doesn’t tell you what the answer is. I go back to whether you’re a musician or a painter or an artist or a writer or a poet or whatever it is, that you know the tools of your trade. If you're a poet or a writer, you know your vocabulary. If you're a musician, you know how different notes and scales and tonalities and these things come together. If you're a painter you know the colors, and as a draftsman you know all of these things and you have these tools. That doesn't necessarily make you into a great artist or an architect or anything else, but at least you have some basis for beginning and a way to approach a problem and to think about the possibilities. Then all of these other experiences that you have had in your own personal life as a student, that I haven't had because I'm not you and you haven't had because you're not me, these are other kinds of things that are extremely important, too. They color the way you're looking at them. You asked about whether these principles may be applied to problems whether it's Bangladesh or Africa…
Blum: Are there universal solutions that apply wherever?
Brownson: What I'm talking about may not be universal solutions, but there are universal principles, or principles, period.
Blum: The 1950s seems to have been a time when Europe was rebuilding and America architecture was of interest worldwide. The exhibition that Darthea Speyer mounted at the American Cultural Center in Paris in 1958 was really one of three exhibitions of American architecture and planning in Europe at that time.
Brownson: Who did those?
Blum: Well, there was one in Moscow and there was one in Berlin. Peter Blake did the one in Berlin, along with some other people from the State Department. It led me to think, what was Europe's perception of American planning at that time if they all welcomed exhibitions about American planning? What was
86 your awareness of their perception of the state of the art in the States?
Brownson: Well, of course, during that same time you had a number of groups working around the world or world conferences occurring in which they were discussing planning problems and people getting together. The CIAM—Congress of…
Blum: International Congress of Modern Architecture.
Brownson: Yes, modern architecture and where was modern architecture? We don't seem to have those kinds of things anymore. I am sure there are people who are questioning what the physical appearance of our communities is and what is going on, because we can see this growth. We've got a conference coming here in January about the growth in Colorado. Colorado is the same size as Italy. It's about one hundred four thousand square miles within the state. It's the same size as Italy. It has a mountain range and it has a center, whether it's Rome or Denver. I mean, it's not entirely, but it's about the same. But Italy has fifty-five million people, or sixty million people, and Colorado has about three-and-a-half or four million people. Now, we talk about light rail and all of these other kinds of things and we talk about the wonderful rail system in Europe, which it is, but remember, Germany, which is the same size as Wyoming, has almost seventy million people living in it. Wyoming has five hundred thousand. There is only one city over fifty thousand people in the entire state of Wyoming. There are only two traffic lights in the whole state.
Blum: Are you saying that when exhibitions of American planning were being exhibited throughout the world that because we had so many fewer people than in European countries that our solutions were not necessarily applicable?
Brownson: It wasn't applicable if you take a look at the population. Today in the state of California there are thirty-two million people. That was the population of the entire United States when Abraham Lincoln was president—total in the
87 United States.
Blum: Weren't European countries looking to rebuild in a modern way and looking to the United States for examples?
Brownson: But the problem was that they were looking for form and not for principles. As I say, Wyoming, which is a very small part of the United States, is the same size as Germany with sixty-six million people. The interesting thing about it was that in 1959 when Frank Lloyd Wright died, the population was about one hundred fifty million people. He dealt with big lots. His Broadacre City as a planning statement was again looking back almost to Jefferson in terms of the way that he was looking at the scale of the space. We're making a similar mistake now with Russia. We talk about Russia in terms of everything that is west of the Ural Mountains. When I talk to my son when he comes home from Kamchatka and from Sakhalim, the Russian peninsula that comes down here, from what's called the Green Sea—you know what the Green Sea is?
Blum: No.
Brownson: Siberia—this green forest up there. Do you know that in Russia you're talking about ten or eleven time zones? We don't even know what goes on east of the Ural Mountains. We're talking about a country that we have no concept of. I'm talking about, again, the scale, but what happens is that we don't understand what to do with the scale of things that we're working on here. Why are we jamming everything in Denver in the Platte River Valley?
Blum: I understand you see a lot of flaws in what's happening today, but in 1957 do you think that Europe was looking to us for an example?
Brownson: I don't know whether I agree that Europe was looking to us for examples. Look at the housing in Stuttgart, the Weissenhofsiedlung housing. That was a statement about how housing could be. Look at the autobahn system that was developed that was the precursor of our interstate system of roads.
88 Blum: But in the 1950s, these were countries that had been through a devastating war where so much had been destroyed.
Brownson: Yes, and they rebuilt. Like all communities, they rebuilt almost exactly the same as it was before, you know, when they replaced it, because those dividing lines, those points of ownership, simply cannot change. They can change, but it's very difficult to change. This lot is defined with a certain ownership to it, and one of the problems that they're having in East Germany is, nobody can determine who owns title to the property that they want to build on. They don't know how to straighten out the titles for this land. We have the same problem here in this country in New Mexico.
Blum: I think some time ago I asked, what was your perception of the European world's perception of American planning—then?
Brownson: Well, if you go back to Roebling, if you look at Roebling's biography or history of his life, he came to the United States because he could not make roads into the feudal system in Europe. His ideas found no ground or no basis for recognition because he didn't have the status in society. He didn't have the credentials, and he came here. Originally, he started a canary farm in the East and failed at all of these things until he finally was able to start to build suspension bridges. But there was a freedom to choose here. I think Europeans were looking here for the kind of things that made possible, that on almost any corner there would be another new building going up. I can't believe, when I think when I first came to Denver how the downtown was and how I see it now. There were none of these tall buildings down there. None of it, or maybe a couple. Now they're all over. I don't know about—Corbu was looking in his Ville Radieuse, you know, his city—this concentration in these big, tall buildings.
Blum: Are you talking about l’Unité d’habitation in Marseilles?
Brownson: Marseilles was the low thing, but I'm talking about the project that he
89 proposed for Paris which were these series of tall buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright proposed the mile-high building in Grant Park, and there was always a kind of gigantism worship. They want to build bigger, bigger.
Blum: But Jacques, there was some rationale behind that at the time. In Chicago many tall buildings went up at the expense of what could have been smaller, lower buildings, but the rationale behind that was that a lot of ground space was freed by having a smaller footprint, and therefore, people had freedom on the ground and there were park-like green spaces. Was that not the rationale for these tall buildings? Maybe we look at that as a poor solution today, and some people did even then, looking back, but at the time wasn't that the rationale for those buildings?
Brownson: Well, this was the thing, that there was going to be more open space on the ground, but why did we have all of this high-rise public housing?
Blum: This is exactly what I was thinking of when I said that.
Brownson: But the real reason behind the public housing in Chicago was political. In other words, in one building you controlled a whole precinct of votes, and if that building didn't vote according to the precinct committeeman, who had the premier apartment, if you didn't vote like the precinct committeeman said, you didn't live in that building. This is a thing that's debatable, but to my way of thinking building things like Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green are a political statement by the Democratic Party to control votes. Those precincts were controlled by the Democratic precinct committeemen, and they're still controlled that way to a certain extent. But it was more than an escape to nature, I think, that generated those things. Then the other question, of course, was a reflection. Who went very far? You had streetcars and you didn't have automobiles and you didn't have the Eisenhower or the Dan Ryan or the Kennedy expressways in Chicago, which are loaded with cars. You only took the train or the streetcar or Sam Insull's interurban going out. That was the way you got around. Very few people went anywhere in the world. Now you can work at home, as we were talking about—my son-in-
90 law and his one-man technological office. I was talking about architectural drawings being made in Bangladesh. Why have a big architectural office anymore when you can do all of this thing with cyberspace, as they say. So you have a different kind of change now. What I'm saying is, you had the Loop in Chicago. There is a big change in the financial industry that has been going on for some time. Everybody likes to go by and say, "That's my bank,” if it's the Harris Trust & Savings or the Continental Bank or Norwest in Denver that Philip Johnson built with the big atrium. What a bank needs an atrium for, I don't know. It's taken a return on my investment in order to pay for that damned vacant space down there. You don't even know where your bank is anymore. I don't know whether that's all good or not, but the financial industry is changing. Is the financial industry on Wall Street? Is it downtown on LaSalle Street? What is the change coming on those areas? You were talking about buildings getting taller and bigger, because you had to physically interact with somebody. You got up and you went over to someone’s office to talk to him. The reason that the architectural offices had their own in-house architects and mechanical and all of the other things was that you could get up from your drawing board and go over to talk to the structural engineer. Today you watch the "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour" on PBS. Remember when they used to fly in all of these guys to their studio and they'd come from here, there and everywhere and they'd come together and sit around and talk? Now they talk to the wall. They talk to a picture on the wall. I never thought that I would come to see the day. As far as I'm concerned, now if that guy exists, he's alive, he's right there on the wall.
Blum: Jacques, you're talking about the technology of today. In, say, 1946 or 1947 after the war, did architecture, engineering, experience the same kind of amazement with new technological changes, methods, materials? Was there that kind of growth at that time that would be comparable to what you're talking about for today?
Brownson: Oh, yes.
Blum: What had happened during the war? Specifically, what was the growth?
91 Brownson: I showed you this book, Yesterday's Tomorrow, in which you will see this great, new world of technology that is coming—refrigerators, cars that steer themselves, talking pictures and this television box. The changes that they were talking about, with all of this technology that was coming in to satisfy that, all you have to do is to look at the consumption of energy as it has gone up in industrialized societies to know that major change was coming. When I came out here in 1972, I brought with me from Chicago the idea of registration drafting. Do you know what registration drafting is?
Blum: No.
Brownson: Well, when you made a drawing before everything went on one sheet of paper. In fact, we used to say when you were making a drawing that "the sheet wasn't black enough," and it became black by the fact that you put a lot of lines on it. Now you don't even have a sheet of paper to make the drawing on anymore. Registration drafting was a system developed in Chicago. Mylar, which is a drafting film that you make the drawings on, you had a registration bar that was out of stainless steel and it had little pins on it. All of these drawing sheets, instead of coming on a roll of paper which you would unroll and you rolled it back a certain way, then run your scale or ruler in there and it would cut a piece and tape it down and start drawing. Everybody was doing that, and you had a big office full of ten, twelve guys, and they were all making these drawings. The registration bar was fastened to your drawing board—as I said, it was a Chicago idea—and it had all of these little pins out. All of these Mylar sheets, which came in a flat box, had master-punched holes in them. The holes in each sheet were in the same place. You simply snapped the sheet over the top. You only put one thing on each sheet. You'd have thousands of sheets of this Mylar, but there would only be one thing on it. Let's say you're making something that is the hardest thing—and this happened on the Civic Center, on the Daley Center—you're going through this whole rigmarole, making all of these drawings, and you've got all of these title blocks. Each sheet has a title block. It's got a number, it's got the client's name and it's got all of that. If it's a public job it's
92 got the commissioners and all of the other names on it. Halfway through the job or maybe even toward the end of the job, three or four of the commissioners are kicked off of the committee and they're changed, and you've got another name. Now what do you do?
Blum: You change your registration bar.
Brownson: The Civic Center has eleven hundred sheets of drawings. You've got to change those names on every single sheet of one of those drawings. So, with registration drafting, the only thing that is on one sheet, and it appears only on one sheet, is that nomenclature so you only have to change one sheet. On one sheet you put the column center lines, and the next sheet you'll only put the actual column on.
Blum: This process recalls to me the process of Japanese woodblock prints.
Brownson: Similar to it. That's where it came from, yes. Well, I'm talking about the architectural connotation of it.
Blum: Yes, of course.
Brownson: This stuff is all floating around, believe me. Someplace it's in cyberspace. That's the new thinking. So, I brought that out when I worked on Auraria because I had all of these different architects working, and I had to get some semblance—we always had the kind of statement that gee, with this other system we could never even get the north arrow going in the same direction. One guy—maybe he had a bad lunch or something—but the arrow would be going in the opposite direction from where the building was. We've even had buildings on the wrong place on the block.
Blum: Some time ago I asked you what kind of technological change took place right after the war, while you were still at IIT, a time which seems to parallel what you are talking about today. When you were at IIT were you aware of the new things?
93 Brownson: The one thing I think that this exhibit of Hilbs's for the State Department, Planning USA, shows is a different kind of thinking.
Blum: From what to what?
Brownson: Of thinking in terms of that very small, narrow focus on things, of thinking again at a different scale that I have been talking about during this discussion with you of emphasizing that kind of thing, where it is no longer significant for the architect—and I don't like to generalize because it will come back and haunt me—but where the architect cannot think in terms of minutiae but has to think at a different scale. We used to have a saying, "You can't start with the asphalt tile on the floor and build a building." Like I told you about Mies and the marvelous concert hall drawing which is on a little sheet of paper, that tells me more about a concert hall than all of the working drawings would ever tell me in terms of the scale of things and the concept of thinking and the encompassment of that kind of thought process that he was going through. Mies used to say, "God is in the details," but he didn't detail all of the minutiae, you know. It all has to come together that way, and it is all so important. But if there is no overall principle guiding that kind of work, then nothing is going to come from our work. We've had Postmodernists, we've had Deconstructionists, we've had all of these "de- this" and "do that" and all of these other kinds of gimmicks, and they're a dead-end street. They lead us nowhere, and yet we cannot get at some of the most pressing problems that we have.
Blum: Jacques, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. You have been very articulate about Hilbs's principles in planning. However, Mies has been criticized for not being sensitive to the environment in which he places his very beautiful, very pristine buildings. How do you respond to that?
Brownson: Only by looking at what he did and the kind of impression that being in those buildings really gives you. Take 880 and 860. Why are they two buildings and not one gigantic, well-proportioned lump? Why are those
94 buildings in the human scale compared to some of the other apartments in that area? If you look at those two buildings and then look closely at the buildings that are inland from that, jammed, and how they are put together, then if you spend any amount of time in 880 or 860—Phyllis Lambert used to have an apartment at the top, and Skip Genther used to be up there. That was an unbelievable experience to be in those buildings. It couldn't have been a more human experience than to be in one of those buildings in a storm. And I'll tell you another little interesting story about 880 and 860. One evening during an extremely heavy storm, Genther invited some people to his apartment. Ove Arup, who was an English engineer, worked with Rogers and Piano. His firm—I don't know how much he did on it—but his firm was the engineers on the Pompidou Center. Oh, the story gets unbelievable. Anyway, Ove Arup was in Chicago. Shirley Genther was a pianist and had invited some people there one night. Frank Kornacker was there with an unbelievable blond, and we were in Genther's apartment at the top of this building. A wild, violent storm came up. Those buildings are very light, and Kornacker was a very daring engineer, and the buildings were very flexible. In the bathrooms you could watch the water sloshing back and forth, and in your cup it's going like that, and you could feel the building moving around like that. Well, Ove Arup is also kind of a pianist, and was playing the piano and Kornacker was sitting there. Arup was playing something on the piano, and he turns to Kornacker, and the lightning was bombing. It was like being in “Der Rosencavalier,” this music, you know. Arup was playing, and he turns to Kornacker and he says, "Flexible, isn't it?" Have you ever been up in the top of those buildings in a storm?
Blum: Not in a storm.
Brownson: Well, anyway, you look out there towards the south, and you see all of these various lights in the city and it starts to set up—these different signal lights, you know. One would go on and the other would go off, and it starts to set up a kind of musical rhythm. In fact, when I'm up at the lake, up at Rainy Lake—one day this lawyer friend of mine, who is very rational—he's about ten years older than I am—we were sitting there on the deck and the wind
95 was blowing, and there is a great difference in nature. But we're sitting there, and the aspen leaves are moving one way, at one rhythm, the pines are moving at another, the lower ones at another, and I said, "Dick, you've got a symphony going here." He says, "What are you, nuts? I don't hear a thing."
Blum: Jacques, I know that in 1947 you did a project for Popular Mechanics. I know that you were featured in the article in the magazine as the typical returning G. I., newly married, without housing.
Brownson: And broke.
Blum: Yes, probably broke. You built your own house in conjunction with Popular Mechanics. Would you talk about that project? How did they find you, or did you find them?
Brownson: I'll tell you how that all came about, but there is one thing that I thought about after our session yesterday. You know, it wasn't all fun and games at school. Sure, there was a lot of—I like to think, anyway—laughing at ourselves. Maybe it's like G. K. Chesterton said, that life's too serious to be serious about it. But there was one thing about IIT, that I always worked extremely hard, and not only did the students laugh at themselves but even our teachers would make jokes about things. I think it was just all of these kinds of stories that I've been telling, that they all make it seem like fun and games to you, but they were just a part of the way our daily life was and what we were living. So much for that. Now, to go back to the Popular Mechanics house. It was a complete fluke and just one of those things. Why did it happen? Why does anything happen to you? It's fate. But I came back, and, of course, I returned to my parents’ home that was at 414 Weston in Aurora, Illinois. Across the street there was another young fellow who was living at home with his wife's parents. His name was Wayne Leckey. I had a reputation in the neighborhood—I don't know whether you would call it a reputation, but anyway, I was known in the neighborhood where I lived and where I grew up that I was always building things. It didn't make any difference what it was. I was big in soapbox derby racing. I raced soapbox
96 derbies in Lincoln Park in Chicago, and I built all kinds of things. Also, as I said, before I went into the service and before I started going to Illinois Institute of Technology, I had built this house in order to pay the beginning tuition. The people across the street knew this and they knew of me. Anyway, Wayne Leckey said to his father-in-law, "You know, Popular Mechanics is interested in getting one of the returning veterans to build a house for himself so that we could publish it and show how it's done, and then we could sell plans and we could sell magazines with it." He said, "This is what I've been working on, and we've been working in Chicago," because he was commuting from Aurora, Illinois, to Chicago on the railroad. He said, "We've been working on developing this project, and now we're trying to find somebody to do this." His father-in-law said to him, "Well, there is a kid across the street who just came back from the service who built a house before the war, and he's been working around as a carpenter. Why don't you talk to him?" So one evening Wayne Leckey came over and introduced himself to me. I knew what Popular Mechanics was, because they were showing different things that were going on and building things, and so I knew the magazine he worked for. So he said, "Would you be interested in building a house for Popular Mechanics? We'll pay you to do that.” I said I didn't know whether I could or not. "Well," he said, "could you get a lot to build it on here in Aurora? This is close enough to Chicago. If you furnish the lot, Popular Mechanics will give you all of the materials that you need in order to build a house, so you won't have to pay for any materials. The only thing that you'll have to do is to furnish all of your labor and all of the things in order to do that. But we'll pay for all of the materials." So the more I thought about it, finally I got back in touch with him and I said, "Yes, I think I could do that." I thought quite a bit about it. They said they were going to get an architect to do the plans, and they showed up with the plans for this colonial house. Well, of course, I had had enough architecture to question this thing. So I made a few changes in the plan, and then my wife, Doris, and I went into Chicago to meet with the Popular Mechanics people. Of course, we were young and our hair was combed and so forth, and I suppose that it was all right. We finally got started on building this thing, and that's the story of the way it started.
97 Blum: And it took you six months to build?
Brownson: Yes, about six months to build it. I had no idea of the consequences of this thing.
Blum: It has all been carefully documented in Popular Mechanics in a series of three issues.
Brownson: Well, evidently it was one of the most successful things that Popular Mechanics it did. They had inquiries from all over and requests for plans. It was the beginning of, I suppose, how to do something yourself. They photographed everything, and they documented it and gave a bill of materials and how you cut the stuff. They would swarm over the place all of the time, and there was always somebody taking pictures. But when the project was finished and they had the grand opening, oh, my, the people. You just couldn't believe it. It was mob of people. I forget how many thousands of people came the first day and wandered through the house. They almost wore the house out the first day, there were so many people going through it.
Blum: Was that going to be your home?
Brownson: Well, it was going to be where we lived. But for Popular Mechanics it was the idea of getting exposure for this project to sell magazines.
Blum: Of course. Who held title to the house?
Brownson: I did, always.
Blum: So it really belonged to you?
Brownson: Right. Whenever there was money required for material, why, they furnished that. I had to pay the income tax. I don't remember what it was, but I had to
98 report it as income, so I had the taxes on that.
Blum: It sounds like you were the idea person to do that.
Brownson: Well, they made a lot out of it.
Blum: And it suited your needs at the time as well.
Brownson: I guess they also made a big thing out of the fact that I had been overseas, and there was the mystique of China and there were all of these other kinds of things. So it made good copy. But I remember talking with Hilbs later about it, because a lot of my student friends kind of looked askance. Hilbs said, "Oh, don't pay any attention to them. It's a great thing to build something like that. It gives you a lot of experience."
Blum: You mean your fellow students looked askance because it was not a modern design?
Brownson: Because it was a colonial house and nobody at IIT was building any colonial or making any colonial houses, you know.
Blum: Did you have any conflict about that? I mean, here you were, being trained in this new vocabulary, and you were building something that was yesterday's fashion.
Brownson: With myself? Yes. That's why I said that I would talk with Hilbs once in a while about it, and Hilbs said, "Ah, forget it. It's a good experience."
[Tape 4: Side 2]
Brownson: And Hilbs also made some reference, "Architects do linoleum patterns, and they do all kinds of different stuff. Forget it." And that was it.
Blum: Did you feel it was good experience for you?
99 Brownson: Oh, yes.
Blum: I mean, you had already done things like that.
Brownson: Well, yes, but not where we were keeping track of all of the expenditures, keeping track of all of the hours it took to do something, organizing the job to be sure that everything was there, that we had enough nails, that we had enough concrete, that we had all of that. I'd never had to do all that before. Previously when they'd tell me to nail up a two-by-four or something, the two-by-four was there and all I had to do was nail it up. But this time I was into a place where I had to organize an entire project. I also had to work with this magazine in order to meet their schedules of what they wanted to do and where they were coming from. So as I look back on it, it was an unbelievable experience, and I'm sure it had an effect. You know, one thing about most of the projects I've worked on is that they've pretty much been done within a time schedule and within the budget. We never had any great cost overruns on things. So that experience, I am sure, had an effect on my planning for Auraria, in the organization of a large project like Auraria. It had an effect on building the Chicago Civic Center in terms of the organization and the way in which you have a lot of people to bring together.
Blum: Jacques, in 1948 you became an assistant professor. You received your bachelor's in 1948, and then you became a teacher. Why?
Brownson: I think that a lot had to do with my personal connections with Mies and Hilbs, going back to the Mies exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Incidentally, when that exhibit was to be put together, I went to New York at my own expense because I wanted to participate in it. What do you call these—I guess they're called groupies in rock music, right? They follow the group. But anyway, I got to know Mies and Hilbs better, and I became much more interested in what was going on in architecture and what building process was being done. I took off for New York by train, and I had some funny experiences. Do you want me to say anything about the New
100 York experience?
Blum: Before you do, what was the significant moment or moments that involved you very closely with Mies and Hilbs? You said you barely saw them during your first two years, but when you returned, that was when everything came together for you.
Brownson: Because I was a part of a class of, I believe, seven. It was a very small number of students in my class. Mies and Hilbs dealt directly with us, just as they dealt directly with—if you look at the early photographs at the Art Institute, of Mies working with a very small number of students, like Danforth and Genther and Speyer. They would deal with a small group on a much more personal level than they could with a large one. As the classes got bigger, they were turned over more to assistants who worked with the students. Consequently, in smaller groups you got to understand these men better and where they were coming from. Also, I would have dinner with Hilbs or lunch with Hilbs many times. You would go with a small group with Mies to the Carson Pirie Scott restaurant, which was up on one of the upper floors, and we would sit around and talk. These kinds of things open up your eyes as to what their experiences had been. When we were talking about the humor or the frivolity of things, there is that marvelous story of Mies and the Graf Zeppelin. We were remarking about when Mies was working in Peter Behrens's office, somebody made a little sketch. I don't know whether it was Mies or not, but they made a sketch or drawing of the zeppelin which was being built someplace in Germany. It was getting ready for a flight. On this day that the flight was supposed to take place, the draftsmen in Behrens's office made this drawing of the zeppelin and cut it out and pasted it on the outside of the window, the window glass, and then they all said, "It's coming! It's coming!" and Behrens roared out of the office, "Oh, look at the Graf Zeppelin!" and it was this drawing. I think Franz Schulze talks about that in his book on Mies. But anyway, these were times when Mies was telling that story, and also the stories about his experiences in the First World War. Because they didn't have much to eat and the food was so lousy, they finally went into this farmer's yard and wrestled this cow to the ground. And
101 somebody butchered it, as a soldier. Then there were discussions not so much about architecture as an esoteric kind of thing, but discussions of the problems of building. Now, at the same time, the Navy Building at IIT had a big effect on me. I was there toward the end of the construction of the Navy Building.
Blum: On campus?
Brownson: On campus. There were the other buildings that were being planned in Mies's office and were under construction, and the bricklayers were working and I saw how they worked, and the welding of the members, and coming to the IIT campus one day and seeing the—I think it was the Chemistry Research Building leaning way over because the wind had hit the steel frame at night, and they didn't have it tied together. And Mies is standing there, "Mein Gott, why don't they put a rope on it?" And the building is all leaning over. You can see today. If you know what you're looking for, you can see the bends in some of the steel members from that experience. Then all of the brick comes on the site, this buff-colored brick that came from Pennsylvania and is used all over the campus. But the brick came, and, of course, the walls on the campus buildings are eight inches thick, most of them, with the exception of the ones on the—I forget what that building is, but there are two big, long, heavy walls on it. But the rest of the walls are eight inches thick and are framed by the steel. They butt into the black steel members that, in effect, hold the brick in position. Now, all of this brick came, and in order to make an eight-inch wall, the bricks have to be eight inches long, because we were using what's called an English bond brick wall. It's a course of stretchers, which is the long dimension of the brick, and then the headers that run in the other direction at ninety degrees to the stretchers. So if you're making an eight-inch wall, then the headers going across will have to be eight inches long. Well, the problem is that unless that brick is rigidly controlled in the kiln when it's burned or fired, some of these bricks get shorter. So one of the discussions at Carson’s at lunch that I remember, Mies said, "I don't know what we got to do. The bricks are short. If I use the bricks in the wall there, the bricks are going to have a lot of lumps on one side. You can only keep
102 one side straight. The other side is going to come and go, depending on where you take the brick out of the pile." This is digressing a little, but if you're putting a black asphalt shingle roof on a typical house, which I learned to do on that Popular Mechanics house, you mix all of the shingles up so that you get an overall tone. If you take each panel, the shingles are not all the same color. They're close, they're almost, but if you put them bundle by bundle on there, the thing looks like a patchwork quilt. So Mies said, "What do I do? Some are seven and seven-eighths, and some are seven and three- quarters. They're all these different lengths. So I suggested to the contractor, to the brick mason, that we make little U-shaped blocks of wood as a measurement, and I would have the students all come and measure the bricks and we would put all of the ones of the same length in the same pile." That sounded like a really good idea because that way you could get the walls straight and it would be all the same width. You could make it all seven and seven-eighths then instead of eight inches. Oh, yes, that's great, but the bricklayers union comes in and says, "Oh, no. No students. We'll have union bricklayers. There are a lot of them out of work. We'll have union bricklayers do all of the measuring." Well, the costs go out of sight. Mies said, "Oh, we can't do that." So if you look at some of those walls, they are a little rough. We spoke yesterday about Caldwell's brick exercises. The real secret in brick is that you have nothing smaller in a brick wall than a half a brick. That's the smallest that you can have. You don't have what are called brickbats. I guess that's why I like to go to some old movies. I'm always looking at the brick walls to see how the mason did it. Historically, in colonial times, you know that pattern where the brick sets up a very striking pattern on a wall of the headers coming through, because the headers would be burned darker than the rest of the bricks so you get a very striking pattern. Well, these kinds of things have an effect on the way that you approach that building process. We became very aware that we're going to start making walls in nothing more than a half a brick, and the other thing is that the brick mortar in there is always roughly three-eighths or half-an-inch square on a side, so you never have any through walls, you never have any brickbats in the walls, and you have logically used your reasoning to determine how that brick wall is. How do you turn the corner when you are not going to have anything smaller than
103 a half a brick? You end up looking at that brick wall in a different way. For example, in the corridors down in the lower level in the Daley Center, I wanted to use English cross bond. English cross bond sets up a very strong diagonal pattern in the wall, and it's very difficult to lay because you always have to work in a regular, precise way. Consequently, most masons when they talk about brick bonding, they know the so-called Chicago bond, which is you lay five courses. You just schlop that up like that. It ends up with an overall texture. This is just the foundation, but there is no reasoning. How do you cut a window in it? What are the proportions of that window and how does it fit in there? You can't just end up with a lot of brickbats and stuff, which is what the mason wants to do. He doesn't want to think. He just wants to slop the mortar down and be half-asleep when he is laying the brick. These things keep coming back to me because just recently I saw the brickwork on a building in New York City. We used to have a saying that, you would strike—what's called striking the joints. You would strike the joints up to about three or four stories above grade, and from then on it was a free-for-all because nobody sees that high anyway except the superintendent, who's got a pair of binoculars, checking how the bricks are laid. Those are the kinds of things that Mies would talk about, and Hilbs would also talk about those things.
Blum: And through these discussions it reinforced not only your connection with the men, Hilbs and Mies, but with what they were teaching and their approach to architecture.
Brownson: It was not only in brick, then it comes to wood. It comes into wood, and then somebody said, "Well, what about reinforced concrete. Why are there so many lousy…? And Chicago is full of them. To build a reinforced concrete building—I call them "mud buildings" because the guys who are doing the work just don't care where they put the reinforcing bars. Consequently, the climate in there expands, and the concrete falls off and the buildings get pretty cruddy looking. So Hilbs would say, "Ja, how about Maillart?" who is the Swiss bridge engineer. Then from out of somewhere these wonderful photographs show up in class. Only the Swiss could do this, like a Swiss
104 watchmaker would put the reinforcing bars in the forms, and the kinds of things that he was able to do. Mies would start to talk about how that generates the final product. You don't get that kind of concrete work out of a sloppy workman. It has to be somebody who knows exactly how to do it. These things appealed to me. I think it goes back to old "Pop" Carlson, you know. Printing. Your lettering. The lines that you're drawing.
Blum: Jacques, I hear the words about substance but I also sense your music. By music I mean the feeling of affection you have for Mies, Hilbs, as you speak about them. Did you get to know them? Did you become friends with them? Through those discussions did you develop a personal connection to them in addition to a professional one?
Brownson: Yes, I think the personal connection was a kind of mutual respect for one another. I've heard the story, but Mies used to say, "Ja, I knew Brownson could do something when I watched him swing a hammer." Well, what did he mean? Hilbs said, "Well, when most people take a hammer, they're very stiff. They try to push the nail in. What Mies is talking about is, somebody takes the hammer and it's the wrist." It's the rhythm that does it. And then Mies would come out a lot of times and he would talk about many different things. It wasn't only as we were talking about—he had an enjoyment for life, and he tried to get quality work. He had an interest in what you were doing, or, rather, they had an interest.
Blum: Did you ever go to any of the parties that some of your colleagues talk about?
Brownson: Oh, yes. Yes, we had a lot of parties. I remember an all-night one where we watched the sun come up on Lake Michigan. What house was that? It was an old, partly abandoned house with a lot of holes in the floor and stuff like that. It was up on the North Shore someplace.
Blum: And was Mies there?
Brownson: Mies was there all night. It was an all-night party that went on in cycles. Then
105 there were the ones in the Glessner House that we used to have. There were parties around the campus, and there was the wonderful night in Crown Hall with Duke Ellington. We went out and hired Duke Ellington's band for one of our dances. Mies was there, and I remember him just sitting there listening. During one of the lulls in the music—God, what a night—Ellington said to Mies, "You know, the acoustics in this space"—it was set up in the big architecture building. We had built a stage that was raised for Ellington's band, and Ellington said, "This is the best acoustics of any space I've ever played in." Speaking of acoustics goes back also to the Eighth Street Theatre in Chicago where I used to go regularly to the Chicago Title & Trust programs with the Chicago Symphony. Ken Nordine was the spokesman for the Title & Trust, and he was the announcer. These programs were broadcast, and students could get in for a buck, for a dollar. When they first started, the back of the stage was draped with some kind of heavy curtain and the sound was very muffled. Later on they took all of that out, and the symphony was on the stage with only the bare bones behind it. The pipes and the ropes and all of the stuff was there. And the sound was greatly improved.
Blum: You say the sound in Crown Hall was very good?
Brownson: Because there was nothing there, it was a very crisp sound on the back of it. It's funny how these things come back to you, but another related things was in the courtrooms in the Civic Center. On Navy Pier we built a mockup, complete, exactly, of one of the courtrooms that we wanted to test. We built it exactly like it was, like we had the drawings and everything done. We held a mock court. These were not that big. It was the small courtroom. I can't remember the size of it, but they were not very big. In the front row, you couldn't hear anything. It was like you were talking between two blankets. We had acoustic tile on the ceiling, we had acoustic panels on the walls, we had this heavy carpeting on the floor, and it sounded exactly like somebody was talking between two blankets. So we went in—I remember Ken Folgers and some other person—and we stripped all of that acoustic tile ceiling out. We stripped the wall panels off, and we ended up with what you see now in a courtroom, which are these very smooth, plaster walls and ceiling.
106 Blum: Were you aware at that time of the fine sound that Duke Ellington called attention to in Crown Hall?
Brownson: When I'm talking about the sound, it's just a kind of parallel case.
Blum: But was there any connection, either consciously or maybe subconsciously, in your own mind?
Brownson: No, I think it was just that you were aware that the sound was very muffled, and how you improve that sound when you take off those soft, absorbent surfaces. As soon as we took all of that off and we held another mock court, no problem. We saved many times over what it cost in terms of time and effort and money to build that. In that same mock courtroom we had the mark. If you look in front of the bench there are granite panels that are solid. Everything in the Civic Center Building, in the Daley Center, everything you see is what you get. There is no veneer on it. Those are solid granite panels in front of that bench. That is solid oak wood on the door. That's no ersatz stuff. Abraham Lincoln Marovitz was a big friend of John Boyle, who was the first chief judge of the court system when it was reorganized. In Abe Marovitz’s courtroom, everything was Lincoln. There was Lincoln every place you turned—busts of Lincoln, pictures of Lincoln, Lincoln sayings, everything. Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. He really loved Lincoln. But anyway, Abe Marovitz said to me, "Brownson, it's too damned small, this courtroom." He was in the Federal Center with one of these big, monumental courtrooms, as a federal judge. These were of a different scale. We've got large courtrooms in the Civic Center, too, but they serve a different purpose. But anyway, Abe said, "Well, they're too small for me. I was born down on Maxwell Street." I forget how many kids are in the Marovitz family. He said, "We slept sideways, three to the bed. I said if I ever get out of here I'm never going to get in a small space again." John Boyle was there, and I got to know John Boyle much better. That was my first meeting with Boyle, and Boyle liked the courtroom. Marovitz said, "John, that's a good idea, that granite on the front there. That's good." John said, "What do you mean?" He said, "John,
107 remember the time you got shot at when you were on the bench? If you've got a protection like that you can quick get down behind it.”
Blum: Can we step back for just a minute and talk about why you went into teaching? After you graduated you decided to teach at IIT. Why?
Brownson: Well, I didn't really like working for most architectural firms. Some time in that period when I was in school and also after I had graduated—I guess it must have been after I had graduated—but going back just a little bit, it was interesting that Old Man Murphy, who I also have great respect for and great admiration because he admitted he was not an architect as such, but he was certainly somebody who understood human nature and what drives people to do certain things. One day Murphy said to me, "Oh, you went to the poor boys' school."
Blum: What did he mean? IIT?
Brownson: And I said, "What do you mean?" "Well," he said, "it's an affordable school. It's not fancy. Most of you are serious, you go to school, you're commuters, and there is no great campus life." He said, "The tuition is very cheap," and so forth. I said, "Yes." One of the things about the poor boy aspect of IIT was they also had a program, the co-op program, where you went to school for a while and then you worked for a certain number of months. The architects did that, too. I didn't do it that way, but you could work at school for a certain period of time, and then you could break and go out to work in an engineering office or an architectural office for a certain number of months. They had a working relationship. The one I particularly remember was Link- Belt. Link-Belt was well-known, world class. They made a lot of industrial machinery. The engineers had a big co-op program with IIT. It made it possible for a lot of us who had not come from wealthy backgrounds to go to school and work your way through school.
Blum: Didn't you have the GI Bill?
108 Brownson: After the war. I'm now talking about what was going on before the war, about the poor boy aspect of the thing. So a lot of people did that, and it was also done after the war because it gave you a hands-on experience with what was going on. Subsequently, the National Council of Architectural Registration Board, it's called NCARB—because all architects have to serve an apprenticeship for three years as an intern before they can take the licensing exam. Now, we haven't talked about that part of my life, about that part of my work, which is also very important to me.
Blum: Excuse me for a minute—if you were on this work-study program, did you have an opportunity to work for someone? Was your work with Jim Speyer part of that program?
Brownson: No. Well, now we get into this problem. You had to work for a licensed architect in order to get the time to count. The registration requirements require you to work directly under a licensed architect.
Blum: Did you work under a licensed architect?
Brownson: Yes, I did. I worked for Frazier and Raftery. Walter Frazier, who was single, and Howard Raftery, who was married, were a part of the Chicago architectural scene. The firm finally became known as Frazier, Raftery, Orr and Fairbank. Walter Frazier had either studied with, or at least was influenced by, Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he may have spent some time with him. Walter Frazier was a part of that group of architects who did work primarily up on the North Shore of Chicago.
Blum: Residential?
Brownson: Residential work. We did a Norman house—you name it, we did it.
Blum: You mean in whatever historical style?
Brownson: The style, and that was when—what was his name, who did the Drake
109 Hotel...? Benny Marshall. And the other guy who was so well known was David Adler. There was a whole group. It's very interesting, in the book that Leonard Eaton wrote—how all this stuff comes around in a circle. Leonard Eaton taught architectural history at the University of Michigan and wrote the book Two Chicago Architects and their Clients. This really, in many ways, is a very significant kind of thing, to take a look at who the people are who are attracted to certain architects. Mies comes to life in Chicago with the developer that was killed in the airplane, Herb Greenwald. Herb Greenwald was a Jewish cantor.
Blum: Well, he was prior to being a developer.
Brownson: But, you know, how do all of these things start to come together? And so, I worked for Frazier and Raftery, and that's where I got my internship because they were the licensed architects.
Blum: Again, how did you feel, studying all this steel, glass and modern vocabulary and working for a firm that did Norman architecture, Tudor architecture, or Gothic, whatever historical style you worked in, for them? How did you feel about that experience? Was there any conflict?
Brownson: No, I don't think so.
Blum: Did you think there was a theoretical world in school and a real world outside?
Brownson: No, I didn't think that, but the work that Frazier and Raftery were doing was good work in the idiom they were working in. It was quality work. Their clients had the money to support their taste, and I got a wide exposure in terms of doing things. One of the things I did was this freestanding, spiral staircase in one of the houses up on the North Shore. I got to know about Asher Benjamin. In fact, someplace in my library I've got a book about Asher Benjamin stuck away. And I got to know Frank Lloyd Wright through Howard Raftery and his work. I also did a lot of work for Raftery. I was a
110 draftsman. I worked on the house for "Pussy" Paepcke over here in Aspen. It was never built, the log house in downtown Aspen that Howard Raftery designed. Then I would shift over to stuff with Walter Frazier for the Ryersons and for all of the nabobs of Chicago on the North Shore.
Blum: How long did you work for them?
Brownson: Oh, I don't know. I must have put in three years off and on in order to get my license, because before you take the license you have to have signed affidavits of your work experience.
Blum: That you've worked for three years and you have a degree?
Brownson: Yes, and you have your architectural degree, and then you can take the licensing exam.
Blum: When did you take it?
Brownson: You know, I don't remember.
Blum: You graduated in 1948. Did you have your three-year…?
Brownson: It must have been some time later—sometime in the fifties. I'd have to look and see.
Blum: Am I correct to understand that you and Bruno Conterato had a partnership at just about the time you graduated?
Brownson: Yes, well, it was really kind of after. Yes, we worked together. We didn't have any significant work. That was the problem. We didn't get any work to keep this thing going. We didn't have the connections.
Blum: Did he have a license at the time?
111 Brownson: Yes. Bruno had just come back from the Korean War. He got called back in to the Korean War, and when he came back we started an office in Aurora, Illinois. We just couldn't make it work. I suppose a lot of it has to do with the fact that an architect has to have a lot of social connections or something. And as I said, we always were a little standoffish at the architecture school. Nobody ever told us at school that, like Ed Stone, the first principle of architecture is to get the job. What's the first principle of architecture? Old Ed says, "Get the job." But how do you get work? How do you generate work?
Blum: Did you have any work with Bruno?
Brownson: No, not much to speak of. I think we did a couple of little remodeling things, but nothing of any significance at all.
Blum: Well, I read somewhere, and I'm afraid I can't cite my source right now, that you designed a freight car maintenance building. Was that a remodeling job?
Brownson: Oh, yes. It received an award from Progressive Architecture or somebody. Oh, that’s what we did in order to keep going, now it starts to come back! I'll tell you what we did to pay the rent.
Blum: What?
Brownson: We did a lot of shop drawings.
Blum: For other offices?
Brownson: For different manufacturers around. In other words, once a job is bid and you have a contractor, then you get all of these shop drawings, which is the way something is actually made. For example, if you're building a steel building, you get all of these shop drawings that show each piece and bolt and nut and rivet and welding and all of this stuff. You get drawings that show exactly what that manufacturer is going to make—the drawing that he gives to his shop. They're called shop drawings. Those are the ones that really build a
112 building. There are definite standards for how they're made, because the workman in the shop has certain ways of looking at that thing when he makes something. He doesn't know what he is making. He doesn't know where it goes or what he is making, so you must detail everything that has to be done. This factory that I did was for the Allied Lead Construction Company. It's in my résumé because it received an award from Progressive Architecture. Allied Lead made protective devices for hospitals and places like that—lead-lined rooms where they took x-rays and all of the protection. Bruno and I made shop drawings for the fabrication of these.
[Tape 5: Side 1]
Brownson: And then we also did steel shop drawings for some steel fabricating company. I can't remember who it was. But we would make the drawings for them because they didn't have a drafting room, and we would make those kinds of things.
Blum: How long were you in business with Bruno?
Brownson: It couldn't have been much more than a year. It wasn't very long. He went with Mies after that.
Blum: Oh. With Mies or SOM?
Brownson: No, he went with Mies. Was he with SOM?
Blum: Yes.
Brownson: I don't remember that. He ended up as a partner of Mies's, but I don't remember the chronology of that.
Blum: And you went to teach?
Brownson: I went into teaching. You asked why I went into teaching. Maybe it was the
113 fact that I couldn't get any work.
Blum: Did you have any special attraction to teaching?
Brownson: No, but I liked to teach, and as a graduate assistant I had been teaching. Then Danforth called me, and he said, "Do you want to teach freshman drawing?" I said yes because it allowed me time for myself. The school was set up so that there were certain blocks of time. There were blocks of time when the student had academic subjects, and then he had drawing and architectural subjects. You would concentrate blocks of time rather than try to take an hour here and an hour there. The planning part became Thursday and Friday of the week, and you would concentrate two full days of work then. So that left me time to do my own work then, so I had an opportunity to do my own work. I was building my house in Geneva, and it allowed me that time for that. I could then teach toward the end of the week, but I had large blocks of time for myself.
Blum: When you decided to teach, had you decided then to continue on for your master's?
Brownson: You know, I always was a laggard, I suppose, and I was prodded continually by Hilberseimer, "You have to get your graduate degree, you have to get your graduate degree." I said, "Well, you don't have a graduate degree." "Well, you never listen to me. You have to get your graduate degree." I got involved in this house, and that became my graduate degree thesis.
Blum: You didn't take any further classes?
Brownson: I was teaching and I took some additional—I can't remember what all the classes were.
Blum: You said some time ago that you were teaching descriptive geometry, and I read somewhere that you were teaching planning with Hilberseimer.
114 Brownson: That, too.
Blum: Oh, so you were teaching several subjects. You taught for almost ten years, 1948 to 1957, according to the records.
Brownson: Wasn't it as late as 1959? Yes, and all that time I was the utility infielder, I guess you would call it. I was shifted around from different classes that I was teaching. I taught planning, and then also they got into this night school thing at IIT. I taught at night school with people who had not been going to IIT but were mainly working and wanted to advance their education. So they would come for night school. That was very, very difficult to do. The classes were large, and night school was very difficult teaching.
Blum: Your Geneva house, as you've mentioned, was it done as your master's thesis?
Brownson: That's true, yes. The Geneva house was done as part of the work I had been doing in graduate school. The graduate school was made up of some people who subsequently went on to do things that received recognition. One who you're familiar with is Kevin Roche. Reginald Malcolmson was there, and there was an Egyptian, Abdel Kamel, who subsequently became very important in planning in the government of Egypt. There was also at that time, or somewhere in that era, Tony Tritsis. I don't know whether his name has ever come up, but Tony Tritsis died just recently. He became the mayor of Athens, Greece, and also was very active in developing the common currency for the European market and he was at IIT for planning.
Blum: So these were people who were studying for their master's at the same time that you were doing yours.
Brownson: Yes. The big thing always with Kamel was studying for the doctorate degree. He wanted to get that degree. I don't believe that he got it. I don't know, but I don't believe so because I don't think there were any given.
115 Blum: Did any of these other students do a master's thesis such as yours? Did anyone else actually build a house?
Brownson: No, no. I was the only one, I guess, who didn't have any sense because I didn't know all of the things about welding and all of the other kinds of things involved.
Blum: Where did your idea come from?
Brownson: Well, I wanted to build a modern house, and I did have at that time potentially some resources from the house that I had built for Popular Mechanics. There was that money that I could use. When Doris and I were going up along the Fox River from Aurora—I don't know where we were going—as we drove along Route 31 in Geneva, which is South Batavia Avenue, there is this big, old Greek Revival house which was owned by a man named Reckitt, and it goes by the Fabian Forest Preserve. This big, Greek Revival house had formerly belonged to, as he was referred to, Squire Reckitt, who was an Englishman, and English mustard and bluing was where his fortune came from. Everybody knows Reckitt's yellow mustard and Reckitt's bluing. So he had this large estate, and then he died and the estate was broken up into a series of lots. This lot had these marvelous trees and all of these things on it, and I saw it and started to make an inquiry from the real estate guy there in Geneva, and then subsequently we bought it. The money for buying that lot, which around that time was five thousand dollars, came from the sale of the Popular Mechanics house. Of course, after having sold the place that we lived in, we had to have someplace to live, so on this property there was an old garage, which was originally part of the Reckitts’s estate, and the inside was all lined with what's called beaded sheathing, which is boards about four inches wide. They've got a beaded edge where the joint comes together, and it's called beaded sheathing. It was these strips of wood. It was a common material, and it was a very nice material. There were the old garage doors on the front of it, and so I thought since we're all young, I could convert this into a place to live in the meantime. So I took the garage doors off, and I made a large window out of the front of it, then I moved the garage
116 doors back and covered them with sheetrock to make a wall out of it. It was really a free plan. There were no rooms with doors as such. One side was a small kitchen, which was about eight feet long, and then on the other side there was a small sleeping space. Then there was a bathroom between the kitchen and the sleeping space. I guess I've always had this kind of feeling—instead of accepting what is, I try to do something else. So what am I going to do for the bathtub? We didn't have any bathtub as such, so I said, "Why don't I just make a big copper container for this bathtub?" I had the local sheet metal man bend some copper sheets to make a bathtub, which was roughly five feet by maybe thirty inches wide that became the bathtub. It was interesting because the copper, of course, oxidized everywhere except where you sat down in the bathtub, which left two nice, shiny ovals on the bottom of the tub. That was our bathroom. And we had a little dining table in the front. Our bed was in what also became a sitting space and was in the front part of that room. I think there was one child at that time. That was before my daughter was born. He had this back room. We had a lot of good times there, and a lot of people coming and going from Chicago. Also during the time that I was building the house in Geneva, the Farnsworth trial was going on in Geneva, Illinois, which was Kane County. The Farnsworth House was located in Kendall County, but the court trial was transferred from Yorkville, Illinois, to Geneva, Illinois, which is the Kane County Courthouse. So all of these lawyers of Mies’s and Myron Goldsmith and everybody would come and go to this trial because at that time it was the longest civil trial that had even been held in that area. In fact—and I've often wanted to do this—I've seen the documents, but I went to Kendall County, to Yorkville, and I asked to see the transcript of the Farnsworth trial. The county clerk went out and brought out this big box of old, dusty papers—this was not too long ago; a few years ago—of the infamous trial on the glass Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. Of course, I knew the Farnsworth House very well. I knew it from the Museum of Modern Art exhibit; I knew it from the work that was done. You know Bill Dunlap did a lot of work on the Farnsworth House in Mies's office. I knew quite a bit about it, and I would make journeys down to Plano to see it during the construction process. I also became friends with Karl Freund, who was the cabinetmaker who also did all of the cabinet
117 work and the wall panels and things in the Arts Club, the same Karl Freund. Karl Freund was also a close friend of Al Shaw's. In fact, Mies wanted to know where he could get a carpenter to do panel work and Al Shaw recommended Freund, who lived in Algonquin or someplace on the Fox River. So I used to go down there quite often while it was under construction.
Blum: When the Farnsworth House or your house was under construction?
Brownson: Well, both. My house also was under construction. There was a time when I ran out of money, and I didn't have any money to finish it. I had the frame of the house up, but there was a period of time—I think it was one summer—that this frame just sat there. It caused a lot of controversy in Geneva because they said it was a heliport that was being built or it was a bridge approach across the Fox River, and everybody was concerned about this steel frame sitting there and this pile of junk sitting there in the woods. I thought it looked like a pretty good frame, myself. It looked good. But anyway, I got to know Karl Freund, and I really got to know the Farnsworth House. During the time of the trial we were living very modestly, and as Doris was remarking, wondering where we got the money for all of this gin. These lawyers and everybody would come to my house, and, wanting to be hospitable, I'd run to the liquor store and get some gin to make martinis. Myron Goldsmith was there, and Mies's lawyer liked martinis. And so, we would sit there and talk about the trial. One of the things that came up in this trial was a question that was asked by Edith Farnsworth's lawyer. He asked Myron Goldsmith how is it that he had the Fulbright Scholarship at that time and he came back. He had been working with Nervi in Rome. He came back because of this trial, really. He came back, and he said, "How can a man of your stature work for a dollar an hour?" Everybody in Mies's office always got paid one dollar an hour. That was it, a dollar an hour. Myron said, "Well, I always looked at working in Mies's office as money in the bank." That was a kind of classic comment about why people worked in Mies's office for a buck an hour.
Blum: Jacques, what was the chronology between your house, which your master's
118 thesis right here says was 1949 to 1952, and the Farnsworth House, which began as early as 1945 and stretched until 1954? Where was your house as the Farnsworth House was being constructed?
Brownson: They were both kind of proceeding parallel to one another in many ways.
Blum: Was yours finished before the Farnsworth?
Brownson: Yes, it was completed before the Farnsworth House. I don't remember all of those details or dates. We could piece it together, I'm sure.
Blum: Were you aware of another glass pavilion that Philip Johnson constructed in 1950? If it was finished in 1950, it was finished earlier than either yours or the Farnsworth House. Did you know about this?
Brownson: Well, I don't quite know how to talk about this particular problem. Philip was in and out of Mies's office continually. He always knew everything that was going on in Mies's office.
Blum: Were they friends?
Brownson: Oh, yes, sure. Philip wrote the book on Mies, and they were friends. But Philip was always in the office, going around from board to board to see what was going on, to see what was happening with the thing. Of course, we know about Philip building the court house which had, I think, plywood walls. Do you know about that one he built, I think, when he was still a student at Harvard?
Blum: Was that his own house, the one he built in Cambridge?
Brownson: It was his own house, yes. Then he built the glass pavilion there in Connecticut, right around the same time all of the work was going on with Mies's building.
119 Blum: Do you think he got the idea from Mies?
Brownson: I think that's something you have to ask Philip. He'd always say, "Well, what else is new?" and I would be working there on the models or something else. Yes, I'm sure he knew what was going on. But that's neither here nor there because the house is in many ways considerably different than the other ones in terms of the space and the structural concept and the subtleties of the detailing, of the way you turn the corner again and the way the steel members come together and all of these kinds of things.
Blum: But the idea that they're glass pavilions is similar.
Brownson: I think this really comes from Mies developing an idea. It goes back to the twenties with the glass tower in Germany—you know, the project and that whole period of glass in architecture.
Blum: Well, the three glass pavilions that struck me were yours, Johnson's, and, of course, the Farnsworth House. You say they are very different, and I'm sure they are to your eye, but to my layman's eyes, they're really similar and very unique from other things that other people were doing in the modern idiom at that time.
Brownson: The Geneva house is really two houses in one.
Blum: Would you explain?
Brownson: Yes. It's two houses in one. It's a house in which there was a family of five living in it—two boys, a girl, and a man and a wife. It was a house that was separated. If you look at the plan, it is separated very clearly by a wall that says that one part is very private, and the other part is the public space, which is the front part. It's a house in which the difference shows. The other two, the Farnsworth House and the Johnson house, are different. Johnson went to a small, adjacent building to sleep. He had a kitchen and the other kinds of things in it, but the glass house itself was a completely open public
120 space, but yet he went to the other one for the more private aspects of his life. In Mies's case, in the Farnsworth House, Edith Farnsworth could do all of her activities, anything that she wanted. Her house was a private house, and she could live in it any way she wanted to. She slept there, she prepared food there, she did gardening out of there, and she did all of the kinds of things. But as I say, the Geneva House was two houses, and if you look at the plan, you'll see it very clearly.
Blum: Two parts of one house, but they're under the same roof.
Brownson: It's all one volume, but there are two distinct functions going on—one very private. You've got children and you've got to separate. This is another thing. If you look at Mies's ideas, and I alluded to differences a little bit, between Hilbs and Mies, Hilbs had the idea that everybody should have his own bedroom with a door on it so that you could go there and escape. Again, it's like in Wright's houses where you had two parts—the private part and an open, public part. It's in all of Wright's work, you know. But if you look at Mies's plans, in all of the so-called open planning projects that Mies did, how can that work where you're all living, in effect, in the same room together? Now, when I talk about going up to Rainy Lake, the cabin at Rainy Lake is just one big space.
Blum: What was your Geneva house like in terms of flexibility of space? I realize you say there were two parts, one public and one private.
Brownson: But there were three bedrooms.
Blum: With doors?
Brownson: With doors. That part of the house had its own heating system, it had its own bathrooms, it had everything. It was almost a completely separate unit with the exception that it didn't have a kitchen.
Blum: Was that the part with the brick exterior?
121 Brownson: That's the part with the brick, in that area, and it opens then on the far end where the glass comes around in the U-shaped section on the end. And it opens out onto what was not completed, and something which I kept saying I was going to make the drawings for, but there was to have been a very large garden wall there which was about one hundred fifty feet long, and a studio section to it that would have completed that private end of the house. That has never been completed. Then there is the open part, the front part, which is thirty-two feet wide, that living room, and with the freestanding element in the center you had another fifty feet in the other direction, and the dining area and the entrance and so forth. It was all a part of that. But when I built the house, after the frame was up, I had a plan for it that was completely different from what the final one was. All of the interior walls were made of out of what is called Pyro-bar, which is a trade name. It's made by United States Gypsum Company. It was used in all office building partitions. It was three inches or four inches thick, and roughly sixteen by thirty. It was made out of solid gypsum with holes in it. A mason would lay this up just like you would lay big blocks of brick, and it went up very rapidly. It was lightweight. The reason for using it in an office building was that it was, first of all, fireproof, and secondly, when you changed the plan you could knock it down. It was flexible. You could put it up in another way. Well, I put up all of this completely myself. I did all of this work on this.
Blum: Did you do this house by yourself, again, like the Popular Mechanics house?
Brownson: The entire house I did all myself. This Pyro-bar, I put the whole plan up the way that I had drawn it out, which I had made the model for. I was living in that garage and I would see this thing every day, and I would look at it. I would walk to it. Finally, one day I just said, no, that's not it, and I took a sledgehammer and I literally knocked the entire inside of that house apart. Doris didn't know, nobody knew about it. I completely destroyed it inside.
Blum: What disturbed you so much?
122 Brownson: I didn't like the space. The rumor got around town that there was an ultra- rich man that had completely taken the inside of his house out and started over again. Well, it was easy to do. It wasn't very costly. Anyway, going back to the beginning of it, when I was working on this house, in the model form and then when it became much more imminent that I was going to build it, I got Frank Kornacker to do the engineering on it for the steel work, to engineer the frame of it because it is built by four, U-shaped, what we call steel vents. These are welded. All of the joints are welded, and then the roof plate, which is thirty-two by eighty-eight feet, is suspended from those steel beams. It hangs below as a hanging frame. These become what are called rigid steel vents, in an engineering term, and they require a technical analysis of the stresses in the thing. Kornacker assigned a young engineer by the name of Ernie Vlad to work on it, and he worked on the engineering on the project. Well, then I went to Joseph T. Ryerson Steel Company over on the West Side of Chicago, and I got a price from them. They took the contract. They made the shop drawings. In fact, you know, because I've lost my drawings on all of this stuff, I'll bet I could go to Ryerson and get the old shop drawings.
Blum: And get copies.
Brownson: Anyway, so Ryerson got the contract. This comes back in the Civic Center again, too, later on. The chief engineer for Ryerson was a guy named Bodewiss. He was the chief engineer for Ryerson. Well, his office guy that looked after things was named John Rome. I was going in every week almost, trying to get this thing, and John would say, "Come on. We'll go out and take a look, and I'll show you. It's coming right along, coming right along." So he'd take me out in this gigantic shop, and we'd go by a pile of steel beams, and he'd say, "There it is, there. There are some of the pieces there. Come on. There is some more of it over there." Well, this went on for a couple of months. Finally, something dawned on me, and I said, "When are they ever going to get done with this?" Somewhere I got a hold of Bodewiss, the chief engineer, and he said, "Rome! Come in here! What the hell are you telling this kid, that his steel is all over? We haven't even started on that job. In fact, Chicago Architectural Metals is going to do that work." Rome is sitting there
123 kind of shocked. Bodewiss said to me, "We'll get it done. We'll call you when it's ready to go." Then they called me one day, and Bodewiss said, "We're getting ready to ship this stuff, and they said they wanted you to come in and take a look at it to see how you like it." They felt embarrassed, I guess, by the fact that they had been stringing me along. The whole steel cost—today it's peanuts, but then it was about three thousand dollars for the steel frame. So I went out, and I never saw such a twisted mass of spaghetti in my life. This stuff was so crooked. I said to Rome, "I can't believe this." "Well," he said, "you know, you had a lot of welding on this thing," which there was, all of these joints. I knew nothing about welding at that time. After learning welding, then I found out with all of these welds you get a lot of warpage. Bodewiss comes out and looks at it, and he said some disgusted remark. He said, "We're going to put old so-and-so in the shop on this."
Blum: Did he mean to straighten it out?
Brownson: To straighten it out. So, this old guy comes over. He saunters over, and he's got this big tank of acetylene and oxygen and a big torch. He looks at this steel member, and he takes this thing and he heats it up and it gets a little red spot on there. He goes over there and heats it up a little bit, like that, and back over there some other place, like that. He goes over and is sitting there, smoking a cigarette, looking off in space. This stuff comes right, eventually, after all. This went on then. I left, but this old guy who knew how to do it—knew the technique, which then I thought I'd find out later on—was able to make it all straight.
Blum: All straightened out.
Brownson: And it came out. It was absolutely perfect when it came on the job. In the meantime, Dan Brenner and I had been doing the concrete work, the foundations. There are some photographs in here that Dan's widow sent me. She's dead, too, now, but she sent me some pictures of Dan and I working. We'd never had any experience in all of these kinds of things, you know. All the steel comes out, delivered by Ryerson. It comes on this truck, so before
124 the truck from Ryerson came, I called up a contractor who I knew had what we call at quick-way or a mobile crane that's on a truck and it goes around. Maybe you've seen them. I called up, so this guy came up alone with his mobile truck. His nickname was Jerico. He was the crane operator who operated the crane. The Ryerson truck is sitting there, and this guy looked kind of friendly, the guy who did the erection work and ran the crane. So I said, "Dan and I, Dan Brenner, we really have never handled any steel before. We don't know very much." "Oh," he said, "I'll show you how to tie these things on there, how you put the hooks and things on it so I can lift it up. There's nothing to it. Anybody can do it." So Dan, he'd get one end of the cable, and I got on the other, and Jerico would lift it up. We finally got the stuff all unloaded and we started to erect the steel, putting all of these steel members up. We'd never done that before either. We didn't know from nothing how to go about this. There were holes where you would put bolts in. I knew that the steel workers had a thing called a spud wrench, which is a long wrench that they use to erect steel so when it gets in a line you jam the end of this tapered pin through the hole and that aligns the steel so you can get the bolt in to connect it, because you have to have erection bolts in order to get the steel before you weld it. So we're about, oh, I'd say, halfway through this erection process of putting all of these loose pieces—and it goes very rapidly. All of a sudden a big Cadillac drives up in the yard and this big guy with a big belly gets out and says, "Hello, Jerico, what are you doing?" Jerico didn't say much, and then he comes over to me and looks around, and he says, "Who are you?" I told him. "A scab, huh?" He says, "Are you union? I'm the business agent for the ironworkers in the Chicago area. We heard you're…" So he goes over to Jerico, and he said, "Jerico, what are you doing working with these scabs?" He called us scabs because we were doing this.
Blum: And you were nonunion.
Brownson: We weren't union. He said to Jerico, "What are you doing working with these scabs?" Jerico says, "Well, that guy, it's his own house." He says, "Lay off. You're not allowed to work with scabs. You know better than that. We'll have a crew up here in the morning, and we'll handle this job. We're going to have
125 to take it all apart and put it back together again, but we'll take care of it. But don't lift another piece of steel." The guy gets in his Cadillac and goes out, and he's gone. So I'm looking at Dan, and we're looking back and forth. I've got a pair of these old overalls on—we were kind of funny looking—and Jerico says, "Oh, I'll tell you. If we really work fast we'll have it all up before they get back," so we did. We got all of the steel erected, and these guys came back—this whole crew of really rough guys.
Blum: To take it apart?
Brownson: Came back to do this job. And this guy gets out of the Cadillac. I had made some kind of arrangements with a local policeman. Anyway, he says, "You're not going to get another stick of material. I'm shutting you down forever. This is it," and he drove off. Well, about two or three days later there is a big headline in the Chicago—I think it was in the Tribune. But anyway, he was involved in the shenanigans at McCormick Place, with some sweetheart deal at McCormick Place. He went out in the morning to start his big Cadillac, and the whole Cadillac and he and everything else went a million directions and killed him.
Blum: Do you mean it blew up?
Brownson: It was a bomb. They had put a bomb in his car. So I never heard any more from the business agent of the ironworkers on this house. Anyway, then we get started, and now we've got all of these welded joints on the frame to do. It surprising how easily the frame just went up. There was nothing to it. It went up nice, but now we had all of these joints that had to be welded and had to be finished. So what do I do? Who can I get to do the welding? I found some local—I called him a lawnmower welder—in Geneva to come out and start the welding. As I said, we were living down in this little garage. We'd have breakfast and we could look up and see in the morning. So this guy comes out with his welding thing, and we worked one day on welding all of this building together, making all of these welds. At night I said, "I'll see you in the morning," and so got down and shut down. In the morning I got up and
126 was having breakfast, and I looked up the hill. Holy smokes! There is a great big bend in the whole steel frame where all of these welds had contracted when they cooled off. This whole frame was distorted.
[Tape 5: Side 2]
Brownson: So then I'm sitting there in the morning, and I'm looking at this thing and moaning and groaning. I don't know what to do, I don't know where I'm going to go, I don't know where I'm going to get any—and there's an old car that drives in. A guy gets out. His nickname was Frenchy. I don't remember what the rest of his name was. So he gets out of this old car, and he says, "I'm looking for work. I really need some work. I see you're building this thing here. I'm wondering if you could give me a job. We're on strike down in Aurora. I work for Austin Western," and Austin Western makes road grading and big, heavy, industrial equipment like Caterpillar Tractor. They're one of those, and they make all of this road grading equipment. I said, "Well, do you know anything about welding?" He said, "I'm really a welder. That's my job. All during the Second World War we built tanks down there in Aurora." I said, "Well, take a look at this. This thing is so warped, I just don't know." He said, "I can straighten it out for you." I said, "You can?" He said, "Oh, yes." So he said, "Let me go home and get my torches and stuff." He went and he got these great big torches, and he said, "Now, you go down and get a couple of buckets of water, and I'll heat her up." He did the same thing this guy at Ryerson did. He knew what to do. He took this big torch, and he would heat the top flange of the steel, and then he would say, "Okay, throw the water on," and I'd throw this bucket of water. Well, we did that for about an hour or so, and the thing straightened right back up.
Blum: Were you lucky!
Brownson: He stuck with me then and did all the rest of the welding, because the other welds he didn't have—there is a sequence in welding. In fact, on the Civic Center, on the Daley Center, we had a tremendous explosion. We had these big J-groove welds in these very heavy column plates, and through the
127 welding process that just exploded one day, one of these joints. After welding for a week or so on this one joint, it just let go from all of the stresses locked in. So I learned about the welding technique. Then I had this other thing. All of the window frames were made out of steel bars, one-by-three-inch bars, and they were all drilled and tapped. As I said, I didn't have very much money and so I found a guy who had a little shop over in Sugar Grove, Illinois, in a back place, and he did all of these drilling and tapping of these holes. Well, then I had to weld this all together. These things would warp when they were welded, and so Frenchy said, "Get yourself a big chisel," so I got a big chisel, and he said, "You just go up there and you keep hammering that joint. It will come right over where you want it," and it did. The thing I'm trying to bring out is that steel as a material is much more forgiving than wood. If you make a mistake in wood, you can put what we call a Dutchman in it or a plug, but you are always going to see it. If you miscut it or you don't make a decent joint, you're always going to see that. With steel if you make a mistake you can go back and it's forgiving.
Blum: But you were very, very lucky. You were the right person, he was the right person, and you just came together at the best moment for you.
Brownson: Everything is luck, when you really get down to it. Steel is just a very forgiving material, and to me is the warmest. Everybody talks about, "It's so cold, it's so inhuman." I say, "Come on, you're talking a bunch of nonsense. What are you trying to do with that? It's the material to work with. It's got certain qualities"—now I'm an expert, of course, after all of this—"it's got certain qualities that wood and some of the other materials don't have, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any better or any worse.
Blum: Jacques, while all of this planning and building was going on, your steel-and- glass house, did you consult with Mies when you were drafting the plans? Did he know about it? Did he comment before the house was built?
Brownson: Oh, yes. It was the thing I was doing in the graduate school. But as I said, the free plan, if you look at some photographs of a very small model that was in
128 the Open House—I forget what the year was exactly, but there was a model that I had built, which was one of the models displayed at the graduate school during what we referred to as the IIT Open House, which is usually in May sometime. That plan was much more open. There were no rooms, and it was simply a much larger space. There weren't the two parts to the one roof plane or the one volume, which ended up being, in effect, two parts. One was a private part and the other public. The other was more of an open plan without any subdivided rooms as such.
Blum: Was this the first time he saw it, in this exhibition?
Brownson: No, no. He would see it as I was working on it at school.
Blum: What was his response?
Brownson: The thing about Mies and the graduate school, he really let you work. As a graduate student, he would come around and make a few comments. One of the things I think that almost all of the people who went to IIT will say is that he didn't come around a whole lot, you know. He was in and out. He didn't come on a regular basis. You never really knew when he was going to be there. He would come, and maybe he would talk with you and maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would just see one person and then go.
Blum: Did he ever talk to you about your house?
Brownson: Yes, he would talk about the house and about what I was trying to do and about steel and would show me some of the ways that he knew that steel could go together and some of these kinds of problems. Then, I think one of the interesting things which was an experience that most students do not have, but the circumstances at IIT were that the campus was under construction. Let's say that one of your professors at a school may be talking about architecture. In effect we were watching things that were being done by our professor. We could go out, and we spent a lot of time physically going out and looking at these buildings going together, at the steel being
129 erected, at the walls being put in. And also, a lot of the problems that were coming up with those buildings, the classic one being on the very large windows in the classrooms. Here they were, when they were all completed, when you would pull down—they were double-hung windows, what are called guillotine windows—when you pulled the upper one down for ventilation, because those classrooms were not air conditioned, the frame was not strong enough and would bow down below the glass and leave a space between the glass and the window that was the outdoors. It wasn't strong enough. So the question was, here were all of these windows that were installed according to the architect’s drawings and everything. The contractor was not responsible. It was a mistake in the strength of that cross- member that was designed to go in it. So now we're looking, and everybody is making all of these comments about what should be done. Mies's office decided to simply have the contractor install a vertical rod in the center of the window that then tied the top and the bottom together and made enough strength for the thing. So that was a solution to that problem. I talked about the building actually almost blowing down one night.
Blum: Were these things that happened with the buildings that were being constructed on campus become classroom problems?
Brownson: No, not really. They became classroom discussions. They weren't problems as such that we were, you might say, involved with. But they were ones that students were discussing about what the consequences of it were.
Blum: Now, Crown Hall was being erected at this time. It began in 1950.
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: Did this have any relevance to you and your house as you were doing it?
Brownson: No, not as such, other than the fact that the girders go over the top of the roof and the suspension of the thing. But no, it was a much different scale. There were also the vertical mullions on the outside of Crown Hall every ten
130 feet—the span across with the big girder on the top. In my Geneva house, that was a rigid frame. A rigid frame is really one bent U-shaped beam, and the forces are transferred into the columns in what we call bending. These are technical terms, I know, and they're difficult for the lay person to understand. But in the Geneva house, in the rigid frame, the connection between the cross member that goes across the top and the column is welded and is fixed. That is a ninety-degree angle, and when the load comes on such a beam, that ninety-degree angle always stays ninety degrees. Consequently, the column is bowing out because it wants to stay ninety degrees, and the thing is settling here so it means that the column is slanting towards the outside and then, in turn, comes back to a point of controflecture which is the point where it changes direction and comes back, and the loads and the stresses go into the foundation. So it is a continuous structural beam member. Now, there is an interesting thing about Crown Hall, and it also appears in 880 and 860, and it is the essence of structure. Now, where this comes from, whether it's an understanding that Mies had or whether it was Kornacker's intuitive understanding of it, but every member is like in a tree—I'll take as an example a tree. If you look at a tree and you see the leaves and the limbs start to move, if it's a smaller tree—it does the same thing in a big tree, but it's more evident in a smaller tree—as the branches and all of those movements and forces that are out on the branches start to move down the trunk and into the ground, the tree is a structure that works in continuity. Crown Hall is a building in which all of the members, in effect, are transmitting the forces. If you start to take it out piece by piece, they become individually relatively weak. But as soon as you put them all together they become a strong structure, and it can be much lighter in weight and it becomes a unified structure. That's what Mies meant when he kept talking about the structural concept of architecture. If you look at most buildings, because of several problems that exist—you have a steel frame in a building and you have to fireproof it, so you either cover it with a concrete encasement to keep the fire away from it, or you cover it with a material like cement asbestos that we spray on to keep the fire from causing steel to become very flexible and fall apart. So consequently the exterior skin of the building is a material which is not structural and is simply hung like a curtain on the outside as a protective
131 membrane for the interior space. But generally, it does not react to the very heavy forces that you have in a building of dead load and wind. Now, in 880 and 860, the outside skin of that building is united with the interior structural members, and it becomes an element that stiffens up the building in the case of wind. Now, we'll come back to that on the Chicago Civic Center and on the Continental Building because in principle that is exactly what was done with those buildings. In Crown Hall this whole thing is a structure. This also involves John Roche, who was the chief structural engineer for C. F. Murphy and then was the chief engineer on the Civic Center Building, or the Daley Center. One evening John Roche was going down State Street and he sees Crown Hall going up and he sees these big plate girders with these relatively small columns supporting them. He said, "It's going to fail," because John Roche—I didn't know him at that time. I heard the story later from somebody in Chicago—John Roche was looking at it as a conventional structural engineer would. An engineer will take a piece out of a building and analyze it independently. If it's a beam he'll take the beam, and he's got certain formulas and it must be a certain size. He'll take a column, the length to the radius of gyration and all of these other things, and he'll analyze that. Then he'll put the whole building together and add on a substantial factor of safety, which is eight or ten times any loads that might exist on the building, and that will determine the structure. There are thousands of buildings that are built that way that are standing, and there is no problem with them. But instead of looking at the building as a totality, they are looking at it as a collection of pieces. That was the most difficult thing for me to do in Murphy's office in all of the work that I was doing—to get the engineers to think in terms of structure and the fact that these forces were not only just in that immediate piece but went throughout the building.
Blum: Is this concept unique to Mies's teaching?
Brownson: Well, that's why I say, Kornacker was the one who was able to either interpret this or contribute to it. It was a similar thing—you know, Kornacker did the engineering on the seven-hundred-and-some-foot convention hall building.
132 Blum: Did you say he helped you with your house?
Brownson: Kornacker helped me. Oh, yes, sure. Kornacker was the engineer on my house through Ernie Vlad, who was working in his office. So, we were looking at these things, and John Roche was concerned about the fact when he was looking at Crown Hall, this building was going to collapse because the columns were too small for the girder it was supporting, not realizing that, in effect, the whole side of that building was really supporting the whole structure and not just the individual, small pieces of it.
Blum: Was that true with your house as well?
Brownson: Well, no, because it was a different principle. In my house it was this rigid bent. Instead of being a flexible pin connection, as we call it, where the column and the beam joins or the girder joins, my house was a rigid connection that did not vary that ninety-degree angle when the load was there, and it caused this really queer bend.
Blum: An S-curve.
Brownson: An S-curve in the column. You were asking where it comes from. I really think it may come from D'Arcy Thompson's book On Growth and Form.
Blum: I know the book you are talking about.
Brownson: All right. It comes out of that. He analyzes a similar thing with the stresses and forces in animal skeletons, primarily. There have been a lot of studies made about the human body, how the forces are moving as you walk or as you run. Certain things are happening.
Blum: Is Thompson’s book one that really impressed you?
Brownson: Oh, yes. That was one of the main books at IIT. Today, generally, it's okay.
133 The mathematics are good, but today the question of biology and growth and some of these things, the way that it's looked at has changed. But in principle, D'Arcy Thompson is still recognized as the leader in this idea of structure.
Blum: In many of the photographs that I've seen of your Geneva house, it looks like the building is set in a park-like setting. How important was the natural setting for you?
Brownson: Oh, it has to be. The other thing is that in order to live in these buildings you have to still have a certain amount of privacy. You still have to not be continually on display.
Blum: Was your property a large one? I know the Farnsworth House property is, and I know Philip Johnson's is.
Brownson: Well, mine was an acre and a half. The site was an acre and a half.
Blum: Well, that was large.
Brownson: There was a considerable amount of trees and bushes and things around it, but this is where Caldwell's influence comes in.
Blum: In what way?
Brownson: Caldwell was a protégé of Jens Jensen of the Chicago Park System and the major parks. Caldwell made a small sketch, a landscaping plan, for the Geneva house. I went out and collected specimens all over the river valley, and then I had a friend out in the country who let me—everybody looked on hawthorn trees, Crataequs crusgalli, as being weed trees, so the farmers liked to get them out of there because they had big thorns on them and they were a nuisance for farming. So this farmer said, "Yes, take as many as you want." I would go out and dig these things up and bring them back to Geneva and then plant them on the site. Well, the house now is absolutely buried in the woods. There is no grass or this kind of thing. It's all wildflowers. I collected
134 a lot of wildflowers and planted them—trillium and lily of the valley and sumac.
Blum: These are all natural plants to the area?
Brownson: They're all natural, and they were ones that, as I said before, I spent a lot of time at the Morton Arboretum. I really enjoyed walking around there. And there was a lot of chokecherry. You wonder where things come from and how they come about.
Blum: You said chokecherry?
Brownson: Chokecherry. My grandmother would shake the tree to get the chokecherries on a bed sheet to make some jam. I planted a lot of chokecherry because it was so beautiful—the white haze in the spring. I can't remember some of the names anymore, but I planted extensively. I tried to make kind of an arboretum out of it. I did the same thing with the landscaping for Auraria here, which was planted with a lot of different kinds of things.
Blum: Has the setting in nature always been important to you?
Brownson: Yes, it always has been. It is one of the things that I think is a very strong element, yet I think that the Daley Center really doesn't need a lot of shrubbery and stuff around it.
Blum: It has three trees on the plaza.
Brownson: Yes, it has three trees. There are certain places where—a good example is in Spain, I think. When you are in a Spanish city, you become aware of how Cubism came about because it’s barren, but now there are natural trees and things everywhere. In Paris on all of the streets you have trees, and there are a lot of trees. It's a different kind of an urban setting in Paris than it is in Barcelona or Madrid. I don't know whether it strikes you that way, but to me, I can see how Picasso was influenced by the urban scene there.
135 Blum: Well, your home was an unusual undertaking. It came out, I assume, successfully. Would you agree with that?
Brownson: Oh, yes. I was remarking after you left yesterday, when I was having lunch, I said to Doris, "You know, we must have really been nuts to build that house. We didn't know anything about how to do it or what was going on." The other thing I remembered was when it started to get cold.
Blum: What was your insulation like—insulation or heating?
Brownson: Well, that's what I'm going to talk about. When it started to get cold, the walls, of course, were only quarter-inch plate glass, these big panels. There was insulation on the roof, of course, but the side walls were glass. There was a gas furnace, and the system of heating was done through the floors. In other words, the floor was hollow and the air from the furnace was pumped down. It's a principle of physics. If you have a vessel that is under pressure and you put holes in it from whatever place you put it, the stuff is going to come out as long as the pressure is maintained. The contents are going to come out equally or almost equally from all of the holes. There is not, like in most what's called heating and ventilating systems, where it goes down a pipe and then comes out an outlet. In the Geneva house, this whole floor was pressurized, and there were openings around the perimeter that allowed this pressurized air to come out. So you didn't have the problem of friction within the system, not allowing this to happen because the laws of physics governed that thing.
Blum: Was it an effective way to heat a glass house in the winter in the Illinois area?
Brownson: Oh, yes, sure, because you have the floor then which would get warm, and you had this problem that Philip Johnson talks about in his house. Philip Johnson used hot water coils in the floors, which meant that the floor had to get warm like a radiator before you got any heat into the room. There is this thing called heat lag. By the time that the heat would get into the room, the
136 sun would be coming out and it would be time to cool it off, but you've got all this heat coming. You didn't have any heat when you needed it, when it was cold. That's like our house how. The radiance of these pipes up here is the heating system. It was built in 1918, but it works great for this kind of house. But in Philip's house, and this is prevalent in large spaces that have a lot of glass in them, you don't have the quick response. In other words, a sunny day in our house in Geneva did not require the furnaces to be on.
Blum: Even in the winter?
Brownson: In the wintertime. When it was a nice sunny day, the sun would come into that space, and just like now we're almost to the winter solstice on the twenty-first of December, the sun will come in and we will get enough heat from the sun to warm up this space. But at three o'clock or four o’clock in the afternoon or if the sun went under a cloud or something, I guarantee you would need heat in a hurry because it gets cold very rapidly. So you needed something that was going to respond to quick changes. I knew this because Johnson's house had been occupied before I finished the house in Geneva, and I knew the problems on the Farnsworth because I went down to see Karl Freund one day. It was in the wintertime and there was snow outside and it was cold, and in the Farnsworth House they had a forced air furnace that sat in that middle core, blowing air out into the space. To get the heat, you would have this blast of air coming out. I said, "Karl, how is it?" He was staying down there at night because he lived way up in Algonquin so he would stay there overnight. He said, "You'll freeze to death in here. It comes on and it blasts you out of here. Then it will shut off, and then it will come on and blast you out of here." There was no, what we call technically a heat sink. There was no place to store any heat, you know, like a radiator stores heat. Then the furnace will go off or the boiler will go off, and the radiator has all of this heat that's in it. It gradually disperses it until the thermostat comes on and calls for more heat and the boiler comes on and heats it back up. But like an old potboiler stove or something, you always have a heat sink or a heat source there. I was aware of all of these things, and that's why I looked around. I went to the library and I found out that the Koreans—it's quite a
137 common thing—had these hollow floors underneath where they built the fire. The floors, in effect, became the chimney, and as the products went through that thing, it would heat the floor up and it would maintain the heat in the space. So I did the same thing with a forced air furnace, a gas furnace. There were two of them because there were two houses, really. There was the front part, the public part, and the private part, so each part had its own furnace unit. That then would force this warm air when it would call for heat in a space. I would get heat almost instantaneously because it would come on and come out. I wasn't waiting for the floor to heat up. But there was enough during that time to heat up the floor so that with the changes of the sunlight and the outside temperature, it could respond to it. In the spring when you needed heat at certain times, or you didn't need it, you weren't waiting for this big mass to heat up by hot water like Johnson was doing, and Wright did that. A lot of people talked about that. So then instead of putting it in the floor, they tried to put it in the ceiling. Well, it ended up that everybody living in those houses had to wear hats because the radiant heat that was coming down was uncomfortable.
Blum: Were you aware of the heating system in Paul Schweikher's house in Roselle? He also had the floors heated. He had his heat coming from the floors, I think through hollow tubes.
Brownson: It was a common way of doing it. In fact, there was a company someplace around Chicago that made a special twelve-inch-square floor tile out of clay.
Blum: I think this is what he used.
Brownson: He may have had it. He may have developed it—I don't know—along with this company. But I just used common, ordinary, partition, cheap, clay tile and then put a two-inch, concrete surface on top of that. It worked. It really worked very well. But anyway, I didn't know anything about—and all of the engineers would tell me, "You can't heat a glass house. It's impossible. It just won't work. We can't even talk about it." So I went to the public service company. At that time it was Northern Illinois Gas, I guess, and I said I was
138 building this thing. "Don't do it. Don't build a house like that. You can't heat it," everybody told me. Well, I was so far along, you know. Then it started to get cold, see, and I had these furnaces. So we turned them on, and, oh, man, it was like living in a continuous waterfall. The water was coming down off of those windows in sheets, water running down and coming across the floor. I had the mop out and was mopping. You couldn't believe the condensation coming. So, about that time this guy from the gas company comes around, and he said, "Well, we told you. You wouldn't believe us. We told you you can't heat a house like this." They never took their coats off when they came inside. They couldn't stand it. It was steamy.
Blum: But were you comfortable?
Brownson: No, no.
Blum: Oh, was it too humid?
Brownson: It was warm. There was no problem with that, but the humidity was very high inside.
Blum: Like a glass house.
Brownson: It was like living in a rain forest. Everybody said, "Single pane of glass, condensation. It's a well-known fact that you're going to have that." I said, "Now what? What am I going to do now?"
Blum: Did you have a dehumidifier?
Brownson: So off I go to the library again. I said, "There must be something about gas furnaces and the problems with condensation.” There was an outfit that made insulation that recognized that condensation in single-pane glass was a problem in houses, but in the dissertation in this book as to the cause of this condensation, there was one line that said, "There is also, however, the possibility that this condensation may be caused by improper venting of gas
139 appliances, because one of the byproducts of burning natural gas, amongst the other bad stuff, is water." When natural gas burns hydrogen and oxygen, you end up with water. So I said, "I'll bet the chimney on that house isn't designed correctly. It's designed for a big, taller house that has some draw." It's like a fireplace. When you first start it out and it smokes, you've got to get it drawing before it really works. I said, "I'll bet that chimney"—so I went back and started to check around, and, sure enough, the products of combustion were coming back into the house. There was a kind of negative pressure, and all of this water that was being generated by the gas furnace was being condensed on the glass. So I went up to the hardware store, and I got just a couple of pieces of stovepipe, and I stuck them on top up there. I climbed up on the roof and I stuck these stovepipes up, three or four high, and put some wires on. Within an hour it cleared up. Everything cleared. The water stopped, all of the condensation, and all of the other things. When I began to realize what the problem was, and that it was solvable, I found a thing that is made for ships and vessels. It's called a Breider chimney cap, and it eliminates the question of back pressure and some of the other things that occur. And so, when I redid the way the stuff was exiting from the house, why then, there was no problem from that point on.
Blum: That house was a real learning experience for you.
Brownson: Oh, yes, sure.
Blum: And it took awards. It looks really quite handsome in photographs. When you left in 1972, did you have any conflict about leaving the house that you had built yourself?
Brownson: No, not in 1972.
Blum: Before you left to come here, you left for a few years to go to Michigan.
Brownson: We went to Michigan, but the house was sold in 1965 or 1966. We lived in it about fourteen years, I guess, or something like that.
140 Blum: What is the status of the house now? Have you ever seen it since you left?
Brownson: Yes. The house has only had one other owner besides us. There was a family that bought it. They were, I guess, formerly from Montana, and they wanted to live in such a house. She—he's not there anymore—she's just overwhelmed by the house and being able to live like that. But the problem is that it is expensive to heat because of the single glass, but she said, "We don't keep it as warm as probably a lot of people would, but it's worth it just to be able to live in such a space." When I lived there, one day I said, "You know, it's like looking at a giant Jackson Pollock," when I looked at that wall. At night, you would see the possum come up to the window, and you would sit in this darkened room and you would have just the light on on the outside that would light the path coming up to the house, and you would see that thing, or you would sit there on a moonlight night, on the snow, you know. It was an experience that you can only get when you're with nature. I spent a lot of time in the wilderness up in Canada canoeing on the rivers every summer—a lot of time—and I like that kind of life. And the sunlight that would come down. Even windows are becoming more and more prevalent. Everybody wants to have big windows in houses now. The bigger the windows, the better. Le Corbusier said that architecture is a search for the bigger window, and if you look and you study, that's exactly what it is. Have you ever been in Chartres Cathedral?
Blum: Yes.
Brownson: I was there, I guess it was May Day one year, and it makes tears come to my eyes when I’m in that space, that light that comes through those windows.
Blum: The glass is very, very beautiful.
Brownson: The other thing is to compare Chartres, which is the essence of Gothic, to Durham, a Norman structure. Durham is very heavy, almost ponderous. The space is much different than in the almost nonexistent, bare-bones structural
141 web of Chartres. I had studied Gothic builders and stood in the transept of Chartres ten years before experiencing Durham, but it wasn’t until that day that I understood the spirit of Gothic. It was light through structure.
[Tape 6: Side 1]
Blum: During the fifties while you were still teaching at IIT, after your house was built, there was a plan for the South Side of Chicago that was drafted by Hilbs and a team of people. You were on the team along with Reginald Malcolmson and Hilbs and Caldwell. Who else?
Brownson: And, I think, [Earl] Bluestein.
Blum: What was the underlying concept? I realize the South Side of Chicago had race problems, but two major institutions, IIT and Michael Reese, had decided to stay, and the South Side Planning Board really wanted to revitalize the South Side. If I understand this planning project correctly, there was a team from Harvard under Gropius, a team from the University of Chicago, and a team from IIT under Hilbs who were invited to submit plans as a solution for this area of Chicago.
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: How would you describe the plan of IIT, and what was its underlying concept?
Brownson: Well, there is one thing that never became an issue in any of our planning—the question of race. Never.
Blum: But that was one of the problems for the area under scrutiny.
Brownson: I'm saying it did become a part. The other entries made more of an architectural solution out of this South Side problem rather than a planning solution as to what was fundamentally wrong with the area in terms of its
142 living conditions. We were not particularly interested; in fact, we weren't interested at all, in architectural solutions as such for these things. If you look at Harvard, they made very elaborate architectural studies for those areas. You don't see any of this kind of detail in the plan that Hilberseimer did for it, but rather thinking about the principles involved in making a city workable and livable for its inhabitants. The principles I talked about earlier of sunlight, with children being able to reach school without having to cross major streets, with living areas that weren't infringed upon by horrendous traffic that was going through, by making a scale out of this area where the major streets, which were to carry traffic, were of such a scale that they could handle that rather than just impose that kind of thing on a typical residential street. Rather than wiping the slate clean we accepted the street grid. It starts with projects that we did with the beginning students in planning, with what was called Marquette Park. If you look at the Marquette Park plan, there was a series stage one, stage two, stage three, and by using the existing streets, we gradually, through a process of elimination, got to where we wanted to go, to the kind of living conditions we wanted—to solve the sun problem, to solve the school problem of getting back and forth to the schools, and to get these living conditions, that we have the park and nature immediately available to the inhabitants where they could walk out. The kids could play baseball and they could ride their bicycles. It was almost like—who wrote the book Towards New Towns for America? Clarence Stein. It was an acceptance of the existing gridwork of streets. Through a process of elimination, you were able to create a new city and not have to completely go in and wipe everything clean. Realizing that there were going to be, like in anything, things that no longer functioned, you take those out.
Blum: Are you talking about demolishing existing buildings?
Brownson: Yes, houses. We didn't go in and clear out everything but rather eliminated streets, because in Chicago, which is roughly a third of the total area of any of these cities, be it Denver or Chicago or wherever it is, a third of the total area is taken up by asphalt, by streets, because of this three-thirty by six-sixty block primarily. So you have a lot of these streets, and you can reduce that
143 amount of street coverage down to around twelve, fifteen percent of the total area, so you gain additional area that you can convert into park space and so forth. This was the thing that underlay the ideas of Hilbs in order to do this. He didn't go in and just demolish everything in order to make that plan. If you look at any of the plans that he made, they almost always accept as a beginning basis that kind of structure, and then adjust it—taking out streets and things—in order to accomplish what he wants. Everybody said—the University of Chicago, Gropius—"Oh, that's a dreamer. That's pie in the sky." The other is the pie in the sky where you think that you can demolish everything and start over from scratch.
Blum: Wasn't demolition prevalent in Chicago at that time?
Brownson: Oh, to demolish everything was, yes. In fact, it had a profound effect on me. When Walter Netsch built the University of Illinois Circle Campus, they spent an unbelievable amount of money in rerouting sewer lines and utilities and changing all of those things, and then going in and building a campus like they were building it as if none of this stuff was there before. The one thing that I realized when I came here to build Auraria was, I'm going to accept that hidden structure that's below grade because everything in Auraria, being the oldest part of town, goes through there that supplies all of the city. To try to simply clean that all out and start with a fresh piece of paper can't be done. You can't find enough money to do that. This was the thing Hilbs talked about. This was a thing you'd give to the students, and you'd say, "Well, here is an area in the city. How can you take this and make those principles you've been working on work here?"
Blum: Was Marquette Park a classroom exercise preliminary to this actual plan for the South Side Commission?
Brownson: Well, the Marquette Park was a standard exercise that we gave to all of the students, from day one, I guess. I think it may be still in use as an exercise. We took small towns. We would go up to Elkhart, Wisconsin, and take that as a small town. How can you change that over the years simply by
144 eliminating streets and things in order to make the plan work? That was completely different than the approach the other teams were using.
Blum: Did they just clear the land and impose their own ideas?
Brownson: Yes. They put out these buildings, and a lot of other things were placed within these areas. There really wasn't very much that they could do under those kinds of conditions. What we were talking about is something that you're not going to change. You're not going to make this change in the plan over the next fifty years or so. This is an ongoing thing that gradually evolves. As I told you on Auraria, it's only two years ago that the final two major streets were taken out of the Auraria plan and closed off. So now you don't have any through traffic. But all of the streets that have become pedestrian ways were the old streets of that section. They became the walkways.
Blum: I told you I tried to drive through there the other day and I couldn't do it, so I understand exactly what you're saying.
Brownson: You can't drive through it, no. Because I don't think you should drive through there.
Blum: Were high-rise or mid-rise buildings any part of Hilbs's IIT plan?
Brownson: Oh, yes. As you look at the development of it, then you start to see the new things coming in. That's why I think that there's this misunderstanding about the so-called city—we talked a little bit about it—that Hilbs proposed. Everybody said it was so grim, those buildings all lined up.
Blum: Wasn't that a very early concept? I think there is a date on that drawing.
Brownson: Well, it was very early, but Hilbs was trying to say more than that. Everybody said that was his idea of a city, and I think that's a misunderstanding of what was really going on. But anyway, you will see
145 some high-rise buildings in our plan, but they were separated from one another. They did not cast a shadow on their neighbors, and there was more space around them. But the one thing that we believed in quite strongly was that you cannot raise children in high-rise buildings. They need to be on the ground. They have to have some way to walk around and to be able to do things. You don't keep them on palettes in the air.
Blum: Was high-rise an idea at that time that looked very good and time has proven that it wasn't a sensitive social as well as architectural solution? High-rise in, for instance, the area of the South Side plan.
Brownson: Well, the whole high-rise public housing solution was no more than a political ploy to control votes. That was one of the things in Cabrini Green. You cannot raise children high in the sky. They're too active. There are too many things going on. Then you can never be sure of where they are when they are on the ground level. They're so far away from any controlling influences that no longer do you have any supervision over them.
Blum: Was Hilbs's plan implemented for the South Side?
Brownson: No.
Blum: Was it just an exercise in what could be?
Brownson: I think that planning becomes a question of the return on the investment and the public understanding of housing. It's what the return on the investment is. Rather than what's the return on the living, it becomes this question of money again all of the time. It's interesting, who can live in high-rise buildings? That's a question I think architects have to ask themselves if you look at the Near North Side of Chicago, if you look at that area of heavy concentration.
Blum: The Gold Coast?
146 Brownson: Yes. If you look at the people who live there, they have the opportunity to get out of those places. They can go to restaurants, they can go to the theater, they can do different things. They have enough resources to be able to take advantage of that. They're not stuck there. But you take somebody that has maybe two or three hundred dollars a month as their total resource, and they've got three or four or a half a dozen kids, the only thing they want to do is to get out of those places and start to run within the neighborhood. They want to get out. It's the same way when you look at cities like Mexico City, you look at the barrios on the outskirts and the conditions under which these people are living in those areas. When you get to the Zona Rosa, that's a different kind of life. They've got nice sidewalk cafes; they've got all of these kinds of things.
Blum: Well, it's a tourist area.
Brownson: And you have a different way of living. But look at Paris. Paris is another city of low-rise buildings.
Blum: They have ordinances that don't permit anything to be built very high in the center city.
Brownson: Somebody has to stop these. One of the things that I'm fighting now is these lousy developers. To me this area over here, Cherry Creek—which I'm now known in Denver for saying; I've said it a number of times in public meetings—is nothing more than a freshly painted slum. "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "No air, traffic congestion, you park your car on the middle. Look at the streets at night. They're nothing but a big parking lot. It's the same thing going on over and over again under the guise that you're building this upscale housing."
Blum: So, Jacques, have we learned anything in the past thirty years about planning?
Brownson: No. I don't think so. I don't see it. Then everybody picks up and they go up to
147 the mountains. They've got the road so it's a gigantic interstate traffic jam. You can't get back and forth on it. They want to get with nature up there. They are going to have to restrict visitors to Rocky Mountain National Park. You're going to have to get a number in order to go to the park, there are so many people that want to go. Why, the reason—boy, I'm on a soapbox when I get started on this. Like this morning, I went out for a walk, and I went over here. I walked up through this neighborhood, through this historic district, up through Cheesman Park, which is one of the larger parks in the city, and I walked around through there, and the sun was nice and it was a nice morning. I walked down and I had a cup of coffee, and then I walked back, and I had a semblance of some kind of civility in life. I don't want to go into these areas to be jostled and shoved and pushed aside all of the time as I'm walking along. But you know, I have to be very careful when I'm talking about these things, because like in the city of New York, the vitality is all of the activity that's going on. Doris and I were there not too long ago, and we went up to the Windows on the World restaurant. You look out, and you say, "Man! Somebody built all of this!" You are just overwhelmed at the energy that must have gone into building that city. But everybody can't live like that. It's great to live in New York or to live in Chicago, if you've got money.
Blum: But you say that high-rises were part of the plan that Hilbs and the IIT team designed for the South Side of Chicago?
Brownson: We had high-rises in the park, yes. If you look at that plan…
Blum: Is what you're saying now ideas that have come to you since that time?
Brownson: No, that was only a part. They were not all high-rises. There are certain people who like to live in high-rises.
Blum: But if there was only one high-rise, wouldn't the same criticism that you're offering apply, such as children needing to be on the ground and so on?
Brownson: Yes, but what I'm saying is that families that have children generally don't
148 like to live in high-rise buildings. I think if you look at the Near North Side, there are a lot of low-rise buildings. The surprising thing about New York City is that when you really look at it, everybody talks about the skyscraper, but I think that the average height of buildings is relatively low in New York City. Somewhere around six, seven stories is the predominant size. But there are people who like to live in high-rises. There are people who like to live in 880 and 860 [Lake Shore Drive]. There are single people, there are couples, there are, I suppose, families with one child, but if you look at a lot of families, they want to live closer to the ground.
Blum: I think that time has proven that it wasn't a good solution for the subsidized housing in Chicago, and we have real problems today in those buildings.
Brownson: If you look at 880 and 860, that's high-class accommodations in those buildings. That was built for less than what the Chicago Housing Authority built the Taylor Homes and those other public housing things for. But 880 and 860, they would never last if you had family of kids in there. They'd have the walls kicked in because they can't get out of there. I think we don't recognize that.
Blum: In 1959 something very different happened in your life. In spite of the fact that you said that you weren't really happy working for architects, somehow you joined Murphy.
Brownson: I think a lot of us became very concerned about the school and the way the administration looked on the school and what they thought that we were doing. I particularly didn't feel that the future looked too good at IIT.
Blum: When did Mies leave?
Brownson: He left right around that time, but I can't remember the exact—I'd have to look up the chronology of it.
Blum: Was that part of your reason to leave the school because Mies had been
149 dismissed?
Brownson: Yes. Not only that, but Hilbs was getting very tired. We found out later that he was suffering from cancer and his energy just wasn't there anymore. I thought it was time for a change, and I wanted to get back into the building scene. Carter Manny was at Murphy. He was one of the partners.
Blum: I think it was Naess and Murphy at the time.
Brownson: It was Naess and Murphy, yes, Sigurd Naess and Charlie Murphy. Sig Naess was the architect. Sig Naess's office consisted of a drawing board and a desk that he could work at. It was not any kind of a big office where people were received, but he had a drawing board and he actually, physically made drawings. He was always interested in building. He was an interesting character. Anyway, I asked Carter, "Things at the school are changing. I'd like to work. Do you have anything I could do?" He said, "Well, let me just talk to some of the others." He got back to me, and I ended up going to work there. For some reason there wasn't very much space. I guess they were working on O'Hare Field, and so I ended up on what is the seventeenth floor. The main office of Murphy was on the sixteenth floor and that was the last elevator stop. So you'd get off the elevator and you'd have to walk up this narrow stair to, in effect, the attic area that was really where Dan Burnham and Edward Bennett supposedly worked on the plan for Chicago. Bennett's office was up there, too, you know. I got to know Edward Bennett’s son Ted more when I was at the Cliff Dwellers. So I was up there. That was a stroke of luck.
Blum: Why?
Brownson: Because nobody wanted to walk up the stairs to the seventeenth floor.
Blum: Wasn’t that called the Eagle's Nest?
Brownson: I don't know what they called it, but it was magnificent. It looked out over Grant Park to the lake. It had the same kind of view as the Cliff Dwellers did,
150 which is on a lower floor, but we were up higher. And it was long, and very narrow. The office was one drawing board that was against the wall, and just enough space to walk by it. That was it. I think it was about maybe ten feet—maybe a little wider. It was a very narrow space. When you came into that office, one way went into where Bennett was, and the other one was into this other office. And so I was up there all alone. I had a telephone, but nobody ever bothered me. The first job that I had was for the Northern Trust Bank. I got fired from that job. The Northern Trust Bank was interested in expanding their bank and making a bigger bank out of it. I went over and I got to know Old Man Smith [Solomon A.]. I can't remember all of their names, but there was Solomon B. Smith and Edward Smith, and the old man. Anyway, they were the sons, I guess, of the senior Mr. Smith. I would go over and talk to him. The Northern Trust Bank was exactly what it was. It was a trust bank for the old Chicago elite. So I would go in and talk to Mr. Smith, and I was really impressed. Mr. Smith would say, "Well, Jacques, let's go and have lunch," which was down in his private dining room. What impressed me was that Smith would get up, and we would start out and I would kind of follow him, and you'd walk down toward the dining room. Mr. Smith came along, and he never broke stride, and these big doors would just open and let us through. The secretary had it all arranged—"Mr. Smith is going to lunch now," and just go like this. I was really impressed. So they wanted to build a bigger thing. I wanted to tear the old bank down. My idea was to build a new bank. I had in mind what Pafford Klay had done. He is the son-in-law of Sigfried Giedion. He was married to Giedion's daughter. He worked at Skidmore, and he was the designer in charge of Harris Trust and Savings Bank. He did that. The last I knew of him he was in San Francisco. That was a number of years ago. But anyway, Pafford Klay had done this other bank, and he had built this new bank, and so I wanted to tear the old bank down. It was a low-rise bank. I talked to John Roche, and John Roche always said, "I don't know whether you can put anything on top of that or not because I don't know what the foundations are. We'll have to check out those foundations and see what we can do with it." So I said, "Well, okay. How do we go about that?" He said, "Well, we'll have to get one of these concrete testing companies in there to start to see in what condition those foundations
151 are." One Sunday we went down into this big vault in the vault area, and here in the vault are these very large pillars that support the bank. They must have had about a hundred coats of glossy enamel on them. They were just immaculate. This guy sets up what's called a coring machine down in there. The guards are all over because it's down in this big vault, and they're all around. So he starts this drill going, and all of a sudden it’s just going in. The stuff comes out on the floor, and I'm looking at this stuff. John Roche looks at it, and it doesn't look too substantial and it looks like we could justify tearing this thing down and building a new bank. But anyway, we started to check into who built the original caissons, and I don't know how true this is, but this contractor who did that original work had a reputation around Chicago. He was known as the continuous concrete pourer. At that time they were pouring with two-sack cement mixers that had a thing that came down. You put two sacks of cement in it and some gravel and sand, and then you'd lift it up and it would go into this thing that turned it around and it would stir it up, and then you would let it out the other side after it was mixed and down into the foundations. Well, this contractor developed what was called the continuous pouring method in which he never stopped mixing concrete. He set up a place where the cement and the sand and the gravel continually went into this hopper and went out. It went right on through down into the thing. Well, I guess on some work around Chicago, he always had the sacks of cement piled up right alongside the device he had, but somehow or other, with cement being very expensive, he never quite got all of the cement in with the sand and gravel. It's an old trick that goes on.
Blum: So were the caissons faulty?
Brownson: But subsequently they went through and they were all right and they stiffened them, and all of that, but it was just that one experience. So I went back and we started to do a new building for them on that corner. I subsequently learned, finally, after two or three months, I guess, Old Man Smith called Mr. Murphy, Sr., and said he didn't think that this young Brownson really understood the Northern Trust Bank, and that maybe they should put somebody else on their job.
152 Blum: You didn't understand it for what reason?
Brownson: That I didn't understand the old bank, the history and the significance of Northern Trust and the old money. In other words, I wasn't in the Solomon Smith spirit of things as he understood the bank and that maybe there was somebody else who could design the addition better and more in their interest. So Murphy called me in, and he said, "Well, Jacques, they want to have somebody else do the work, so we're going to assign Jim Ferris to it." So Jim Ferris got the job, and he put that addition on which is over on Wells Street. The Northern Trust Bank was a real rabbit' warren, you know. Across the alley there was a passageway that you would go in. You know, a bank has the front image, which is the front desk, but the real work is done by the guys in their sleeves, plugging away, going through checks and accounting and all that stuff. But I did become aware of how these big banks work in terms of the accounting system. Electronics and things were starting to come in, and the accountants were telling me how the accounting and record- keeping was changing; that now they had these boxes which were like a printed circuit board and you would slide them in and they would do the accounting without all of these written numbers. It was all done with these boards. It was the forerunner of this electronic banking.
Blum: Were you hurt at being asked to leave the job?
Brownson: No, I don't think so. I just accepted it.
Blum: I know at Murphy that the reason they wanted you in particular, and other good designers, is because they wanted to do some good, modern design, and apparently it was Charlie Murphy, Jr.'s, idea that that's how the firm could change their image.
Brownson: Yes, that's true. Murphy, Jr.—Charles, as we always called him—went to the University of Notre Dame. He was a graduate of Notre Dame University, and he had a brother, Robert. Robert Murphy was a manufacturer's
153 representative. He flitted around here and there. He wasn't an architect. Helmut Jahn built a house for him somewhere up in Wisconsin—it was published—up in the woods someplace up there. He built a house. We may start to uncover all kinds of skeletons here. Yes, Charles had this idea to change Murphy’s image. Carter was there, and then there was also Charlie Rummel who I got to know much more and was much closer to, and then there were a lot of people who came into the firm from the O'Hare project.
Blum: Who were the designers? You were a designer; Sigurd Naess was a designer. But he wasn't doing the kind of work you were doing.
Brownson: No. They did that building that you can see all sides at once, which is the Sun-Times Building over there, which is a lot line building. It's interesting, the Santa Fe Building is what's called a Graham box. Did you run across that term?
Blum: No.
Brownson: Well, Graham was a bricklayer. He made all of his money, I think, in the World's Columbian Exposition in 1890-something. He was a bricklayer and he got grandfathered in when they started to license architects. He never studied architecture.
Blum: Ernest Graham?
Brownson: Ernest Graham, yes. But his forte was to build to the lot lines. His building plan was the lot line, and the lot line on that building is on the corner, there are no right angles. They're skewed in the Santa Fe Building on the corner there. He'd simply take the lot line, and that's where the walls are built. With all of the contractors, that was a common way of doing things. You built until somebody said you can't build so close to your neighbors. But they built to the lot line. So that building, consequently, doesn't have any square corners in it. It's a little cattiwampus all the way through the thing. But Sig Naess did the same thing over there. In a way, it kind of follows the lot lines. It parallels
154 all of the facades, and they all parallel the lot lines of the Sun-Times lot. Murphy also did the FBI Building in Washington. I don't know whether you ever saw that fortress. Now that looks like J. Edgar Hoover, you know? The guy who was the job captain for it, Gerritt Germeraad, who I admire greatly, was also the job captain on the Daley building, the Civic Center. I think at one time he taught drafting on either a high school level or a junior college level. But he knew how to organize work. He and I were continually—because he was a Sig Naess man. Sig Naess was his hero. There was another guy who was also part of the Sig Naess’s "good old boy" school, a big Swede. What the heck was his name? Anyway, in the engineering department, John Roche was a real prince of a man.
Blum: Jacques, I understand why Murphy wanted you. Why did you select Murphy? SOM was in the city if you were looking for a big, prestigious firm. There were others. Why did you choose Murphy?
Brownson: I know very well why I didn't choose Skidmore.
Blum: Why?
Brownson: Because I think I told you that there were four buildings on the IIT campus, and for three of those prime commissions, to me, there was only one architect who should have finished that thing. I thought that it was just the worst kind of treatment that SOM could give a person, to go in and take the work away from him, which to this day I still resent. I'm sorry, but I just feel like that. In a way it comes back to haunt me right at the present time on the Daley Center. So I wouldn't go to Skidmore.
Blum: On principle.
Brownson: I wouldn't go to Skidmore because I didn't want to get involved in that, and don’t forget, there was a lot of politics at Skidmore between Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham. Then there was a guy I got to know somewhat who did Lever House in New York, Gordon Bunshaft. He and I had a big night in
155 New Orleans when I got an award for something from Progressive Architecture, and we ended up at a fancy restaurant.
[Tape 6: Side 2]
Brownson: We're digressing a little bit, and we'll come back eventually, but I also learned a lot from Gordon Bunshaft. I traveled back and forth to New York a number of times to see the Pepsi-Cola Building, which was being built, and then also the Chase Manhattan Bank. I was walking around with Gordon one day, and he was telling me about how they had set up all of these special rooms. They had made mock-ups with different kinds of furniture in the rooms, and they would take the Chase bank executives in and say, "Do you want a walnut room or do you want a cherry room or do you want a bird’s- eye maple room?" He took me and he showed me all of these rooms and the furniture and how it was all set up, just like an architect, as we talked before, likes to tell everybody how to live. And all of these things are nice. Well, subsequently I went back and I went in, and they're telling me, "You know, we now have bird’s-eye maple in a walnut room, and cherry is in the mahogany room, and it's all mixed up," because these executives would swap furniture after they moved in. "I like your chair. Do you like that chair?" Then they would swap, and so the offices became a very eclectic mixture of what these guys liked. That's typical. Architects like to go through to the paper clips and tell them what to do, and it just cannot be done. That comes back again to Mies. To show you how perceptive he is, on the 880 and 860 building, he knew. Did you ever look at that Life magazine article about people living in 880 and 860 and what they did to their apartments? I think they had some information from the outside of how people were living in those apartments. Mies knew that. He knew what they were going to do, but he got this curtain in all the apartments so that there was some uniformity from the outside anyway. He knew there was going to be window coverings with shades and all of these other kinds of things. He said, "You can't tell anybody how to live." If he said it once, he said it a hundred times, "You can't tell people how to live. You can give them the opportunity of what they could do, but they're going to do what they want eventually in those spaces."
156 We were talking one day about how you lay out the sidewalks on a campus. How do you put the sidewalks in? He said, "You never put the sidewalks in until after the students have been there for a while and have made paths," and then he paved where the paths were. He didn't always follow that, but that was to show his awareness.
Blum: Did you know the Murphys before you went to the firm?
Brownson: No, but I think I had a realization that—first of all, I knew that Murphy, Sr., and Mama Murphy really controlled that firm. What I did know about Murphy, Sr., was that he was not an architect and that he had been Ernest Graham's secretary.
Blum: But he had a reputation for getting very big, city jobs.
Brownson: And for letting the guys who were working on it alone if they didn't get in trouble. If the job went along and everything was going along fine, Mr. Murphy, Sr., stood back. He did not dictate, like in so many firms, "Do this, do that, do this, this is the way we're going to do it."
Blum: Did you know that before you joined Murphy?
Brownson: Well, I knew that he was not an architect, and somebody told me that he was more concerned with the decorum of the firm. That's why Charles, Jr., I think, had this idea of getting out of the Sig Naess mold. Sig Naess also had a free hand—he was a very strong character—in building the Prudential Building. That was under construction when I was in Chicago. It was very heavy. There is an interesting story about the windows in that, which occurred in Grant Park. Prudential wanted to have windows that opened, as we talked about. The contract had been awarded by the Prudential contractor to Reynolds Metals Company. Reynolds, the aluminum company, were making these aluminum windows with this bicycle tire and stuff around it, or whatever it was, and so they had a big ceremony out in Grant Park. Anyway, Shorty Reynolds—he was called Shorty; he was a short guy that ran
157 Reynolds Aluminum—was orchestrating this thing, and they had a big airplane propeller-driven thing on this stand, blowing at this window. Shorty Reynolds is orchestrating this thing, "Wind 'er up, boys. Faster!" Pretty soon it was going, and this engine is roaring away, and whap! the window blows right out of the wall, clear down the back. Reynolds lost the job.
Blum: I can see why.
Brownson: It's the same thing as the story they tell on the old First National Bank about the elevators. Was it Edward Eagle Brown who was the chairman of the board then? He was the one who was responsible for the regional parks in Chicago. He was a great environmentalist way back and always liked things done naturally. This was on the new building that Carter was working on with Stan Gladych; it was told to me when we were doing the elevators with Westinghouse on the Daley Center. They were talking about when the First National Bank always had elevator operators. You didn't have to press the buttons. You'd get on and the operator would say, "What floor?" and you would tell him. They would have that crank on the wall, you know, and they'd go up and let you off. So either Otis, or whoever it was, was trying to sell them on automated elevators. Anyway, they were demonstrating to the chairman of the board one day. They took him someplace to show him how these automated elevators worked. When the doors close if you happen to have your hand or your arm or something in the door, the edges react and they go back open. So this salesman from the elevator company is all wound up about this thing and he's really trying to make a sale. He's all wound up so he takes his scarf off, and as the elevator doors close he throws his scarf between the doors. Well, of course, the scarf is very thin and the doors just kept closing and sucked the scarf right into the elevator shaft. Brown says, "That's it! We're not having those." And he looked, and the scarf is disappearing down the shaft. These are some of the crazy stories. I'll have to tell you one more. We had a job in Chicago when I was with Murphy in which the question of an automated parking garage came up. Chicago built some of those things. So Otis Elevator had made connections with a Czech engineer-designer of parking lots. I guess Otis was the one that really was
158 involved in the scarf disappearing. Anyway, Otis came to me, and they said, "We want to take you to New York and show you this automated parking facility that we've got which is the state of the art. You'll see what this thing can do, and you should use this." Someplace we had a job that required a big parking area. So anyway, we went to New York, we went down one of the streets, and we came to this place and went in where this automated garage was. The whole place was full of people. They're screaming, and they're hollering. Here this thing is going up and it would stop and then nothing and then, "Let it out, that's mine!" "Let it out, that's mine!" and then it would disappear and go away again. This is going on, all of these people are there, and this Czech engineer is sitting there trying to punch these buttons. This is in the fifties before computers had really taken off, and he's sitting and he's trying. Finally, some guy says, "If you think this is something, you should have been here last week. There was a United Nations limousine that came in. It pulled up to park and this thing came out, picked it up, pulled it back in, and pulled the bumper off."
Blum: Aren't Denver people suffering with the same problem now with the new airport baggage delivery system, an automated feature that doesn't work?
Brownson: You know, we're so primitive. We're like when you read about Lewis and Clark's expedition through the Indian country up there, and how they'd lay out all of these trinkets and knickknacks and they'd come in. We're no different. We're really no different.
Blum: Jacques, when you were with Murphy, one of your first important jobs was the Continental Center, which has become known as a forerunner of the Civic Center. Would you talk about the Continental Center as your commission? I know it was an addition to an existing building which apparently people were skeptical about having it done successfully.
Brownson: Murphy, Sr., had some connection with the Continental Insurance Company, and there was the big building on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Jackson. That would be on the southwest corner of Michigan and Jackson, a
159 very well-known building.
Blum: Was that the Straus Building by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White?
Brownson: It may have been. But Continental Insurance Company was growing, and they needed additional office space. They had part of the corner of Jackson and Wabash, but there was one building that they did not have which was immediately adjacent to, I believe, the alley. It was a very well-known, old, Chicago landmark building. The owners wouldn't sell that building and, of course, the Continental Insurance Company wanted the entire site in order to get what's called a floor plate big enough to house all of their clerical staff for their insurance business. So Murphy, Sr., said to me, "We want to make a rendering of this building as an L-shaped building, wrapping around the existing building, and we'll just build there and publish that in the paper. Maybe the owners of that building will get the idea they're boxed in and will sell the building." So we made a rendering, and it was published, I think, in the Tribune about the new Continental Insurance Building that was going to be shortly under construction. Well, then the owners of that historic building sold their site and their building to the Continental Insurance people. I wanted to keep a record of the old building. I wasn't averse to tearing it down, but I wanted to have a record that it had existed and what it was. So we photographed it extensively, and Jim De Stefano made a marvelous set of measured drawings and we completely documented that building. In fact, I think the Burnham Library probably has a copy of that book. Anyway, we got the entire corner site and started to work on the building. One of the considerations was the fact that the floors varied in height in the Straus Building. That was that building on the corner. The floors varied in height, and so we had to make a transition across what was the alley to that other building. We had all the same height within the new Continental Building, so in some cases we had ramps that went up if it wasn't too much of a transition. In some cases we had steps or risers that would make the transition, and we were able then to connect the old building, the Straus Building, to the new building. Jim Ferris was working for me at that time, or rather with me. I don't like the term "working for me," because we were all
160 working together. Anyway, Jim Ferris had been working also with Myron Goldsmith on the United Airlines Building that had the very large spans, if you remember, but it was done in concrete. We were working on this thing and thought, well, why don't we just keep this? One thing about Chicago was that we were all aware of what was going on particularly with the younger people who were working then. So we said to Jim, I remember, that maybe we ought to explore building this with larger bays. When Graham, Anderson, Probst & White constructed the Field Building, of course, it wasn't air- conditioned. We didn't have any air conditioning in the Santa Fe Building that is where our office was on the corner of Michigan and Jackson. You would be almost completely undressed with towels all over yourself and towels on the drawing board because you were perspiring and sweating so much. The windows were open and you had that courtyard, and so air conditioning was important. But anyway, before that, there wasn't any air conditioning in Chicago. Really, the only building that was built as an air- conditioned building was the Prudential Building, which was after the war. But the first building that was air conditioned in Chicago was the Field Building. Nobody in Chicago knew anything about air conditioning. Murphy or Naess or one of them found a young guy by the name of Bob Sollinger down in Dallas or Houston, Texas. Of course, Texas was far advanced technologically in the air conditioning elements, and Sollinger was hired. He came to Chicago to head up the mechanical—heating, ventilating, air conditioning—section of the Naess and Murphy organization. He had a young fellow working for him by the name of Dan Despot who subsequently worked with me on some things out here on Auraria when Helmut Jahn got involved. But back to how to do the air conditioning for this Continental Building and these big spans. Traditionally, in a steel frame building you put up the columns, the girders and the beams and you assemble the frame of the building, and then you proceed to hang onto that frame all of the mechanical systems that you need—the electrical, the heating, ventilating and air conditioning. All of the services are suspended or hung, just like in this room where this boiler pipe is hung from the ceiling. In most conventional buildings that's exactly what's done, so consequently you have one level which is the structure of the building which is where the beams and all of the
161 steel is. That's set aside for the structure that supports the whole thing. Then immediately below that you have a section which is full of pipes and all of the other extraneous things that are running around—we call it spaghetti—all over the ceiling that is hung simply below that, again, in a zone which is for mechanical systems. And then underneath that system you suspend a ceiling that in effect holds the lighting fixtures and conceals all of that mechanical equipment. What this does is make a floor-to-floor height much higher because you've got to accommodate the zone for the structure and the zone for the mechanical system. Particularly when you have long spans, you end up with quite a substantial depth for the steel framing as such, and another depth, then, for the mechanical system. If you look from the outside at most of these buildings, you find a big, opaque section which is the floors of the building, and your floor-to-floor height where you try to maintain—in most cases in New York they got the ceiling heights down to eight feet and in some cases even lower. We always try to keep at least nine feet in an office building. But that's set up then three or four feet, required for that other, and that's additional volume that you have to build, and it's a costly operation. So in working with Sollinger, we came to the possibility that we could cut holes in these deep girders and framing members, and instead of hanging all of this ductwork below there we would go through the girders and would use a floor system that had been developed by H. H. Robertson Company, which is a hollow sheet metal steel section which has a core almost like an elongated honeycomb, but there are these long tubes that are all welded together and panels which are roughly maybe two feet wide and thirty feet long. They're very lightweight, and because of being bent sheet metal—going back to my old cars again—they were able to span longer distances between the beams, so you could develop an economical structure. You could also make use of the fact that the floor now not only can move air but you can fish wires down through all of these areas, and you can have a complete electrical system, so you can locate desks and office equipment and you have a flexibility. We had no idea that the electronic revolution was coming. But the building even today is very adaptable to any kind of distribution of energy that you want within the building. And so we used that system and pressurized the floor, like in the Geneva house, so that this
162 air then is moving out, which was air conditioning in the summertime and heating in the wintertime, to the perimeter of the building and coming up through these distribution elements at the windows as well as coming down for individual offices from the ceiling. So we had almost unlimited flexibility. The problem in these office buildings is that someplace you have to have a source of heating and cooling. You have a boiler for heat and you have refrigeration equipment to chill the air. Then you have to have these fan rooms, and it simply is a mathematical problem to calculate the size of these fans and the size of these ducts and the distribution system based on the requirements of how much air you've moving. So these things started to determine where you have your bathrooms, where you have your elevators, where you have your stairways. All of these things are concentrated in this fixed core area, and that's where the real energy has to go in order to determine a reasonable plan for the building. Then outside of this, you have to have enough space left in order to have the people working in the office, for their desks and all of their equipment. That becomes the usable space. An owner of the building is not interested in the machinery. He's interested in his people being able to work and so forth. So an office building requires a certain amount of air, and this determines, as I said, the heating and the ventilating system. But when we came to the Civic Center, which in principle was the same thing, and I'll talk about that later, the requirements for the Civic Center in the air quantity, since it is classified as an assembly building or in effect one large auditorium with all of these courtrooms, you have to have twice as much air supply as you do in a normal office building. We'll talk about that when we get into the Civic Center.
Blum: Jacques, the idea of drawing all of these—you say "the spaghetti"—through the structural members, was that the first time something like that had been done?
Brownson: No, I think it had been tried before. The floor system that H. H. Robertson developed was a flooring system that was used extensively in New York City. The only thing that we did was simply to go through the structural member and cut holes in these beams. From an engineering standpoint in
163 principle, a rule of thumb is that when you cut a hole through a beam, you usually cut it on what's called the neutral axis, which is generally halfway between the top and the bottom flange. The material that you cut out of the hole you weld around the opening so that you in effect have not eliminated any material in it so you won’t have a strength problem. So this sets up, and when you start to look at it, even though it's very crudely done where it's concealed by a ceiling, you start to see the possibilities of how the kind of structure starts to dictate the architectural significance and what the possibilities might be for steel when you see these—and I don't really like to use this—shades and shadows, as the Beaux-Arts people used to say. You start to see that on there, and it starts to open up your eyes to the fact that there are other ways that you can handle this thing. Well, then the other thing that I became interested in—I like to see the real McCoy, and I always use a kind of story. I said, "I don't want to go to a church supper." And somebody said, "What do you mean, a church supper?" I said, "Well, you've been to those things. You go to one of those turkey suppers, and you look at it and you get this piece of turkey on the top, and it's so thin it almost blows away. But underneath is all of that stuffing. If it's turkey, let's make it turkey." So, I like to see what really is, what goes on with things. I started to think that instead of hanging this curtain on the outside, why don't we use that so- called curtain wall to become a part of the structural system to resist the wind forces and some of the other things and unite that outside skin of the building with the fireproofed members. As I talked previously in this tape about fireproofing the steel with concrete or asbestos or something to keep it from collapsing; that if we could unite the exterior so-called skin of the building with the inside, we would have some extremely stiff exterior members. Now, the other thing is that the code is such that—again, I'm oversimplifying—you only have to fireproof the dead load members. That's the requirement. In other words, the dead load is simply the load that you place on it from the load of the building and from all of the people, the code gives you some numbers to deal with. But the wind bracing, which is very critical in the building to keep the building from collapsing in strong winds, can be exposed in many instances so that you don't necessarily have to consider that as a fireproofed member. John Roche was a structural engineer,
164 and I got to talking with John. I said, "I'd like not to have any expansion joints in this building. No open joints in the building. First of all, after a few years they end up not working, and the thing is difficult to execute to keep the water out." Denver is relatively easy to build in because of the dry climate, or building in a desert, compared to what it is in Chicago where the climate is changing drastically night and day and you've got a lot of water and humidity and so forth. I said, "How is it possible that we can tie those things together? What is the function of these Nelson stud bolts?" Nelson stud bolts have a round head on them, and they're welded onto the flanges of steel beams and are used to connect the concrete floors to the steel structure so it becomes, again, one unit. You get considerable strength. There is a machine called a Nelson stud gun, and the workman simply loads it up with one of these big, oversized rivets and he goes along and pulls a trigger. Then the arc welding comes in and it welds it directly to the steel member. I said, "I wonder if it would be possible to transfer the stresses out of the skin immediately into the structure by making a connection between that concrete fireproofing on the outside with these stud bolts.” We put a lot of studs on the steel structure. We put a lot of studs on the exterior steel plate, on the inside of it. Then we erect that all at one time and we fill it full of concrete and unite the two together, and it becomes one monolithic member. John said, "I think that's possible. It's going to take a lot of stud bolts." I said, "Well, yes, but I think it's going to be quite simple because we won't have the forming costs. The contractor won't have to make separate wood forms and then take those off and then hang this skin on the outside." Now, you can do that with steel quite easily, so it wasn't difficult. If you look at photographs of the building under construction, you see that the outside skin and the structure are going up simultaneously and with the advantage of having the same contractors doing the steel skeleton as well as the skin. So there is a certain economy involved in building. Economy is a real element in your planning. That gives you an idea of how the Continental Building…
Blum: You were exploring new ways, it seems, with the Continental Building that stood you in very good stead later. Jacques, before we move on to where it stood you in good stead, why is that building red? Was that your idea?
165 Brownson: No. If you look at the original building that was completed, it was painted with a kind of industrial black paint that gradually oxidized. There was a name for it, and it was used extensively in the railroad industry and all over. It was very resistant to corrosion, and it gradually got this marvelous kind of flat black and it did not show the different kind of imperfections. In other words, if you have a shiny surface you will see all of the oil-canning. We call it oil-canning, the bulging of the panels which, incidentally, reminds me that if you look at the Continental Building, you will also notice vertical members about ten feet apart. They were steel bars welded to this outside plate. So when I alluded before to cutting these holes in these beams and stuff, we used those bars I call stiffeners in order to stiffen up the outside so we wouldn't have to go to any elaborate concrete forming methods to resist the pressure of the concrete when it was in a liquid form. Those stiffeners are structural, and they, in effect, perform the same way as it would in a plate girder and resist many of the forces of pouring concrete between those two members.
Blum: Are the vertical pieces of metal, probably steel, on Mies's buildings structural, as you're describing it, or are they decorative, as I think many of us had been led to believe?
Brownson: You're talking about 880 and 860?
Blum: Yes.
Brownson: No, and there was a different system on 880 and 860. That, too, incidentally, also used stud bolts on it. I can't remember how extensive it was, but the vertical members of 880 and 860 had panels that were made up on the roof, all welded together. They were roughly twenty feet by about ten or eleven feet high. The mullions were on those I-beam sections, and if you look, there is a joint between each one of the panels and there are guide bars welded on the inside flange. I know this is complicated to explain, but each one of these panels then went down over the roof and was hung in place, and when the
166 concrete floors were poured, that also became the form for the concrete floor that they poured. There are no hollow floors, as such, on 880 and 860, but those floors are concrete there, in contrast to the Commonwealth Apartments, which were aluminum. There the concrete skeleton was erected, and then this curtain wall came and is not in the sense a structure other than the skin to support the wind loads on the glass and that. Also, people were criticizing Mies for the so-called vertical mullions on the columns. That was also architects, too. "Well, if he's such a purist about structure and all that, why did he put those fake…?" I said, "They're not fake. You have a problem over this thin steel plate that is going to get pressure exerted by the construction process, and if you don't it's going to look like an old Campbell's soup can. You're going to have this tin-canning on it." So, in effect that is really a structural mullion that is used, and it ties all together, as I spoke previously about Crown Hall, and is the difference between structure and just a piece of the structure. It becomes a unity. When the whole thing is together, you have a unity to it that allows you to reduce the size of the members, and there is an economy involved in the whole process.
Blum: In the Continental Building, the mullions were structural members, and do I understand you to say that for Mies they also functioned in that way?
Brownson: I can't remember talking to Kornacker or to anybody about that, but I'm sure whether it was considered or wasn't considered, in fact it does just that. It stiffens up the building. If you make something where it's all united together and has a unity to it—and we can also talk about those mullions as creating the architectural unity of the building, because that certainly would be completely different if they were left out. I've also used a story about the Renaissance architects who built stairways on which the risers were all equal, then they would put an oddball riser in so that when the thief was running away—you know how you have that rhythm going down the steps—when he would hit that misfit stair it would trip him. I said, "How do you think that building would look if all of a sudden your eye is going along"—as you look, those buildings 880 and 860 sometimes become solid because of the way you look at it. Sometimes they become completely transparent. There is that
167 continual change of play of light and shadow and things, which is the difference between architecture and building. I don't know what architecture is. I asked Mies many times. I said, "What is it? What is architecture?" It's when something really sings, when it sings. Those two buildings, 880 and 860, sing. That's all you can say.
Blum: Some people think that the Civic Center sings.
Brownson: I guess I have to say that I feel that, too. The other thing is when all of this—you asked, I guess we got into black paint, right?
Blum: Well, I was asking why the Continental Center was red. You answered why it was black, but I'm still not sure why it is red.
Brownson: Okay, it was all black. Then later Jim Ferris leaves and I leave, and we all disperse to the wind. Jim Ferris gets the commission to build the Continental Center building adjacent to it, immediately to the south. Jim wanted to paint his building red, and so some way or other—I guess maybe the Continental people didn't like the black shroud or the black paint, so they painted the whole project the same red color. They call it now the Continental Center, I think. It gives a corporate image. Instead of being the Straus Building and one Continental Building and the other Continental Building, it now becomes the Continental Center. There is an interesting story about the Straus Building and the Buckingham Fountain. There evidently at one time was some executive who had an office facing east, and when people would come to see him from the hinterlands there was a certain time of day he would make the appointment. Buckingham Fountain has a cycle of when it comes on and goes off, and he knew what the cycle was, and he'd kind of dummy- up a call. He'd pick up the telephone, and he'd make one of those Bob Newhart calls, "Would you turn on the fountains? I've got some friends of mine here from out of town. Would you turn the fountain on?" and pretty soon the fountain would start up. They were always impressed.
Blum: That's a good story. Would you please talk about probably the best-known of
168 your work, the Civic Center? How did that commission come to the office?
[Tape 7; Side 1]
Brownson: I think with any major project there is always a number of people involved. I think Mies said that architecture or building is “the will of an epoch translated into space.” I think earlier I was talking about standing on somebody's shoulders and carrying it a step further, so you're always indebted to and appreciative of all of the help that you get. I said in a little brochure for an exhibit that I had in 1966 at the University of Michigan, and I'm quoting here, "The Chicago Civic Center especially represents the work of three Chicago architectural firms, C. F. Murphy Associates, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett, together with a staff of one hundred and fifty architects and engineers." So I can say that I had a part in it.
Blum: You were chief designer for Murphy. Murphy had the lion's share and you had the lion's share of Murphy.
Brownson: Yes. I think the formation of the Chicago Civic Center Architects was a stroke of, call it luck or genius of C. F. Murphy, Sr., that the office to build this project was not going to be in any of the principals’ offices. In other words, the headquarters of the project was not going to be in Murphy's office. It was not going to be in Skidmore's office, it was not going to be in Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett's office, but it was going to be at 104 South Michigan Avenue.
Blum: Did that ensure its independence?
Brownson: It ensured its independence, although it started a little differently. But when the real intensity of the project and all of the kinds of things were decided—we turned out over eleven hundred working drawings, big sheets of drawings, in less than a year's time. It was very rapidly done once it was determined what we wanted to do.
169 Blum: Jacques, let me interrupt you for just a minute. It was my understanding from some of the reports in the newspaper that when a civic center had been decided on, there was a proposal with drawings, published in the newspaper that was a two-building concept with a plaza with restaurants and shops, and it was from Solomon Cordwell's office.
Brownson: That is correct.
Blum: How did the plan go from two buildings to one building, and from Cordwell's office to the Chicago Civic Center Architects, which was a combination of three offices? How did that shift take place?
Brownson: I can tell you what I know about it, but I don't know why Solomon and Cordwell did not participate when the project was, in effect, approved to get started more seriously rather than just in pictures. I received a call late one Saturday afternoon. I was in my glass house, living there in Geneva. I never got a call on the weekend, and of all people, it's C. F. Murphy, Sr. He said, "Jacques, the firm has just been awarded, together with Loebl's office and Skidmore's office, the commission to do the Civic Center. I want you to be the person in charge for me. I want you to start Monday morning." I said, "What?! Do you mean…?" And he said, "Yes, we've got this half-block site on Washington Street there. It's north of Washington Street between Clark and Dearborn, and we want to build this Civic Center there." So Monday I go up to my top floor office up the stairs. I can't remember the date, really, of what year that was, but that was the beginning of the project. I knew as I got into it that at the time I didn't know that Solomon and Cordwell had made a scheme for the project. I knew that the Department of City Planning had been involved, and I also knew that Bob Christensen, who was the deputy mayor, had been involved on the project. I think probably Ira Bach was the head of city planning at that time. But anyway, there were a lot of things to be done. One was that the reorganization of the courts under the so-called blue ballot amendment in the state of Illinois allowed the consolidation of the courts. All of the court system for Chicago, the municipal courts, the civil courts with
170 one exception, the appellate courts, the probate courts—all of what I call the civil courts were to be consolidated and the question was how to handle it. So then it had to be determined what was the program for this building. First of all, as an architect, you're given a certain kind of a job and generally—I can't say all of the time, but most of the time—the client really doesn't know what he needs or what he wants other than, here was a courts building that was going to have a lot of courtrooms in it. We had to determine a program, then, as to what it would be. So, each one of the firms involved started to think about providing people for this thing, just like on the project that had preceded the Civic Center, the Federal Center, where each one of the offices involved had certain tasks. It was determined that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill would be involved with the mechanical systems—the HVAC; not the electrical—the HVAC systems.
Blum: This was for the Civic Center?
Brownson: For the Civic Center, and that Loebl would furnish some men to do drafting and contribute to the design of the building. Then Skidmore provided some additional men to work. If I remember right, after a couple of weeks there was a loan. Art Takeuchi came from Skidmore, and Noel Fullham, who is now living in Dublin, Ireland, came from Loebl's office. I believe there was Ken Folgers, too. It seems to me there were a couple of other people who were involved. We started to work on this thing, and, as I said, I was always very concerned about the question of building orientation and the consequences of how this space would work.
Blum: Jacques, you described the responsibilities of Skidmore and Loebl. Was Murphy’s responsibility design?
Brownson: Well, I don't like the word "design," but, yes, you could say Murphy was in charge of the design. But Murphy, as the supervising architect, was also in charge of the structural. That was very predominant in Murphy's direction. The electrical was also from C. F. Murphy, all of the electrical systems, but the heating, ventilating and air conditioning was out of Skidmore's office.
171 John Roche was the chief structural engineer from Murphy's office, and he had been involved in the Prudential Building and the Field Building. I guess he goes back to Graham, Anderson, Probst and White and a lot of major buildings. He had a reputation as a very substantial engineer—a conservative engineer, but one who really knew his stuff. His assistant, who had been with him over the years, was a man named Tom Michaels. Tom Michaels was the one who came together with us at 104 South Michigan. Of course, Roche always stayed at Murphy's main office. He would come and go and stop, but he was more of the director of how the thing was coming together structurally. Then in Skidmore's office were Bill Dunlap and George Jarick. George Jarick was a mechanical engineer who subsequently became a project manager later on in the Skidmore organization. He had a young mechanical engineer who, I think, was originally a Chinese National citizen, Al Cho. Then Murphy had Dan Nakonechny for electrical.
Blum: Now, were these all people who were in the Civic Center Associates office from these three offices?
Brownson: Yes. We had our own letterhead. We were known as the Chicago Civic Center Architects. I don't know what the corporate relationship was, what the joint venture relationship was.
Blum: Well, if this was a joint venture, it is known that Murphy had the lion's share. In other words, he had forty percent and the other two offices had thirty.
Brownson: Right.
Blum: Was that usual to do it that way?
Brownson: That was the theoretical split-up. But when the project got started, there was always this discussion about—and these were funny meetings. They went on in the Tavern Club. We'd all get together for lunch, and Bill Dunlap was the most outspoken about how each one of the firms were charging for their time and how they're splitting up the profits and all that stuff. I don't know how
172 they could think there were profits yet. They had just gotten started, you know. But anyway, Dunlap and Loebl used to always get in an argument about, "Well, what's your overhead?" and Dunlap would give some numbers. Then so much for the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill picnic—the annual picnic, you know—for overhead or something. Jerry Loebl would say, "I sure am not going to pay for your picnic!" so then that would shift around. John Burgee was involved. John Burgee was in charge of keeping some kind of reins on the designers—you know, the oddballs—and it was a continual fight about all of the money that I was spending. It was "just going out of sight," and it was "way over the budget," and every week I would get, "You can't spend this money, you can't spent that money." I would just keep roaring ahead because we weren't spending that money. The old system in an office, and it was prevalent in Murphy's office, was that you would have a whole lot of people involved. You'd get a job, and you would put a lot of people on it. Nobody knew what they were doing, there was no clear direction, and there was so much lost motion in doing it that it killed you in the beginning. Well, as I said, I was working on it, Art Takeuchi and Ken Folgers, and then there was Noel Fullham. It was a very small group as we got to working on it. We were working night and day and weekends and everything. It was an ongoing kind of thing, and we only got paid for forty hours a week. We didn't get paid overtime or anything like that. But Burgee would keep talking about, "We're not staying in the budget." Then we'd get the sheets that would show that the design aspect was way off on the chart someplace. When it came time to produce these drawings, we turned out eleven hundred sheets of drawings in almost no time at all. It was phenomenal how much work came out, because the draftsman knew where he was going. That was later on. But as we were working on this project, the one thing that came out was that we could never determine how many courts were really needed. It was roughly around one hundred fifty courtrooms, total, in the building.
Blum: Because courts were not consolidated, was that the reason for the two- building scheme in the first place?
Brownson: I can't really say, on the two-building scheme.
173 Blum: I mean, did that situation seem to justify two buildings?
Brownson: I think part of it was that not only did you have the courts, but you had the county clerk, you had a lot of outside activities that subsequently came into the Civic Center project. There was the whole Chicago Board of Health offices down on the lower level. The total lower level of that project became the space for the Chicago Board of Health, and all of the vital statistic records. It became a much more extensive thing than just the courts alone. Now, why did the Board of Health all come into that area? That was the time of Civil Defense. It was the Cold War time, and the idea was that the Board of Health was located there to be adjacent to the main transportation system for the entire city, the State Street line and the Dearborn Street line. The decision was made in a discussion with the mayor, to have a minimum amount of parking in the site to force the public to use public transportation to come to the center. We knew there were going to be a lot of people here and a lot of activity, and we were not going to build parking on the thing. We had a relatively limited budget.
Blum: So how did the two-building scheme become consolidated into one?
Brownson: If you remember that site, as I said or as Murphy said when we started the project, the site for these buildings—he may have even used the plural term, "these buildings"—was to be on the half of the block on Washington Street to the south of that site, because that was a parking lot. They had just torn down some buildings, and then they had made a parking lot out of it. So that site was available, that half. The other half, which consisted of Henrici's—oh, boy, you can't touch Henrici's. Henrici's is going to be there forever. You're never going to move Henrici's. And there was an old, broken-down theater.
Blum: The Erlanger.
Brownson: The Erlanger Theatre. I'm sure that the historians are going to jump all over me, but there were all of these cruddy, old buildings all along Randolph
174 Street. I would walk over there early in the morning, late at night, all the time. I kept going there. I said, "This building has to be on the site where the buildings are and it has to be one building to have some kind of impact and we have to have open space. We have to have this. If it's a courts building, it has to have a forecourt. It has to be full of sunlight," because Chicago is dark and cloudy and gloomy and dismal enough, you know. I said, "It has to have sunlight in it." So we made a whole lot of studies. I think we took the two building scheme and showed that there would never be any sun in that area. It would always be blocked out by the two buildings, and we would never have any sunlight in that area. We started to make these studies and to take a look at different plazas around the world. We put on a slide show when we presented the model for the building to the Public Building Commission. There was a slide of an old man and an old woman sitting in Bernini's crescents in front of St. Peter's. That was the last slide in the exhibit. They're looking up and the sun is shining down, and the mayor said, "That's what we want! That's what we want!" At that presentation for that building, Bob Christensen was really shocked. We had built the model in Union City, New Jersey, the big model. Did you ever see that?
Blum: For the Civic Center? No.
Brownson: For the Civic Center, the gigantic model that was shipped by air freight, and I remember the hassle of trying to get it on a freighter and getting it into Chicago and the doors weren't big enough. This was a big model. I don't know where it is now. Maybe it's at the Museum of Science & Industry now, a beautiful model. It was built—but that's a whole other story—in Union City.
Blum: Who did it belong to?
Brownson: The Chicago Civic Center Architects. We had it built. I sent Al Swenson to Union City to look after this thing as it got put together, and then I went. I stayed, I guess, someplace over in Manhattan, and I went over to the shop where they were building it. So we took a very serious look at the two
175 buildings. The other thing that came out was that the method of communication at that time was generally by pneumatic tubes of some sort. They had those pneumatic tubes, and you would put the papers in there and whoosh! it would go off someplace. I guess we had that, and then we had a vertical mail elevator that carried the mail vertically up and down the building. The thing was, if you split it up into two, you were going to have a problem of getting all of this information back and forth between the buildings and we thought one building would simplify the problem. Then as we worked on the plans, we started to see the tremendous variation between the requirements. There were jury courtrooms that had to have a jury room and jury seating, and they had to be of a certain size to accommodate that. There were other rooms that were to be non-jury courtrooms that didn't have to have all of those extraneous things. You had lawyers' conference rooms that were needed in certain cases, and then you had the larger courts that had more, in case you got some kind of a trial that had a bigger population. They had to be bigger and the ceilings had to be higher. So flexibility was needed in the plan. We really didn't know, finally, how this was all going to work out, and every time we made a normal building—I call it a normal building of, let's say, a thirty-foot square base or something like that—we always had a column coming down, interrupting the space, and we always had to work around this. If you wanted a big courtroom, you had to go to a lot of elaborate tricks in order to get the structure to work. I remember that a group of us were sitting there, and I said, "Why don't we take this thing and really put it into big bay areas so we end up with these large areas on each side of this central core that we can subdivide? We don't have to worry right now what that plan is going to be." As you're working, you've got to keep in mind, as I said, the code requirements for such a building. The building code said that this was an assembly building, or an auditorium building, and that it required twice as much air, in effect, as an office building. Consequently, if we had the capacity in order to supply this air in mechanical systems to any of these spaces, we could adjust it accordingly and subdivide the plan as we needed, which is unique—I won't say unique, but the reason a steel skeleton building is so good is that it's flexible. You can do whatever you want with it. By having, then, this open space—the column spacing was eighty-seven feet
176 by almost, I think, about forty-eight-six, or something, in the other bay. Those were the columns, and it ended up with sixteen major columns in the building, these very large columns and these long spans.
Blum: And all of this was possible only in one building? All of these factors led to the conclusion that one building…
Brownson: No, it would be possible in any building, but it is very costly to build longer spans. You have to start to think of what that means when you start to make longer spans. George Jarick or Al Cho were working on the mechanical systems, starting to work on the requirements of how to supply this air, and we've got elevators and we've got a lot of other things that have to go into it. Like the Continental Building, instead of hanging all of this stuff below the structure, why not take this ductwork and thread the stuff through the structure? So, in talking with Al Cho—“How big are your largest ducts? What is this pattern for it? What would the pattern be for a typical floor in order to do that?”—he came up that it would take almost four or four and a half feet of hollow space between the structure and the ceiling in order to run all of the spaghetti stuff up there. We had this problem with columns in the middle of spaces, the flexibility, but I said to John Roche, "What can you do for a truss? If we make the span eighty-seven feet or ninety feet"—I don't think we had really determined yet what it actually was—but I said, "What is the truss configuration? What is an optimum size that would allow us to go through with all of this ductwork?" It ended up for that span that the depth was somewhere around five and a half feet, and that was standard then on all floors. So we went back to work, and taking that we got this large column spacing. You couldn't justify this in a normal office building. You couldn't justify these big spans because you don't need that kind of flexibility. But in an assembly building where you have auditoriums and you need some big rooms and you need all of these different kinds of things, you've got to have some way of doing that. This is where I go back to one of the things that I was going to talk about. Before I went into the Army in the Second World War I got a job detailing reinforcing steel on the Dodge plant, which was on the South Side in Chicago. This was a plant that Albert Kahn built, and I was
177 simply detailing reinforcing steel.
Blum: When was this?
Brownson: This was early 1943, if I remember right. So Albert Kahn’s work comes in at IIT, you know, with the photomontage project. Mies was always impressed with the Willow Run factory that Albert Kahn built for Henry Ford. I think you've seen those, of taking the truss structure of the Willow Run plant and hanging the concert hall inside this big space where they built B-25s. That was when I was teaching at IIT, and I worked on those projects, too. All right, we've got these big spans and these trusses and all of this stuff, and we're working at that time up on the seventeenth floor or up in the top of that building, and I got a call from C. F. Murphy. He said, "Jacques, come down here. John Roche is sitting here with me. Get down here." So I went down and I go in, and here they are sitting there. They are both contemporaries, John Roche and Murphy, Sr., and they have been through all of these jobs together, they respected one another, and all that. Murphy said, “I want you to stop work on that Civic Center project the way it's going. Go back to a normal building. John Roche says that he can't build it, that it can't be done. The spans are too big. He just can't handle it, and it's not possible to build it.” Well, gee, we're a long way along. We've put a lot of work in—I don't know, four or five months or something, and I'm thinking that it just won't work any other way. I'm sitting there, and I said, "Now what do I do?" I'm sitting there rather glum, and they're talking back and forth about why it can't be done. "You're extending it. It's never been done before any place in the world. If you can show me where it's ever been done before, maybe we can try it. But John Roche says it's not possible to do it."
Blum: Didn't you do something similar in a smaller way with the Continental Building?
Brownson: Well, it was similar, yes, but you're now talking about a building which was for a very short time—three or four months—the tallest building in Chicago. It was the largest office building, with spans of ninety feet or eighty-seven
178 feet. Those spans and the scale of that thing are something else. You're not talking about a little building. You're talking about a real span, as you said, it's almost like a bridge. So I'm sitting there, and I listened to them talking back and forth. I said, "John, you know, we've got a lot of time in on this thing. We've worked together on the Continental Building, we've worked together on some other projects, and you know I don't look on these things in a haphazard way. I try to analyze the project. With all of the things that I know about it, we need spaces like that in order to accomplish it. Is there any way that you can do this so that we can proceed with it?" He said, "Well, let me go back and talk with Tom Michaels about it. Let's get back together tomorrow morning." So here I am, I didn't say anything to anybody about what was going on up where we were working. The next morning we got together again in Murphy's office, and Roche said, "Tom and I have looked at it, and if you would be willing in the center bay"—there were three big, long bays—"we would be willing to go ahead if you would drop the ceiling height in the center core area where the elevators are. If you would drop that down to around eight feet and make the ceiling height from the floor eight feet, then that would give me ten feet to put some big girders and stuff up there to stiffen the building enough, then I think maybe we could make it." I said, "Well, I don't like to do that because it makes it a really weird situation later on as the elevators drop off. You've got part of this thing hanging down in the space at eight feet, and the rest of the ceiling heights are at twelve feet," which is what we needed for the courtrooms. The usual office building is somewhere like eight or nine feet in ceiling height. "But," I said, "if that's the only way you will do it, rather than just scrap this whole thing at this stage, somehow or other I'll make it work." In the back of my mind I had the idea that I'll get them to gradually push this thing up. Let me get a little document now. One of the things that nobody has really brought out about this building are some of the structural things that are involved in it that make it considerably different than any other building. For example, this building is weakest in what we call the long axis. The long direction of the building is the weakest part because of the trusses. When a load comes on, particularly when the wind loads come on the building, it tends to push the building over. It does that because these trusses are very flexible. They're lightweight.
179 They're just a spider web, almost, and a truss is weak. It will support tremendous weight from above, down, but is weak in the long direction. So it's always a question of the wind bracing stiffening that up because the wind is a serious problem. Roche never wrote many memorandums. This is one he wrote to me on May 25, 1962. He says, "Originally, we were attempting to use a variation of the cantilever system of wind bracing. At that time I had considerable doubt as to our ability at producing a structure of adequate rigidity to prevent possible excessive deflection," and that was at the first meeting when they said they couldn't do it, you know. He said, "You", meaning me, Brownson, "you then reduced the ceiling height in the core area which provided sufficient room for a K-brace structure in that area. This enabled us to obtain a positive stiffness that we feel is essential to ensure a satisfactory building," and then he talks later about this thing going up. Then I became much more involved with Tom Michaels who was doing, as he always called it, the arithmetic. We didn't use a computer in that building, you know.
Blum: Was it available at that time?
Brownson: It was just starting to become available. The programs weren't developed, and for most of the engineers it was still done with a slide rule. In working with Tom Michaels, we'd say, "Tom, can't you push it up a little bit?"
Blum: You're talking about the ceilings?
Brownson: The ceiling yes. Every day, "Can't you take that big tube out of it? Can't you make it go up a little bit more?" He says, "Yes, I can play the piano standing on my head, too, but what kind of music are you going to get?" But anyway, it gradually got up to the top.
Blum: Which was?
Brownson: Got up so that the ceiling then became twelve feet all of the way through. So we had eighteen feet, floor to floor, in that building, with six feet for the
180 sandwich that involved the structure and the mechanicals going through it and all of the other things. That was six feet in depth. What is very hard for that building is the scale of it, and the scale is such that people don't realize that those floors are eighteen feet, where most office buildings are around nine feet-six inches or ten feet or maybe a little more, but are much less. The whole thing, the scale, is much different. Well, then, this was only the beginning of our problems. As we got into it, if all of these wind loads are coming down to the second floor, then how do you get from the second floor down to the caissons, which is where all of these forces have to go into the ground to become a static thing? It can't move around. So, John Roche called in friends of his from way back, Edwards and Hjorth, who are recognized as top echelon, world class structural engineers and were friends of John's. There was a man who came in from them. Edwards and Hjorth was the firm that, if you remember when the Lockheed—I think it was called the Electra—the wings were falling off the Lockheed Electra. They were having these horrendous airplane crashes. Do you remember that?
Blum: Yes. This was the airplane that Herb Greenwald was killed in.
Brownson: Yes. They flew into the river, of course, but this airplane, when you would fly in it, you would see these wings out there. I've flown in it. You see these wings moving up and down. But anyway, Edwards and Hjorth were the ones that were able to finally work out the structure in such a way that it became a safe airplane. So, they were involved in developing the method of transferring these forces from the second floor down through these columns into the caissons. Then we also had at that same time another engineer, a Professor John E. Goldberg, who was a professor of engineering at Purdue University and, if I remember right, was one of the engineers involved in the first atomic nuclear submarines.
[Tape 7: Side 2]
Brownson: Al Picardi, who was the chief engineer for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, would also come into these meetings with Roche. Whenever we had
181 engineering discussions, Picardi was there, and Fazlur Khan would come. Picardi, backed up by John Goldberg, wanted Roche to use what's called a Viereendel system of framing the building where each joint takes the wind loads. But Roche would not go along with it. He didn't feel that it was the correct way to go and was involved with this K-brace system. The building is extremely stiff. It just does not move around. The one thing that does move the building around is the sun. That building follows it. As the sun hits that steel, it expands, and consequently, in a way, as you expand the south face, the building actually curves away from the sunlight. The surveyor brought that up to me one day. He said, "The sun is hitting the building and we've got to allow so much for that heat from the sun that's expanding the steel plates." Then on the fireproofing, on the outside of the building we used Cor-Ten steel, which is a trade name.
Blum: Why did you select Cor-Ten?
Brownson: Well, I wanted it to be a steel building. I didn't want it covered with marble. I wanted to have a structure. I also was pretty enamored with the Continental Building. I liked the scale of it. Also, I needed some stiffness on these exterior trusses. In effect, in addition to the truss, you had it wrapped in concrete which was reinforced and it became, in effect, what we call a composite member. And so, this big, exterior, steel covering, which is six feet high and eighty-seven feet long, has all of these stud bolts on the back side of it. That building doesn't have the hollow Robertson metal floor in it. It has a concrete floor, and the floor is connected to the trusses by means of vertical Nelson stud bolts. So then the trusses and the exterior skin go up almost simultaneously, and all of it is done, in this case, by the United States Steel Company, the American Bridge Corporation from Gary, Indiana. These big, in effect, steel plates, when they're handled in the shop, you can see how flexible they are before they're fabricated. We then welded these vertical stiffeners, like on the Continental Building, to take the pressure of pouring the concrete and to get rid of that oil-canning problem, which you get on so many buildings. The encasement for the steel columns going up, that too was all tied together with this same system. There is not an expansion joint in
182 almost seven hundred feet. There is not an expansion joint in that entire building. When we did the Continental Building that way, Roche was very skeptical. I said, "Well, John, make an analysis of it. If you look at the railroad, the railroad had butt-welded all of their rail together. It goes on for miles. They don't have any problem with the stuff," because it's resisted at each one of the ties with a spike. The rail is spiked down. So I said, "If you can resist it and instead of letting those things accumulate, you confine it to a smaller area, then you can handle the expansion." That was exactly what we did with the Civic Center.
Blum: Who was responsible for selecting Cor-Ten? Apparently it was a material that was, as I understand the history of it, developed for railroad cars, the bottom of freight cars.
Brownson: Right.
Blum: Had it ever been used in a building before?
Brownson: Yes. It had been used by Kevin Roche and Saarinen and Dinkeloo and that group on the John Deere Building in Moline, Illinois. The whole building is done with that.
Blum: Were you aware of that material on that building?
Brownson: Oh, sure. We went down to look at it. We were aware of the thing. One of the things that was evident with the Cor-Ten was that it is a wonderful material as long as it has that wetting and drying action. You cannot let puddles of water set on Cor-Ten because it will simply make big flakes that will rust off. But in the Chicago air at that time, from the steel mills down on the South Side, there was a lot of sulfur dioxide, which then combined with the humidity and made sulfuric acid and acid rain, and that acid rain was ideal. It's a lot like the old, marvelous, green copper roofs that oxidized to that kind of greenish color from the contaminants.
183 Blum: You, evidently, were satisfied with the black steel material that you used on the Continental Center.
Brownson: It could have been painted.
Blum: Why didn't you just use it again in the Civic Center?
Brownson: Well, I think primarily because paint and the Civic Center really doesn't go together.
Blum: No, I'm asking why didn't you just use that black material instead of using Cor-Ten?
Brownson: First of all, because the Cor-Ten is much stronger. It's a high-strength steel, and it's a much stronger material. In fact, one of the things that the fabricator discovered was that the tools and machines that he had for handling normal, what's called A-36 steel, to bend that, because it's not as strong, this Cor-Ten steel is much stronger and requires heavier equipment in order to bend it and to shape it and to work it. So you have to have new tools to do it. Incidentally, in the scale of that building, McNulty Brothers were the plasterers, and the one thing that evidently they didn't consider too thoroughly was the fact that the ceilings are twelve feet high, and it meant that they had to put different kinds of staging on the floor for the plasterers to do their work. So it took them more time because of the higher ceilings than it would on a normal office building ceiling height. But there was that, and there was this Cor-Ten, and the fabricators recognized that. Well, during this time when this was all going on, I take a trip to Indianapolis, Indiana, and the building hasn't been started at all yet. We're still working on it. I made a trip down there because they had built a courts building in Indianapolis. I've run into more people, just flukes. They were not flakes; I'm talking about flukes. Just happenstance. So I went down there and went out to lunch with one of the old county commissioners who, I suppose, like me, likes to talk. We're sitting there at lunch, and he said, "Well, I'll tell you what you've got to do. You know, I worked around with county commissioners
184 and building boards and all of this stuff. It's really hard to get them to make a decision on things. They'll just run you from pillar to post, all kinds of tricks and stuff, and you never can get anybody to make a decision." I said, "What do you do?" He said, "Get the foundations in the ground. Then they can't back away." That was exactly what we did. The first contract was for the caissons. Paschen Brothers did the caisson work, and that in itself was an interesting experience. Those are big caissons. They're sixteen feet in diameter, and they go down to bedrock at one hundred and six feet below the ground. In fact, I still have a piece of the rock here on the shelf. I went down into one of these caissons to look at the bottom of the thing, at what they were doing, and you'd look up and you could see the stars and the sky and the moon. It was like looking through a big telescope, looking up this high. But those caissons are sixteen feet and you have to make them so that—they're like Frank Lloyd Wright columns on the Johnson Wax Building—they're bigger at the top than at the bottom. It's a building technique. You start out with these long pieces of wood, and then you have these iron hoops and you dig down, let's say, six feet. You stack up all of these wood things around it and you put this iron hoop in and you jack it up and you caulk it with straw or something else to keep the water out. Well, then the next row that you have to drive down has to be inside the first row, and all the way down you're stepping down, so at the bottom is the size of the caisson, but your caisson is really much wider at the top than it is bearing at the bottom. It's a column that's upside down, in effect. We got the caissons contract in. We got all of that done, and then we let it out for bids. Then, oh, boy, come the bids. We were about twelve million dollars over what we had estimated the building was going to cost. Oh, there was one intermediate step in there—not intermediate, a major step. There was a contract for the caissons, then came the contract for the steel work. There were really only two bidders that could bid this job, United States Steel Corporation and Bethlehem Steel. They submitted bids. The bid that was awarded on the Chicago Civic Center was $13,313,313. Mack Corner was the representative of United States Steel submitting this bid, and afterwards I said, "I can't understand. I understand the thirteen million, but then you go into three hundred thirteen thousand, three hundred thirteen dollars." He said, "Yes, I
185 like threes. I feel very comfortable with threes in the bid." So they got the bid for the steel and went ahead with the fabrication on that. Then the last contract was the general contract awarded to Gust K. Newberg Construction Company. When those bids came in, they were something around forty-nine million, if I remember right, and it was considerably over what was budgeted. I remember Bruce Graham jumping all over me for this cost overrun. So Mayor Daley said, "Well, you know, I think"—the banks were subsidizing and backing all of the bonds. I wasn't involved in that, but Bob Christensen and the bankers and the mayor and banks all said, "There is no problem with that. We can come up with that." Afterwards, at the end of the twenty-five years or whenever the bonds were paid off, we had this big luncheon. I said, "Yup, here is the building. It's all paid off and it's still going strong. It's all paid for."
Blum: Jacques, did you need the approval of the mayor and the aldermen before you could go ahead with your design?
Brownson: You needed approval of the Public Building Commission. But at the time of the whole presentation on this project, the big model and all of the things and what we were going to do, Bob Christensen was a little upset by the fact that there wasn't a two-building scheme, but not really overly concerned and later realized that one building was the right way to go. But when the mayor saw that old man and old woman in front of St. Peter's and the Bernini thing with the sunlight streaming in, that was it, and everybody else said, "Yes, that's what we want."
Blum: But didn't that have more to do with the placement of the building in the sunlight and the plaza than a very modern looking building?
Brownson: I think it was all one thing. One thing you find is that usually everything comes together at one time.
Blum: Was the plaza planned at the same time the building was?
186 Brownson: As far as I was concerned, but they went through a lot of gyrations afterwards, and still are. In other words, all of those decisions, the caissons and the steel and then this final contract of Newberg's, and in effect then it was a question of getting underway. All of the working drawings were done.
Blum: I understand that as the construction was proceeding, there were problems with the glass of the windows on the upper floors. Did they pop out? Did they break or what?
Brownson: There were bigger problems than that. There was a problem when the building fell down, you know.
Blum: Well, will you talk about that?
Brownson: You always test windows, like I was saying about the Prudential Building. You always test windows to see that they don't leak and that they work. The place to go for window testing was the University of Florida. They had people who, that's all they did. They had all of the equipment set up and all of that, so we went down to Miami to the University of Florida, I guess it was where they tested the windows. We had a full-sized window set up and all of the things going on. That evening, Gust Newberg said, "Come on, I want to take you over to Joe's Stone Crab." I had never been to Joe's Stone Crab, but that was a favorite place that old Gust liked to go. So, we went in and we had a table and we had these crabs. After a little while the waiter comes over, and he says, "Oh, Mr. Newberg, you're a contractor. Did you hear about that big accident up in Chicago that just happened this afternoon?” Gust said, "What accident?" He said, "A building that is under construction fell down." Well, there was only one big building under construction, and that was the Civic Center. I looked at Gust and quickly ran out and got on the telephone and called Chicago, "Yes, the fourth and fifth floors collapsed on the Chicago Civic Center."
Blum: Oh my, what a surprise that must have been.
187 Brownson: I said, "I'll be back as soon as I can get a plane. I'll be back in Chicago sometime tonight." I ran out of Joe's Stone Crab and got back to Chicago. I've got all of the construction photos of this thing, but I couldn't believe the mess and the thing that had happened.
Blum: Why did that happen?
Brownson: Right away the mayor calls everybody to get together. "What's happened? What's going on?" U.S. Steel, of course, has been touting this building and what they were doing, and they had their company plane flying in with their top chief executives and all of that. They were flying through the worst weather that had hit Chicago in years. They had to come in and discuss this. Well, what had happened was that in the welding of these trusses, somebody on the night shift had done what's called slugging the weld. When you bring two pieces of steel together, you make a weld that has a certain cross-section to it for strength. Now, these welds were quite substantial, and I guess the welders are paid according to the amount of weld that they lay down, as they say, and so it takes quite a bit of time to make these welds. Well, one of the ways you can speed up is to simply take little pieces of welding rod and lay it in the joint you're welding and weld over the top. So from the outside the weld looks fine when you look at it, but there really isn't anything there because underneath it's nothing but these loose rods. There were a couple of things happening on the Civic Center. One was the method of erection of the steel, the hoisting mechanism, which had to be pretty big because we were lifting those main columns. They weighed almost ninety tons. They were tremendous, the steel. They were six feet out. They were big. They had to develop special trucks to haul this stuff in from Gary, [Indiana]. Anyway, the lifting machinery and the guy operating the lifting machinery can't see what's going on. He's down there in the bowels of the building, way down, because he's got this big, heavy machine that's sitting down on the ground. He is directed by the lifting superintendent, who directs him by telephone, "Hoist, hoist." Well, okay. One of these big columns came in, and the steel workers connected on to this steel column, and he's giving instructions what to do to lift and so forth. So as the column comes up, it starts to spin because there is a
188 swivel on the hook that holds it. It's a swivel hook, and the column and its inertia, the way they picked it up, it started to spin around. Then the cable started to get twisted, and the lifting foreman was caught so much by surprise that he forgot to tell the guy running the lifting machine not to lift. And so he's down there and they're lifting, but the only thing he's doing is pulling down from above on the connection where this thing is up above. He pulled the fourth and fifth floor all the way down, with all of these men and everything on it, and the whole thing collapsed. You can't believe the mess. What happened? What occurred? Why did it collapse? Even with the forces on it, it shouldn't have caused that. So as we checked around, we ran across this bad weld on one of the main trusses that was used where they were pulling from, where they were hoisting from. Then we had to go into the whole United States Steel welding process. We went down to Gary and found out that their whole process of preheating the joint before you weld it was just not organized properly. We also found and brought in a guy whose nickname was “Tiger.” We called him “Tiger” Arnold, and he became the general welding boss. He was a tiger. U.S. Steel looked like they had every welder in Chicago. Every single joint, everything was checked and rewelded and redone. The building now is so strong that you wouldn't have any trouble with it.
Blum: I realize that it was a welding problem, but who was legally responsible for this kind of thing?
Brownson: Well, it was U.S. Steel because they were the ultimately responsible party.
Blum: It wasn't the architects?
Brownson: No. You can't tell from looking at the outside. It's something that happens on every welded steel job. Look at this catastrophe in Kansas City where that walkway fell down because of bad welding, and the one that collapsed at that stadium in the East. Welding is an art. It requires real craftsmanship. It's not something that just anybody can do. You have to have training. You have to know what that welding is doing. And so, we set up training for welders.
189 We set up certification for welders, and U.S. Steel, I must say, just went in and really took a hold of it. They changed their welding procedures all over the country because of that accident and tightened up because they realized that they couldn't afford this. But they fixed it all up and they really did a first class job. The other thing is, if you look at that welding on the outside on the frame, if you look at the columns, the columns are the shape they are—if you notice, the face of the columns is not flat. I was talking about oil-canning. The face of that column is not flat but it goes back in about four inches or so and then comes back out again. In each one, you have that flange that goes out. Now, why is that? Not only is the generation of the architectural qualities there, but it's a very practical problem because when you weld those things, if you have a big surface, it's very hard to grind that weld to make sure that it doesn't wave all over. This way, by putting that surface on there, there are grinding machines that can be set up that can simply proceed, and it can be very mechanized and very straight. That was why. That, then, subsequently sets up these shades and shadows that I was talking about.
Blum: Jacques, although the Civic Center has received overwhelming compliments, some comments have been critical. For instance, someone said it was the "kissing cousin to the Federal Center," and then went on to tell a story that a confused litigant goes to the Civic Center instead of the Federal Center. How do you respond to the criticism that the design is too close to Mies's Federal Center?
Brownson: Well, I suppose the statement I am about to make I could be criticized for, too, but if you look at all architecture, at any time in history there is always a continuity and a thread of building that runs through it. How many Greek Doric temples were built throughout the history of Greece? Certainly, when we look at Paestum and compare that with the Parthenon, even though they are both Doric, there is considerable difference. The one at Paestum, for example, is much heavier. The columns and the detailing and all of it is much heavier, and the Parthenon is much lighter. Some people prefer one, and some people prefer the other. It all depends on how you look at it. You can say when you're looking at the trees that they all look the same, but they're
190 really quite different when you look at them in some detail. Or even in music or in any of the arts, there is always a common thread that runs through all of those things. You might say that the comment is reasonable, but I think it was just what was needed in terms of the building project. Yes, it certainly was influenced by the Chicago School.
Blum: Did Mies ever comment to you about the Civic Center?
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: What did he say?
Brownson: "I wish I had done it."
Blum: That's a very nice compliment.
Brownson: He called me one day and asked me if I would take him to see the Civic Center, even though I knew Mies quite well, and he would go out to the Fox River Valley frequently and I would see him, but I think that he really respected the scale of the Civic Center and that kind of approach to a building problem. He could sense that in a way there were people who were involved with that building at one time or another had been his students, almost all of them with the exception of the draftsmen and those who were working on the working drawings. The rest of us had all been students of Mies's at one time. When he saw the building coming up out of the ground and he saw those very long spans and the detailing of the so-called spandrel beams, he said that here was architecture. He said you could sense it immediately.
Blum: How did you feel when he said things like that?
Brownson: I was taken aback and couldn't say very much. He never said very much about any buildings, really, except the ones that were being worked on. He was never critical of another architect's work, for example. He simply didn't
191 say very much about those things. This was the surprising thing because when he talked about the plaza and the space and the very large spans, he said they were on such a scale that he really could admire something like that, you know. He could appreciate it.
Blum: Bruce Graham has claimed that he had not just something, but a good deal to do with the concept of the Civic Center. How do you respond to that claim?
Brownson: Well, again, going back, as I said, there were a lot of people who were involved in this building. This kind of form was generated out of the need for that kind of space. The scale of the building certainly came out of working on all of these different ideas that were coming together. Who knows, really, where all of these things finally come from? I think there is one thing, that you can't really tell where one leaves off and the other begins. There is always some small spark that starts to generate all of these things. I like to think that the small group that was working on the top floor above Murphy's main office in the beginning, that the kind of exploration we did generated that project. You couldn't create the circumstances to say that you're going to do it a certain way, but rather out of the facts that you were working with came the solution to the problem.
Blum: Was Bruce doing design with you? Was he in the Chicago Civic Center Architects group?
Brownson: There was Bruce, there was Bill Dunlap, there was Al Picardi on the structural engineering. He was in the discussion on it. There was Fazlur Khan, there was George Jarick, and then there was Art Takeuchi, who was one of the excellent students of Mies's at IIT. There was Ken Folgers, who also was one of the top IIT students. It was just a good group of people that somehow or other all came together at one time, and it worked. It really came together, that kind of work. To me the important thing is that nobody will—they may remember some names down through the years, but most people don't know that Phidias was hired by Pericles and then Phidias the sculptor got Ictinus to do the Parthenon. Nobody remembers unless you're
192 really an architectural historian. I think the comments of Mies about the building, and then the comments of anonymous people—I heard one comment that I thought described it very well. Somebody said, "I was talking to a young woman today, and we were talking about the Civic Center. She said to me, 'When I go into that building I feel good.'" Now, what else can you do? If you feel good in a building—the interesting thing, too, is when you look at the floor plan or the courts plan, Dick Bennett, I suppose is the one who, in a way, brought this to my attention. There were a lot of crazy plans for that plaza.
Blum: What were some you recall?
Brownson: In the group there were different kinds of things. Some looked like big chairs in the building, and there was all of this to try to give the impression that it was a courthouse. But Dick Bennett said that in every courtroom historically, there was always a kind of forecourt. If you get off the elevators on the courts floor in those buildings, there is that one big space in front that looks out south over the city. That space is the forecourt for all of the other courts, and then you go into each one of the rooms. Then when you talk about the plans of the courtrooms themselves, one of the things I observed in looking at other courtrooms is that the court has to be public by nature. You cannot exclude people from the courtroom. You had people coming there and continuing to open the door, peeking in and letting the door close. That became a bother, so one of the things that we tried to use was this very dark tinted glass so that the light intensity in the corridors being less than it was in the courtroom, you could see into the courtroom and see what was going on without opening the entrance door all of the time and disturbing the activities in the courtroom. So we didn't have that problem with those little peepholes in the doors that you see in so many courtrooms, but rather you can look into the space and see what was going on without opening these doors. The courtrooms are very simple. In fact, all of the materials for that building are, you might say, native materials. Solid oak wood for all of the doors. The benches and all of the woodwork are all white oak. To make just a slight difference in the building, on the upper floor where the Illinois Supreme
193 Court chamber and appellate court was, that was done in English brown oak which is a little different than the other. That floor is all English brown oak, but the rest of the floors are white oak and the carpet material is all natural wool. The granite is Minnesota Cold Spring granite. The steel is from Gary. It's a building that uses all of the materials, in a way, right from that immediate area.
Blum: Jacques, as you and I both know, when we saw the interior on the tour of the building you gave to a little group about a year and a half ago, the building has worn very well.
Brownson: It's in good shape. It's stood a lot of use and a lot of people coming into it. We were talking earlier about the details of a building. Here in Denver, about two or three weeks ago, they completed redoing all of the elevators in the state capitol building. Just the other day, somebody vandalized the surfaces inside by scratching all of this very shiny brasswork. Well, if you look at the Civic Center, the elevator itself is a rather subdued space, and you can't scratch the walls because of the kind of material they're made out of. It's solid bronze screen so that scratching won't touch it. But we were aware of that. If you take a look at the furniture, the other problem was that we had to have furniture that could be competitively bid. I ended up developing, with some people there, a fiberglass shell that then could be upholstered with loose cushions so that when one cushion was damaged you could take it out and simply replace it with another one. Then, for example, if you look at the chair arms that are upholstered, people who are on jury duty sit there and if they're nervous, they're scratching away at it. So we tried to develop furniture which was going to take that kind of abuse. The judges’ chambers, again, were very simple, and all of the desks and chairs were solid oak and have stood up very well. So the building has, I think, provided the citizens of Chicago with a fair, merchandisable, standard, good piece of architecture that holds together.
Blum: Well, it has. You mentioned Richard Bennett just a minute ago. I understand that Richard Bennett wanted a suppressed or a submerged plaza for the Civic
194 Center.
Brownson: I'm sure that came up because the First National Bank was doing that. This is a question. This plaza is a thing that today is in the news because of the use of it over the years. They've put Army tanks on it, and they've put great big fire trucks on it going back and forth. It became a space almost like a parking lot out there for a while for big trucks and all kinds of things. Then the Blues Brothers came along and they made their movie, just driving through the building. It got a lot of abuse, so that had to be replaced. The thing with the plaza is different, and the city should have different kinds of plazas. The one at the First National Bank is much more related to sedentary kinds of activities. There are a lot of places to sit. There are a lot of steps. It's down low. It's protected from the surrounding streets, and down below you've got fountains and water and things going on down there. There is no large, open space where you can have different kinds of activity. You can't have the variety of activities there that goes on at the Civic Center. The Civic Center Plaza is much more adaptable to whatever goes on. You can have protests…
[Tape 8: Side 1]
Brownson: I remember the thing that struck me when I went to see St. Mark's in Venice, when you look back towards the church and the campanile and the surrounding buildings—this is not a profound remark, but St. Mark's is almost like Old Man Moroni's restaurant in that it was convertible to different kinds of activities. If you go to St. Mark's, there are times when all of the little street cafes and the places to sit and the pigeons and all of those kinds of things are going on. Then you go there at other times and they've got an orchestra playing and there are street musicians and jugglers and all of these things going on. So it's different, and I was aware of that kind of space at St. Mark's. One of the things at the Civic Center, now the Daley Center Plaza, rather than to clutter it up was to leave your space and make those elements that go into it not permanent but changing, almost like a curator would set up an exhibit in a museum. It requires somebody who would have sensitivity to do that. In other words, there is a plane, the floor plane of the
195 surface, on which you can do almost anything. You can have any kind of activity. I've seen certain times where they had a demonstration in the plaza. The police department had a guard dog demonstration on it. The next time the farmers' market is going on. All of these kinds of activities are what makes a real plaza. It's the agora. It's the agora of the city. It's not meant to be a place for sedentary kinds of activity, although you can have that, too. Look at the Tuileries in Paris, where you can get a chair and take it over to where you want to sit and sit down if you want to. But somebody has to take care of it. Chicago thinks that those places take care of themselves, but somebody has to look after it. They don't maintain themselves, and they get hard use.
Blum: Was the agora concept in your mind when things were being sited on the plaza, when the plaza and the building were being planned?
Brownson: Yes, and I was just looking here, again. I had this rendering that Al Francik did here in my file, which had only one thing on it, and that was the Maillol sculpture and the three flagpoles. This was the original concept of the Civic Center Plaza. I wanted less things on it, and that was the hardest thing. Every time you turned around there were more.
Blum: Who did this drawing?
Brownson: A man named Francik did the drawing. I think that it is at the Chicago Historical—this was about eight or ten feet long and about four or five feet high. It was a big drawing.
Blum: Now, in this sketch, the Moore sculpture is here.
Brownson: Yes. This was the Moore, but we were talking at one time also about Maillol. There were some other things, but there was just one piece that went into that area, and there were the three flagpoles. And so, the plaza was much more open. So then it starts to develop. Well, maybe we ought to have some trees. We'll have the fountains, then we're going to have the eternal flame, then we're going to have that little maquette for the blind to come up and touch it.
196 The problem with all of those knickknacks, as I call them, that snuck in, like this thing for the blind. After it was done, I asked this blind man what he thought about this. He said, "Well, I want to thank you for thinking about us, but, you know, most of us do not have a sense of touch because blindness comes very late in life for many of us, and we can't really feel all of those little things. In many ways it doesn't really help us understand what's going on entirely." For me the desert or a big snow field—it is the emptiness, it's the voids again that I’m talking about. It's the void that has become so important—the emptiness, the lack. The thing people can't stand is a void. Nature can't stand a vacuum. It's got to fill it up. We can't stand that kind of thing, either. We've got to start cluttering it all up with stuff or else we're not comfortable. Look at that marvelous—I can't recall the name right now—that Japanese garden which is nothing but raked stones. There is one stone, I think, critically placed in that courtyard. So I think that Chicago has to be very careful here now. We're talking now in about December 1994, and somebody else is working on renovating the plaza. I don't know what is going to be the consequences of what they're doing. Do they really feel a sense of plaza, or are they going to try to make it like old home week?
Blum: Have they been in touch with you?
Brownson: I've met with them, and I talked about it. In fact, I wrote a couple of pages on the meaning of the plaza of the Daley Center and pointing out what had gone on. I suggested to them to pull out all of the old, I call it the board files from the newspapers to learn about the kinds of activities and how that plaza was used and not to clutter it up with a lot of stuff and a lot of shrubbery and things like that. For what? Again, it's not a space that requires—it doesn't even require those trees, really. We talk about trees giving the human quality to it. To me the human quality is to be able to have that space be just a space. There are some interesting things, going back to the building. As I said, United States Steel did the main frame of the building and the covering on the outside, and then we got into the windows. You talked about the glass breaking and things like that. We developed a window that, in effect, was around nine feet wide, or maybe a little bigger, and twelve feet high, and it
197 had a horizontal bar about three feet up. This was all out of solid Cor-Ten steel, too. When we got ready to do that, it required making special rollers in the steel mill to roll that section. U.S. Steel, because they had had that accident with the building, were not interested in developing this steel and the rollers. And so I talked Bethlehem Steel Company in Chicago into—I said, "You have a material just like Cor-Ten only you call yours MAYARI-R." It's a common trade name that Bethlehem uses for the same metallurgy as Cor- Ten. So Bethlehem jumped right at it because they wanted to use the building in advertising as well as U.S. Steel. They made these rollers, and Ceco Company out west of Chicago fabricated the windows. They all came as pieces, and the interesting thing was that each one of those windows floats in the opening. It's not connected rigidly to the building but rather floats within the frame of this building. The reason for the cracking of the glass was that the water would get between the material holding the glass in and the steel, and the steel would corrode and that would exert a pressure on the glass to cause some cracking. Well, then they developed a little spraying machine that would spray molten zinc, take the stops out and spray molten zinc on that so it would stop the corrosion within that channel. That started to control the problem, although from time to time, there still is some cracking. You know, glass is really a liquid. It obeys the laws of physics for a liquid. Most people think it's solid, but it goes back to the fact that the surface of glass is in tension. It's a tensile surface, and the interior material is a liquid. Albeit most of us would think it's solid, but if you don't believe that, go to Boston. You measure the old glass panes, and they are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top because over the years the glass has sagged down and it has become thicker at the bottom than it is at the top. You know, we wanted these big flagpoles. I don't know whether you ever looked at them or not.
Blum: Not as carefully as you have, of course.
Brownson: Well, the flagpoles are in section or a plus, just like in mathematics. They're a plus section, and they're made out of three-inch steel plate. They have what we humorously call genuine Venetian entasis on the pole—entasis being where you take a gradual, almost imperceptible curve as it tapers to the top.
198 We couldn't get anybody to make these because they were one hundred sixteen feet in length. They were made out of three pieces of steel, and there was extensive welding required, continuous welds. American Bridge had a small company outside of Kansas City. I can't remember the name of the company. But anyway, I was sitting there one night, and we were talking about some things, and I said, "I still have these flagpoles to build, and I can't find anybody to make them. They tell me it's impossible because of the length of them and the difficulty of welding them because the welding warps everything." This guy said, "Well, what are they?" and I made a little drawing on a napkin or something for him. He said, "Oh, we'll make those for you." I said, "Are you sure?" "Yes, we'll make them." They had this little shop down there, and these flagpoles came on three flatcars. They had them so the middle flatcar didn't have any weight, and there were pivots on the other two so that they could go around a curve with them. These flagpoles are magnificent in terms of the quality of the work on them and the way they were done. That was one of the latter problems. But going back to this plaza, the granite and the structure itself was designed to take highway loads, to take extremely heavy loads. But somehow or other the granite got skinned down and was too thin for the loads. It should have been thicker. So now they're going to redo the plaza, and I think it's going to cost somewhere around ten, fifteen million dollars to put new granite down.
Blum: Do you think that now they will put the thicker panel in?
Brownson: I hope they're going to do that. I don't know what's going to be done. I have no idea.
Blum: Probably the most eye-catching piece on the plaza is the Picasso. Did you have much to do with the selection of Picasso, the acceptance of the design by the city, the general problems associated with such a sculpture?
Brownson: Well, to me the critical meeting on the Picasso, I believe, was at the Chicago Club. It was a meeting in which we had a discussion about who we might suggest for the sculpture. Picasso was kind of a unanimous decision of the
199 group. We talked about Henry Moore, we talked about some other people, but the thing was, "Oh, well, there is Picasso." Then we got the whole thing started. I think Bill Hartmann talked about doing that through his contact with Roland Penrose, and it went on and on. We had one item to get for the building, which was the window-washing machine, which is rather interesting because of the size of it. That window-washing machine was finally made in Bielefeld, Germany, and it was made by Manishmen out of aluminum. Manishmen is a company that was very well known for their aircraft structures and things like that, so Bob Christensen and I and Bob Ludeking, who was a contractor who was one of the principals of the Gust K. Newberg Construction Company, and Dan Nakonechny, we went to Bielefeld to talk with the engineers about building this. Then after those meetings we drove south to Juan-les-Pins and over to Nice, and there was some other place that Hartmann was staying. Murphy was down there at that time, and I guess maybe Norm Schlossman, although I don't quite remember whether he was on this particular trip. But anyway, we were there, and the story was that we would call up Penrose to see if we could see Picasso, and he would come back and say, "Not today." We've got to call again tomorrow. So then we'd go off on some junket through the countryside and have dinner at a fancy restaurant and all of this, and finally one day—I forget how many days this went on—Murphy, Sr., said, "You know, this is getting really expensive, staying here on the Riviera and living this good life. I guess we should all go back to the States, and Bill Hartmann should stay here and maybe he'll get in to see him sometime down the line." Although I was there, I never got to see Picasso. Bob Christensen was there. Then after all of this work in Germany on this window-washing machine, the whole thing comes to Chicago. Chicago has a very strong electrical union in the building codes section, and when the machine came from Germany and was sitting there, this head guy at the electrical union said, "We can't accept it. It wasn't wired in the United States. We've got to have some of the local boys doing the wiring." So they took the machine and completely stripped it and, in effect, put the same wire back in again, but it was done by the union men in Chicago and it was finally accepted. But it's an interesting machine, and we put that together. The one who worked with me on that was David Haid.
200 It had to be an eighty-seven-foot platform on the long base because it ran up and down on the guides in a column. There is a railroad track up on the roof that this thing rolls on. When it goes around a corner the two end pieces come off and it becomes forty-eight feet in length and goes down the short section. So it's an interesting device.
Blum: Why did you have to go to Germany to have this made?
Brownson: Yes. There was nobody in this country…
Blum: With all of the tall buildings we've built in the United States…?
Brownson: There was nobody interested in making it. They had been doing these small window-washing machines. There was nothing of that scale. Manishmen, who was big into jet aircraft and things like that, through a local broker in Chicago who had a contact in Germany—he was a German national—found this company in Germany to build this device. That's how it came to be done there.
Blum: Jacques, if you had the chance to do the Civic Center again today, would you make any changes?
Brownson: No, I'd take the same drawings out and start building it. I think that generally the building works. As I said, I think the only weak point to me was this granite on the plaza and the fact that it was not of a scale with the rest of the building. It was simply too thin and was not substantial enough to stand up to the kind of use it gets. But when you think about it, over the years, how many different plazas have been—at St. Mark's there have been all kinds of different replacements. Or the Capitoline Hill in Rome. To me the important thing about this plaza is the people, and that people are a permanent part of it. If they want to add these gimmicks to the thing, that's another thing. Talking about architectural drawings, if you look at Corbusier's city planning renderings, in all of them you see the buildings and you see one or two people and a couple of cars. As soon as you start to put people into these
201 spaces, you start to really feel what they are and you get to see what's going on. I think that if they are not extremely careful with this plaza renovation, it's going to end up being pretty congested and will not function as it could. I think that the correct place for the sculpture, as it shows in this forensic rendering, is still where we originally selected, which was over towards the courts building.
Blum: How is that different from the way the plaza is today?
Brownson: This plaza now, here? Yes, sure, because the sculpture is jammed into the area between the building and the flagpoles. It's way over there. The reason for locating it there was to have the piece of sculpture where you can see it. If you take the stone of the County Building, which is the county side of the County Building/Chicago City Hall, then you free up the whole front of the Civic Center and you make a larger space that is much more usable.
Blum: Was the sculpture supposed to be placed originally on the west side of the plaza?
Brownson: That's right.
Blum: Jacques, what does the Civic Center mean to you in the flow of your entire career?
Brownson: Well, I was roughly thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old when I did this, and architecture is kind of an old man's game, really, because of all of the kinds of things that you have to do. But if you look at all of the work that I've done over the years, I've done relatively few buildings just to be doing buildings. Somebody said to me—we were standing on the plaza, right after the building was dedicated and occupied. They said, "Jacques, it's going to be pretty hard to do anything after this, isn't it?" And I said, "Yes. An opportunity like this only comes once in your lifetime." I think that the significance of it is the real public use of the building, the thousands of people that go into the building each day. It's a public kind of thing that is in
202 keeping with the civic life that a city should have; that is where all of the interests, all of the protest, all of the spirit of the city come together. One time the Container Corporation did a lot of banners and hanging things for this. I don't know where they are today, but they had four different kinds of activities. You would fly these different banners. Think of the people going there when we had all of the Vietnam protests and the kinds of things that people were talking about. First you'd have the Hispanics, you'd have the Polish, you'd have the Serbs, you had the Croatians. you'd have all of these ethnic groups. Everybody was coming here, and there was a mix, and it was truly an agora. As I said early on in our discussion, everything comes from Greece. All of our government, you can trace back to Greece, and not that many generations ago, three hundred generations, I guess. When you see that, it's a true agora. It's a true meeting place for a city. That's what it means to me.
Blum: Well, it certainly works that way in the life of the city. I know you did other projects with Murphy, but I think you mentioned that after you left Murphy, you had a project for Illinois Bell to which Charlie Rummel was connected.
Brownson: When we talked about Frazier and Raftery when I was working there after the war for a while, there was a big emphasis on the Cold War and the need for civil defense. Of course, it came later on when the Civic Center—I already talked about the civil defense aspect of the Board of Health and how that tied in with the subways and so forth. But one of the things that Frazier and Raftery had to do was to build a processing factory for Lindsey Light and Chemical, which is an old Chicago firm, to process and refine thorium which is an ingredient, as they call it, in nuclear weapons. The firm was asked to do this factory, which was done over in West Chicago, Illinois. Lindsey Light and Chemical, going back to the early history of Chicago, their first factory was located where 333 North Michigan Avenue is now, before the river was changed. Lindsey Light and Chemical originally made gas mantles for gas lights in all of the houses. One of the byproducts of making these gas mantles is what's called heavy earth, but in this heavy earth residue is unrefined thorium. We weren't getting the thorium from Chicago, but I forget where
203 this material was coming from. But this factory was built in order to do this. I worked on this factory somewhat. It was big. I think it may even be part of one of the Superfund cleanups in West Chicago, Illinois. But in the course of building that, one of the things that we learned was that Lindsey Light had originally been located where the 333 Building is. So the AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission, goes over to the basement of the 333 Building and the Geiger counter goes off the hook. I don't know what transpired with all of this, but evidently underneath that foundation is all of this material. The residue from this manufacturing of gas mantles is still there. In fact, there are several places in Denver where substantial uranium waste has been thrown out. But anyway, so we did that. We built that thing. Then when I left Murphy, Charlie Rummel asked me if I would participate in a competition and do the design for a building that the Illinois Bell Telephone Company had for which they would pay a fee to each one of six different architects. They paid each one of them twenty-five thousand dollars to submit the design for a building. The building was to be a Long-Line Switching Building that was able to resist the shock waves from a hydrogen bomb dropping one mile out in Lake Michigan. This is really surreal, you know. The building was to be located—and it has been built, incidentally; not the one that I did but another one—at Madison and somewhere around the Northwestern Station. Off of Madison there is this gigantic, big behemoth. It's out of reinforced concrete. Do you know the one I'm talking about?
Blum: I know the building, yes.
Brownson: So Charlie Rummel said, "Would you do the design for this?" I think the firm that was awarded the job was Holabird and Root. Anyway, it was an interesting problem because the forces from the hydrogen bomb are easier to design for than the forces from an atomic bomb because the shock waves are such. But anyway, in a hydrogen bomb, the waves jump over a building and instead of necessarily pushing it down, it also helps to push it back up. But there is this very substantial tidal wave that was going to be generated off of Lake Michigan. As I said when we would have these meetings, "What the hell is the use of building something like this? There isn't going to be
204 anybody around anyway." "Well, they're all going to be in this building because the building has to be self-sustaining," for, I think, one or two months after the bomb dropped so the communications could be maintained. That was to be the central point for communications in the United States. It was all diesel operated and there were special ways to get in it. I did a building that started out with extremely heavy steel plate at the base. The building was one big welded steel box. Then Bell Telephone went on and built it with Holabird and Root. But anyway, that was a part of this civil defense movement during that time. I don't know who's got the drawings of that project.
Blum: The competition drawings?
Brownson: Yes. There were six different firms that were involved in it.
Blum: Jacques, you stayed with Murphy for almost ten years, and in 1966 you left Chicago, you left to become the chairman of the Architectural School at the University of Michigan.
Brownson: Well, I suppose there are two things. One is that I had completed a very important building, and, after a lot of energy and a lot of work over that period of time, I suppose I wanted to get away from going back in and, in effect, like most architectural things that you do, you start over every time. You have to continually prove to somebody, you've got to convince them to do it this way and to do all of these things. You're continually selling your ideas.
Blum: But hadn't you established your seniority at Murphy?
Brownson: Oh, at Murphy, but as we well know—all you have to do is to look around—you very seldom establish seniority with, let's say, the lay public. It's always a beginning-again. They get an idea that somebody can do certain things, and somebody will come and hire you and then they'll say, "Well, we want this and we'd like to have that and we want it this way and we want
205 that," and all of these other kind of things. Many times I've heard from other architects that you continually, in a way, have to start over again and do it. I was interested in Michigan. First of all, it was a major school, and it had a good architectural department at one time. Who was the Chicago architect who was up there and commuted back and forth to Chicago? Was it Jenney? It was one of the Chicago School architects when it began.
Blum: You mean one of the earlier architects?
Brownson: One of the early architects when it began. I don't know who that was. But anyway, Malcolmson was up there as the dean, and so I thought, well, it would be good to go up and start to work on this thing. So I accepted that in 1966. Little did I know what I was in for.
Blum: You sold your house and actually picked up and relocated?
Brownson: I sold the house. I picked up everything and took off down the road for Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Blum: As Mies had a promise at IIT, not only to head the architecture school but to build the campus, did you have any promise like that in your contract, or was anything unspoken but in your mind?
Brownson: I didn't realize about state institutions then. I learned very rapidly they would say, "Well, we want to build a very strong school, and we're interested in doing this." I'm talking now about the administration, that "we're going to give you all of this support” and all of these kinds of things. But little did I realize that contrary to what happened at IIT, where Mies went there and in a way had a free hand at developing it and bringing his people in and things like that, at Michigan we had a very strong state university with its faculty council and senate and all of the organization and the bureaucracy that goes with it. Everything had to be voted on and done democratically. There was one man, one vote, and so I had a situation where I became simply the arbiter of various factions within the faculty and what direction it was going. I soon
206 found out that it was a very political kind of a job from the standpoint that you had not only the architecture school, but also you had to relate to the subgroups on the campus directing different activities. You had the medical group, the engineering group, the arts school, the humanities. All of these different groups of people worked, particularly the senior faculty members, and because they had tenure, you almost had to go along with what they were doing. It was very difficult to change that. At that time the Vietnam War was causing a lot of unrest amongst the students, and they were having protest marches continually. Michigan was a hotbed of dissention against the Vietnam War, and I think that my friend from the same high school, Frank Allen, was dean of the law school. It finally got so difficult for him that he just relinquished his deanship and became simply a tenured professor there. So I went on for, I think, about three years, and I finally told the administration that I thought that they should find somebody who could probably fit into that school better than I could. I left and got into the car and came back to Chicago.
Blum: We spoke in an earlier tape that there are schools that are hands-on schools, and there are schools that are more theoretical. Where did the University of Michigan Department of Architecture fall in that spectrum?
Brownson: Well, I think it was both. There were really three groups that were working. One was the so-called research section in which they were talking about the research of architectural materials. Then there was the formal part of the architecture school, which taught the requirements for licensing so that you could meet the accreditation. And then there was a very small planning school at Michigan.
[Tape 8: Side 2]
Blum: I’d like to read a quote about you: "Brownson is not an academic. He's a builder." Do you think that's accurate?
Brownson: I think that's accurate. What I didn't but should have realized is this kind of
207 process—we see it, I think, in almost all democratic institutions—is that it becomes one of how persuasive somebody is, what kind of friends he has to work with. I think I talked at one point about the TVA and Franklin Roosevelt and Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace and these people. They would be sitting late in the afternoon, talking about things amongst themselves, and to start something going, Roosevelt would say, "You ought to pick up the telephone and tell [David] Lilienthal, 'Here is fifty million bucks. Get started and do something about the Tennessee River Valley.'" Well, you know, he had a base of friendship. First of all, when you study or read about Franklin Roosevelt, he had that assurance and that way of working that brought things together, which we haven't seen for quite some time. But in a school, particularly, I think, at this time, there is really no clear direction as to what an architectural education should consist of now. IIT has been in shambles for some time since Mies left.
Blum: What did you hope to bring to the University of Michigan, considering that it was the kind of school it was and that it was the sixties, which was a time of unrest on many campuses?
Brownson: Well, I had the hope that since I had heard that Michigan was a very reasonable place to work that there would be the opportunity to develop some sense out of the curriculum that was being generated there; that there would be an opportunity to sit and talk with people and discuss what were the real needs and how do we organize that. But what I didn't realize was that the faculty was really inexperienced and that they were so ingrown over the years. Incidentally, the same thing, in a way, kind of happened to IIT and may have been also one of the reasons why I left IIT when I did. Michigan was so ingrown. Almost all of the faculty were graduates of Michigan and had never been out of Ann Arbor. The whole world revolved around Ann Arbor. None of them had ever built anything of any consequence, and they felt vulnerable to somebody coming in to talk about building problems. They, in effect, would stonewall me, and I couldn't get anywhere.
Blum: You know, Jacques, what you're talking about recalls something that Paul
208 Schweikher experienced and spoke about. In the course of his career he left Chicago and went to teach at Yale, his alma mater. He stayed there for only a very short while, and from there he went to Carnegie-Mellon where he stayed for the rest of his academic career. He said that he was the wrong person for the kind of school that Yale was, and he was the right person for Carnegie-Mellon because it was not a theoretical school. It was a hands-on kind of school, and that's the kind of architect and person he was. Could that have been the problem that you experienced? Were you the right person in the wrong kind of school?
Brownson: Right or wrong, the thing is that—yes. The University of Michigan quite frankly was a conglomeration of incompetents which I always said was taking money from students under false pretenses and not giving them a fair shake for their dollar. I said, "You don't talk about what we have to do in terms of making drawings and some of these other practical kinds of things. Unless the student has those kinds of things, I don't care how much you talk, we're not lawyers, we're architects." But all they wanted to do was to sit around and talk about it and make some kind of esoteric statements. They had an idea that, well, the way to build a house—this research group said that we were doing it all wrong, that in effect you had to have a big lazy- susan and you put the building on it and instead of the bricklayer or somebody moving around, the building moved around and the bricklayer stayed stationary. I said, "Well, this goes back to the scheme of philosophy where the philosopher believes that the chair doesn't exist because he says it doesn't exist, and when you ask him to get up and go over and feel it, he says that it still doesn't exist. I can't deal with that." These professors had all been at the school so long and had not been out in the real world to experience what the building process was. They didn't like to work. They were lazy, for another thing. Then I would say, "You are only teaching about three or four hours a week," and they would say, "Yes, but we are thinking." I said, "Aw, come on." Yes, I was the wrong person in the wrong place. I was too blunt.
Blum: You were the right person in the wrong place, or were you the wrong person in the right place?
209 Brownson: But anyway, Michigan used to be a very strong school at one time. In fact, Ed Olencki was up there from Mies's office. He was up there, Joe Albano, also out of Chicago, was up there on the faculty.
Blum: And you said Reginald Malcolmson.
Brownson: Reg Malcolmson. Then his son worked at Skidmore. There were some good people at Michigan. I don't want to be misunderstood and condemn it. There were some good people there. Olencki had been in Mies's office for years, and Albano was not only good at planning but he was also very active in the labor movement in Chicago with Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers that Walter Reuther was the head of. But you could not get through to faculty members who were very clever and worked the system so they could maintain their position and simply keep this status quo going. As soon as you would start to question their competency, they knew they were out in left field because they couldn't produce.
Blum: Did Reginald Malcolmson stay there a long time?
Brownson: Oh, he stayed there a long time, but…
Blum: I know he didn't build much.
Brownson: He stayed there a long time, and he became so discouraged with everything. He was kind of on the sidelines from the extent that he didn't take a very active part in what was being done in the Architecture and Planning Department. Now, the other interesting thing that went on at Michigan was that all of these universities become very important—you know, "Go, Blue!" with all of the other kind of hoopla that goes on.
Blum: Campus life.
Brownson: I use the same term here with the University of Colorado. "We're the Athens
210 of the West." They were the Athens of Michigan. So they made a decision which was interesting. When I was there—I think it was about the second year—they made a decision, and I don't know how they made it, to double the size of the graduating class of the medical school. Now, the financial consequences of that are gigantic for a school because of all of the resources that go into putting something like that together—the training of the doctors, the equipment, the new hospital that had to be built and all of those kinds of things. So, consequently, the other departments were shortchanged. We were always at the end. We didn't have enough in the budget to keep going. It was all going to the medical school. The university was also closely connected to the automobile industry. Many of the executives of General Motors and Ford and Chrysler all lived in the Ann Arbor area because it was a nice town. So, we really couldn't get the resources in order to develop a department. They had an excellent library. They had an art museum. But it was a difficult time, and I think a lot of it was compounded by the Vietnam War because the students never knew where they were. You'd have them in class for a while and then they would disappear, and you'd say, "Where are they?" and they would say, "They got called up in the Army," or, "They got called up into the Vietnam War." We had some good students, but it was a state university.
Blum: Did you have the idea, perhaps, to fashion that architectural department after the one at IIT that Mies had put together?
Brownson: Oh, yes, to give the kind of training in working with materials in the beginning and being able to draw and to be able to construct things. Because I felt very strongly, and I think you said it, too, that it was a hands-on kind of training that I was trying to bring to the school—to have their work finished and displayed at the end of the semester, to have some kind of culmination to their work so they had something to show for that. It became very difficult to work. We had several faculty members who simply couldn't even discuss what building problems were at all. There was one interesting part of Michigan that involves the Michigan Public Service or electric company up there, and it goes back to the Marshall Plan activities after the Second World War. The man—whose name I can't remember—who was the head of the
211 public utilities in the state of Michigan was one of the people who was involved in the Marshall Plan for Greece. When he first went there, the first guy who popped was [Konstantinos] Doxiades, the architect/planner, and Doxiades had been working for some time during the war. He realized that the war eventually would be over, and when the Marshall Plan people got there, he was the only one who had some kind of a plan developed for what Greece could do to come out of this war, during which they suffered substantially. The things that went on in the Second World War with Greece were pretty abominable. And so, Doxiades came to Michigan. He gave a couple of talks and also gave a big presentation at General Motors—this strikes a bell, okay. General Motors sponsored Doxiades to come and show his plan for the state of Michigan. All of the architects were there. It was in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Okay. So he came up, and he had this big drawing, and he would get up on a stepladder and would go through all of these things. The guy who was the head of Albert Kahn's office, Saul King, was a nice man and a very friendly guy, so during the intermission I said, "Well, Saul, where are you going?" He said, "I'm headed for the northern peninsula to buy land," because Doxiades was talking about this big development. That's when Detroit was really starting to go downhill, before Henry Ford II—we used to call him "The Deuce"—came in and got this Renaissance Center and some of these other things started. But anyway, I was very popular there for a little while.
Blum: At the University of Michigan?
Brownson: Yes. U.S. Steel gave us a grant to get into computers more. I knew that the Ford Motor Company was involved in computer work in their car design, and so I went over to Dearborn, Michigan, to the center there and talked to the people at Ford. They said, "Yes, we'll tie in with your computers." I don't know whether you called them computers at that time. "We'll tie in directly so you can use our programs here, but you have to use them at night." I think it was after midnight, between twelve and six in the morning. Well, we had a couple of faculty members who were really interested in this, and they would work all night. They would work from twelve to six to use this thing by
212 telephone, and U.S. Steel paid the telephone bills to tie this thing all together. That was when we had punch cards. You'd see these students going around the campus with these boxes with little cards with holes punched in them. They were on their way over to the computer center to run their program, to run these punch cards, and they would sort them all out. It was all done on this very elaborate system on this big mainframe computer. That was before we had this electronic thing. And so, we had an extensive program going on, and that was interesting.
Blum: That was something that you brought to the school?
Brownson: Yes, through U.S. Steel. Then as I said before, I was saying how parochial architects are. They're very clannish. They stick together over in one little corner. They say, "Oh, those are the architects. They don't talk to us. They're way over there." Michigan was like that. So I would wander around the campus, and I knew that there were some things hidden away that were going on. From some of my readings I knew about the Skunk Works. That very famous part of the aircraft development in the world was this bunch under Kelly Johnson called the Skunk Works out in a little broken-down hangar out in Burbank, California. Then I found out that the University of Michigan had this fabulous wind tunnel which they used for testing. So I'm wandering around over there one day, I stumbled into this room, and here is a little airplane under construction. There was a guy working there on it. I got talking to him, and his name was Ed Lesher. He was a professor of aeronautical engineering, I guess, or aerospace or whatever they called them. I got friendly with Ed. He was building this experimental plane, which subsequently set a number of records, in which the power plant was in the back and the drive shaft went between his feet and the propeller was out in back. I said to Ed, "You're doing exactly what the architects should be doing. You're working there on that thing. You know how it's going. I assume you intend to get in there and fly that thing." He said, "Yes, I'm going to fly it on this closed course, and it's going to be timed and we're going to set a record for this class of airplane." So I said, "Would you come to the architecture school and give a lecture as to how you build one of these airplanes?" Well,
213 you know, the process is not much different than building anything else. You put all of these things together. Ed Lesher came, and he gave this marvelous lecture about how you start, the drawings you make and how you punch the holes in the metal and how you do all of these things, how you put it in a wind tunnel, how you test it, and the students were really intrigued. This guy was really doing something, and this one section of the faculty was doing a lot of talking all of the time. You'd see them sitting there, yakking away and never making a drawing or nothing going on. But one of them said, "What do airplanes have to do with architecture?" and they got on all these architecture things, talking, like the Deconstructivists about the revolving square and all of these systems I hear about today. It was the same kind of nonsense and gibberish. They couldn't stand this guy but the students were intrigued about doing these kinds of things. So then I started to wander around a little further, and all of a sudden I stumble on the testing tank with these guys in these underwater seal suits, this big testing tank that the University of Michigan has for testing tanker hulls. They were involved in the design of ocean-going oil tankers and new ship hull designs. I found out that this department was well known for that. So here they were, hidden away in another part of the campus, so I got that guy to come over and talk about how you put a ship together and how they did that thing. The ship didn't look like anything on the front. If you look at these tankers on the front, on the bow, instead of knifing through the water they have a great big bulb on the front that makes the hull go through the water. They had this thing anchored onto a railroad car and it goes through the water, and the seal men are down there watching the waves. So these guys come over and they talk to the students about how you build a ship. I thought we were getting someplace and maybe it's going to rub off on them after a while, but I could never get through the politics of that department.
Blum: The faculty?
Brownson: And I would hear from the administration that "Brownson is involved with the aerospace department," and some guy would call up, "What are you doing with those guys?" I said, "Well, I just went to see what they're building
214 and what's going on over there." So we had a lot of fun with that. We had some interesting lectures at that time. We had an architect by the name of Yonna Friedman. He's a Parisian. Friedman had this new plan for Paris. I didn't exactly agree with it. In fact, you were saying that John Zukowsky is doing an exhibition on airports?
Blum: Yes, an exhibition on airports in 1996.
Brownson: Okay, Yonna Friedman is big on airports. Theoretical. Yonna Friedman came to Michigan and gave some lectures on air transportation. Richard Saul Wurman came and talked about the development of cities.
Blum: Well, it looks like you were bringing a very interesting program to the university, but there was resistance.
Brownson: There was resistance because Mies van der Rohe's name was connected with it.
Blum: What was wrong with that?
Brownson: When I had this exhibit which all of these drawings were in—that little brochure I gave you is the exhibit that I put together with these big blowups and things on the wall. The exhibit of the work was up for a month or so, and they thought that was too Miesian. They didn't want that.
Blum: Was that a problem for you, being considered a Miesian?
Brownson: Oh, I think from the standpoint that anybody who was closely connected with Mies always had—like when Stanley Tigerman made that collage that shows Crown Hall sinking into the lake like the Titanic. Stanley is still a little bitter about the Chicago exhibit “100 Years of Architecture in Chicago” that was put together in 1976 by the Museum of Contemporary Art. He and his group, the Chicago Seven, went over to the Time-Life Building and put on their own show, Chicago Architects. Stanley never forgave us for that. So
215 there was an animosity, I think, about Mies and the fact that we had too much influence on things. At least if two lawyers get arguing in a courtroom, the judge is kind of an arbitrator and can keep them at arms' length. But architects are just brutal to one another the way they lash out. Instead of looking at what the problems are, it's very difficult to get a serious discussion going between dissimilar architects that doesn't end up on too personal a basis.
Blum: The Miesian idiom was certainly strong in Chicago.
Brownson: Well, it was strong all over the world for a while. I think also there was a conflict between the IIT group and Reginald Isaacs’s Michael Reese Hospital group in planning, and Martin Meyerson and the group at the University of Chicago. When we did the plan for the South Side of Chicago we, the IIT team, would talk about moving the stockyards, getting it out of there. “Oh, you can't do that!” The economists from the U of C would come up and they'd make an economic plan for planning, and they thought it should all be done in terms of dollars and cents rather than the physical plan. Then a decade later the stockyards is gone and has disappeared and there is a change going on. Then as I was saying when I was talking about my education at IIT, we had different connections with some of the teachers at IIT. Who was the guy from the New Deal? Rexford G. Tugwell, he's very well known. He's a geographer. You know, they had fantastic map rooms at the University of Chicago and Henry Brested Hall at the Oriental Institute. They had resources there to draw on. We had Otto von Simpson coming to IIT from the University of Chicago to talk of another way of looking at Gothic architecture. Rather than looking at it on the structural basis, what were the spiritual consequences of some of the Gothic buildings? That to me is the way education is developed. You have to be very careful that you don't become a dilettante. You have to structure it so that it has some kind of meaning. I go back to Ortega-y-Gasset, the Spanish writer, on his very little, thin book on the meaning of the university. You can't be all things. No one person can be all things. One has to concentrate, I suppose, like in Zen. You have to have a spirit of concentration. I don't know whether I told you that or not, but
216 Hilberseimer always had this statement about a doctor's degree: "When you're born you get a doctor's degree. If you work hard, you can get rid of it." Ruby Braff, the jazz clarinetist, practiced scales eternally to develop the facility to be able to do anything. He had all of this at his command that he could draw on, but when they asked him about it he said, "Yes, it's the only way you can really be selective, if you know what you're looking for."
Blum: But you knew what you were looking for at the University of Michigan. But it was apparently the wrong focus for what was already established there.
Brownson: Yes. I think a lot of it was really the Vietnam War. That was devastating for schools. That period of time was…
Blum: But that didn't seem to change the focus of the faculty because it was so well established, as you describe it.
Brownson: That had a devastating effect on things in this country.
Blum: May we go back to Chicago in 1968 when you returned after two years at the University of Michigan?
Brownson: Yes, I went over to the administration at the University of Michigan, a vice- president named Smith, and I said, "Enough." He said, "Well, do you realize you have a lifetime appointment? You're a full professor, you have tenure. How can you give up a lifetime position like this?" I said, "Well, maybe two more months of this and it would seem like a lifetime. I just cannot. I don't need it. I'm young and there are things going on." I didn't know where I was going. I remember getting on the plane with my family—we had bought a house in Michigan. I had intended to stay, and we had bought a nice house overlooking the Huron River Valley. So I left and took a plane down to Chicago, and I looked up Bob Christensen. I said, "Bob, do you need any help? Is there anything in the Planning Department of the city? Is there anything? You've worked with me before." He said, "Well, we're just getting started with the Public Building Commission, building some new schools for
217 the Board of Education. Would you like to head up a group and direct the planning of this school building program?" I said, "Yes, sure." So they gave me an office in the Chicago Civic Center.
Blum: In the Civic Center?
Brownson: In the Civic Center, overlooking the plaza to the south. I started out with a couple of people. We started in on the program in which we developed twenty or some schools for roughly forty-five thousand students altogether.
Blum: Before you went to Christensen and took a public job, did you have any idea about returning to Murphy? You had only been away for two years.
Brownson: No, I really wasn't interested. Part of it may have been—wasn't Gene Summers there then?
Blum: I think Tom Beeby, Stan Gladych and Gene Summers were all there.
Brownson: But anyway, Gene Summers was there, and Helmut Jahn was a young associate of Gene Summers's, so I just felt that the opportunities—I don't know, I just didn't go back to Murphy. I wasn't interested in just doing—if you look at what I've done and what my interests are even today, forgetting about my cars and airplanes and that stuff, but the planning projects that I'm interested in now for the country—most of these small building projects don't turn me on that much.
Blum: You're talking about individual buildings?
Brownson: Individual buildings as such. I'm not talking about small buildings or grand buildings or these kinds of things, but I'm looking at ways in which we can really have the freedom to work on these things and explore them. I suppose a lot of it is like Hilberseimer again with planning. Everybody would ask him about a lot of the details on his plans, and he really wasn't interested in that aspect of it, the real minutiae of the project. So I think that that had an effect
218 on me, that I didn't want to go back into that firm. I wasn't interested in Skidmore because of what that organization had there. In many ways, it’s almost like when I left the Public Building Commission and came out to build Auraria. I didn't know anybody here. I simply came out, and I didn't have any help to start in on Auraria. There are people like that, that when things get too good and they can't stand it.
Blum: When you were with the Public Building Commission, apparently there was some controversy about building schools in a park?
Brownson: Oh, yes, sure.
Blum: What was that all about?
Brownson: Mayor Daley's idea, one of his ideas was that he was interested in making the school more than just a part of the Board of Education. He felt that schools were not used intensively enough; that they became very isolated in terms of, that is a school, that is a recreation area, that is a library, that is something else. One of the things that we talked about early on, and you know most people think, they look at me and I can just see in their mind they're saying, "You're a damned liar. Remember what Daley did at the Democratic convention with the police and all?" I know what they're thinking, but when Daley said, "You know, if you could just get these guys out of their limousines," he meant guys like James Redmond, the superintendent of schools. He always had this gigantic limousine. It was bigger than the mayor's. Daley said, "If you could just get the park district and the library board and all of these separate things, if you'd get them together." It used to be that the library was part of the school. The school used it in the daytime, and it was open on the weekends and nights. He said, "The gymnasiums and all that stuff were used by the park district in the evenings, and during the daytime it was used by the students at the school." So we had several meetings because the agreement was between the Public Building Commission and the Board of Education. This was a massive building program to undertake. The other thing that he didn't want to have happen
219 was to have these schools controlled by small groups within a community. If you look at Daley, he was always interested in Chicago. There are a lot of things that have been written about him. I know that, but he was always interested in the city. He always lived in that same house, although I don't know what the inside of his house was like. He may have had it lined with gold plate or something, but he certainly didn't live in any grandiose estate. When he died and when his estate was probated, there wasn't much, contrary to Tom Keane who was a thief in the city. But anyway, Daley was interested, and the other thing he kept emphasizing was that the schools and the community activities were not to be taken over by small groups of people. We worked on one project, the Roberto Clemente High School, which is a high-rise school. Dirk Lohan built it. It was a high school that had escalators in it. I have no idea what it's like or what condition it's in now or anything else. There is a bridge across, I believe, Division Street, that goes over into a gymnasium, swimming pool and some other things. But what Daley was talking about in terms of taking over, when I made the first proposal and met with the Hispanic community up there, I used to do a lot of, I suppose you would call it public relations. I forget what school it was, but in the auditorium I was up on the stage and the alderman was there—maybe it was Tom Keane—anyway, they're talking. All of a sudden the doors roar open at the back of the place, and down the aisles come the Cuban flag and some other flag and these paramilitary guys. They marched up on the stage and said, "We're taking over the meeting." I said, "Be my guest," and I ran out the back door and got out of there. That was what Daley was talking about, the small groups taking over from the parents and from the people who were really using the school. There was a lot of unrest at that time.
[Tape 9: Side 1]
Brownson: The reason I'm telling you all this is that there was all of this dissention that was going on, you know. The first school we built, which was Sojourner Truth up in the Cabrini Green area. There was a small, low building which was built for the Head Start program. I think that program was one of the more positive elements of the Johnson administration, of the federal
220 administration. I don't know whether you've ever read the book, Opening new worlds: Jane Addams' Hull-House. Her idea was that you could take these young girls who didn't know city life and didn't know all of these kinds of things and give them training in hygiene and how to take care of their health and how not to get pregnant and about preparation of food and all of these kinds of things at Hull House. We were working on these schools primarily, not in all cases but I would say in the majority of the cases, in the so-called inner city of Chicago.
Blum: Did you have the idea that after school hours it would function as a community center for the kind of things Jane Addams did?
Brownson: Yes. In fact, where this long sashay through the woods is taking me is to answer your question about building the schools in the park. The one that comes to mind is the one down around Fifty-seventh Street or Fifty-third Street in Washington Park.
Blum: Just west of the University of Chicago?
Brownson: Yes, down in that area. There was that school, Dyett Middle School. David Haid built it, and there were two separate buildings. There was an academic building, and it was connected then below grade so this would not be a big, massive thing. But there was this low, two-story building connected on the first level, below grade, to the gymnasium and community building which was separate by, oh, maybe about fifty or seventy feet from the school building; the idea being that the students could come and use that. There was a swimming pool and there was a central meeting hall and there was a basketball court. That thing would be open at eleven, twelve at night. It would be open on the weekends. During the daytime hours the Board of Education would use the school, and at night the Park District would. Finally it wasn't until Daley got the Board of Education head man and the head of the Park District together in the same room and said, "Look, let’s make this thing work. That's the idea behind it. If you don't make it work"—I don't know if he threatened them but he said, "Make that work. That's the idea
221 behind it." And so, it became more of a community center, and that's how that building, in effect, got in the park area.
Brownson: There were a number of interesting schools in the program. There is also the one immediately west of the Loop, the high school for the deaf, and I'll talk about that.
Blum: Jacques, excuse me, but under this program which lasted four or five years, there were twenty-six schools built, and a different architect did each one. How were the architects selected? Did you select them? Did they submit for a competition? How did that work?
Brownson: I think generally I selected, not all of them, but a number of IIT students got work in that group of schools, Y. C. Wong, Arthur Takeuchi.
Blum: Had you seen their plans before you said, "Okay, you do that school?" or did you just say, "You develop a plan for that school"?
Brownson: No, because I was driving the program. I was playing painting-by-the- numbers, let's say.
Blum: What do you mean?
Brownson: Well, the way it started out was—I'm not sure I can remember the numbers entirely. One of the things I realized early on was that there was a big drive to make these schools flexible, that team teaching was to be used, that there was going to be much more flexibility in the building program, and that rooms that formerly were very static would become much more flexible and could be changed relatively easily. So here we had a certain total amount of dollars—I forget how many millions of dollars it was—which equated to what total amount of square footage you could build. The first thing that we tried to determine, the small group that I had working—this was before the architects were retained—was, what were the commonalities, so we could say to the architect, "These are the specifications," just as somebody in
222 industry needs a machine or an aircraft. If the airlines need an airplane, they tell them how many seats, how much fuel consumption, how many landings they'll make. They set performance specifications for how they want the machine to perform. So we were trying to determine the performance specifications for these schools, and it started out with how much is needed for schools with Head Start, a certain age group, how much is needed for K-4 or -5 elementary schools, how many square feet are needed for a middle school, how many square feet are needed for a high school? The other thing that the Board of Education had been used to was buying a lot someplace and plunking a building down, and there was never any space around it. It was built right up to the sidewalks all around. The high schools, particularly, were done that way. And so, the first thing was to determine, how big should a school be? How big should a Head Start school be? So we get into planning problems of community planning. How big should a middle school be? How many square feet per student? We established, if I can remember right, in an elementary school it required around sixty-five square feet per student, not only for the classrooms but for the adjacent ancillary facilities—the library, the science, the gymnasium and so forth. I think that the middle school went higher up to something like almost a hundred square feet, and the high school, because of the specialization, went up to around one hundred and twenty square feet per student. The Board of Education, since they thought they had a real sugar daddy with unlimited resources over here in the Public Building Commission, thought that they were going to have this grandiose school. "Oh, we're going to have a planetarium." Okay, so we'd write this all up, "planetarium." "We need a Chinese studies room," write, "Chinese studies room." "We need a Russian studies room. We need an advanced biological studies laboratory," and write that down. We put this whole wish list together. So here are these representatives, all sitting in this meeting, and all of these high schools wanting these planetariums and all of these grandiose kinds of things. I said, "How many students do you have studying Chinese in the system?" Then they were shaken up. I said, "Yes, how many of your students are studying Chinese? Does every high school have to have a Chinese study laboratory? I can't imagine there's that many students in the system studying Chinese." "Well, it may come in the future." I said, "The
223 building should be flexible so you can do those things. Now, a planetarium. A planetarium is a very specialized piece of machinery. Just go over there on the lakefront and take a look at that one and see what's required. They've got to have somebody who knows how to run it. It can't be run by an ordinary teacher, you know. You've got to be somebody who knows what a planetarium is and how it works. Each high school certainly doesn't need a planetarium. Couldn't you get by with"—I forget how many high schools we built—"couldn't you get by with just one planetarium for the whole group? You get on the bus and you go over to the planetarium for certain classes, and you have that kind of mobility." So that was the way we tried to approach it. Then after we got an agreement, the one thing I realized was that we couldn't dictate what the curriculum was going to be. We could talk to them about it and act as if we knew what was going on, but we couldn't dictate what that program was going to be. But we did have the agreement on an elementary school, sixty-five square feet per student, so if you had three hundred students you've got three hundred times sixty-five square feet. "You cut the cake up the way you want it, Mr. Administrator, and we'll put the thing together with a certain rationale. High school? You tell us you've got a hundred and twenty square feet per student times two thousand students, let's say, in a high school. I personally think two thousand students in a high school is pretty big," and what they eventually ended up with was that they broke up these large high schools into sub-schools within the larger school. They became units, I think, of around five hundred students and became, in effect, an administrative cell. So then we got started on the site. What does the site need? Here the Board of Education came by to have these sites where they wanted these building. For a high school for two thousand students, they'd come in with these small sites where there was no space outside. So I had one of the fellows just make a drawing of this lot with the building, and I had him put two thousand dots—well, the whole drawing was all of these dots. We had this meeting, then, with the Board of Education, and I said, "Well, here is your site. You've got two thousand students. I'm not saying they're all going to be out at the same time, but if they are, you're going to have to put some of them over here." There was a police station close by. "They're going to be sitting on the steps at the police station," which is
224 exactly what the students do, you know. They sit on everybody's porch step, they go into all of the stores around and all of these different places. Up here at Fort Collins [Colorado] there was a proposal to build a high school as part of a shopping center. My god, these kids would be all over that shopping center and there would be no end to the trouble. But anyway, that's not important. The board had never seen a drawing that any architect had ever given them that showed all of the students that were there and how much space they take. I said, "If you have a bed, the bed has to be a certain size or you can't use it. You can't make a bed any different. Somebody is walking around, and each one is going to take a certain amount of space." We finally got an agreement then that we would make a program for what the outside use around the building was, in terms of the running track, the football field, the baseball area and these kind of things, and we put together a program and showed how the school then becomes a dynamic kind of thing rather than a static building in the area.
Blum: Now, was this the kind of list of guidelines that you presented to each architect?
Brownson: Right.
Blum: And then they had to work within those guidelines?
Brownson: Right, but we carried it much farther than that. We realized that we had to mass-buy in order to accomplish the programs economically. We started first with the structure. What size is a classroom? What is the most economical structure that we can get for that? We retained an outside firm of architects to make these studies, and we made several hundred studies just on the structure alone to determine that the optimum size was a thirty-by thirty-foot bay with a certain structure and all of the things that were related to it. We simply told the architects, "We want a structural system with columns thirty feet on center, period. That's it. You accept that." Then we talked about the heating for such a space. We wanted to have heating and air conditioning, so we worked with a company to develop standard units, almost like diesel
225 locomotives where the whole thing is a power plant—heating, everything. So we did this with all of the so-called components of the system—the electrical systems. Then there is the communication system that is needed in the buildings, the science laboratory systems that we had to do, the furniture and all of these kinds of things, and we established a series of guidelines which became spiral-bound notebooks that were given to the architects as the guidelines for their work. Then on a mass basis we bought several million dollars' worth of furniture at one time, and we bought heating and cooling units en masse, so then we had some control as to what we were building and we could control the costs.
Blum: Did that leave the architects much flexibility?
Brownson: Yes, it left them really quite a bit of flexibility, actually, because in the planning we got some rather interesting plans. I mentioned one just a little bit, and this was the Whitney Young Magnet High School which is west of the downtown Loop area over on the Eisenhower Expressway. This was a high school in which the Board of Education wanted to bring together deaf students with hearing students in the same background. They wanted to give them the opportunity to work together because most deaf students are not completely deaf, they are partially deaf. But they're much more difficult to teach than even the blind, because since we're all based on sound or words, we can communicate. It's when you can't hear that it becomes very difficult to develop communication skills. Consequently, I traveled all over the United States. I went to Gallaudet, which was founded by Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D. C., and experienced the conditions there and talked to the faculty members about some of the problems. I went on to the Brooklyn School for the Deaf where I experienced being shut into a soundproof chamber in which I could hear the blood coursing through my body. I experienced the use of hearing devices and the futility of trying to hear over fans and other things operating in a room, and came to the realization that the mechanical equipment has to be much better for such a school because the noise factor is picked up by all of the hearing devices. Most hearing devices are so primitive and poorly built that the students, in effect, end up
226 tearing them off their heads because of the background noises that they're hearing. The other things are simple things that you and I don't even consider, exit signs or fire alarm systems. The fire alarm system has to be a visual thing because they can't hear the alarm, so you've got to do this with lights and that relates to the exit signs and so forth. The way these students circulate, it's almost in many ways like somebody who is physically handicapped, who is in a wheelchair, and there are certain things that you have to do to accommodate that within a building so that they can function. The Whitney Young School, which was done by Perkins and Will, became the one where deaf students were accommodated.
Blum: Did any of the architects object to the fact that they may not have been chosen to do a school? Did you get any flak in that way?
Brownson: No, not really. There was a considerable amount of work going on, so architects were not as unemployed as they are at the present time. So we didn't have that problem.
Blum: Did you get any flak from architects who were selected to do a school because of the rigorous guidelines?
Brownson: Oh, yes, a lot of them didn't exactly like some of those things. But we would sit down and talk with them, and hopefully we convinced many of them as to what we were trying to do, and I think we were successful. But there was still so much work to do, even beyond—simply by saying that we wanted a thirty-foot bay and some of these technical aspects, many of the architects are glad that somebody else is doing that for them. We'd simply say that, "Here is this furniture, how do you"—and many different plans evolved, but here, using these kind of elements as furniture in the school, how do you put all of these things together for team teaching? We did make certain accommodations. We did one school up on Lake Shore Drive.
Blum: The Walt Disney Magnet School?
227 Brownson: Yes, the Disney School. It was considerably different because it was a magnet school.
Blum: Who did the Disney School?
Brownson: Perkins and Will. Then we went up to Toronto because Toronto was into a school building program also. The Ford Foundation, with the architect Ezra Erenkrantz from San Francisco, was involved in building a lot of prototype schools based on a mass production technique of school space. You have to remember, too, that there were a lot of these—and I suppose they are still around—so-called mobile classrooms. The place was full of these things, so consequently this was the only opportunity that we could economically build some of these things. It's quite well documented. There are some books that were published on this program.
Blum: How would you evaluate the success of the program?
Brownson: I think it was very successful. I think it worked. Most of the problems that we did have concern about—because of the low budgets some of the elements were not substantial enough. They couldn't take—like in places like the Pompidou Center where every three years you've got to completely remodel it, right? I mean, it wears out because of the use.
Blum: The needs of the space changes also. They need more exhibition space and less office space and larger library—things of this sort.
Brownson: Yes, but when I was at Pompidou Center, the floors wore out because they put so many people over them. The wear and tear on everything was substantial. All of the schools in Chicago were nothing but plywood boards for windows on the outside where the windows were all broken out. We decided on using a material called Lexan. What junk! It's a great material, but the janitor wants to take the easy way to wash the windows so he uses some kind of strong soap or something, and two or three months after the windows are in you can't see out of them. They're all opaque because the
228 plastic has clouded up. So we had that problem, and then we had the usual problems with buying furniture. We had one low bidder on furniture, and the furniture was made someplace down around Tijuana in California. It was all made out of scrap steel, little short pieces. You couldn't believe it. All of the legs and everything were all welded, and there was no way of rejecting it because it was structurally strong enough. It was a leg on the chair, but it was all made up out of little pieces. He bought all this scrap metal, and then he had somebody put these things all together. So we had our share of problems. And then the janitors and the bureaucracy of the Board of Education. We talked about different ways of feeding the students. There was a lot of wasted food, and so we would have specially prepared, almost like on airline food on a tray. Everything was there which you would get on a tray or some way. But that didn't go over either in the end because of the bureaucracy, so we couldn't do that. We built these high schools and, as I said, it was for forty-five thousand students. Then when I left, my close associate, John Callanan took over. He's been at the Public Building Commission about thirty years, I guess, and now has the job of Co-managing Architect of the commission.
Blum: Jacques, you said some time ago that people at IIT sort of stood apart. Did you, as an example, ever joint the AIA?
Brownson: Yes, I did. I joined the AIA.
Blum: Do you feel it was a worthwhile affiliation for you?
Brownson: Well, in looking back on it I probably would do things a little differently. But I joined the AIA, and then after the Civic Center was built I was considered to be a fellow—FAIA, you know, fellow in the American Institute of Architects—and I was rejected because I hadn't been a member for ten years. I said in a huff, "If that's the way you pick your fellows, I don't want to be a part of it," and I left and I quit the AIA. Now, whether I was right or wrong somebody else will have to judge, but I left at that time. But I was a member for a number of years.
229 Blum: Do you think it was an organization that did anything significant for the profession, or was it just a status affiliation?
Brownson: No, I think Inland Architect was published by the AIA—right? Isn't that an AIA publication?
Blum: No, but there is a journal that the AIA publishes. It used to be the AIA Journal, but now it is Architecture.
Brownson: But isn't Inland Architect published by the Chicago AIA?
Blum: No, it is privately published. Harry Weese had been underwriting it for years, but recently he withdrew his support.
Brownson: I thought that Inland Architect was a part of the AIA. Well, I learned something tonight. Well, the other thing that always bothered me was the kind of—in order for an architect to get work, that's one of the things that the schools don't discuss very much is how you go about doing that. Of course, many of the firms have public relations people out looking for work. The bigger offices have enough resources that they can do that. They have a surplus that they can draw on as part of their operating costs. Also, the question which is very critical for small architectural firms, in order to do any public work you have to have errors and omissions insurance.
Blum: What type of insurance?
Brownson: It's called errors and omissions or malpractice. You have to have insurance so if something goes wrong, some insurance firm can take care of it. Well, most projects—today it's even more than ever—are so big in terms of the dollar amounts that the cost to a small office to carry insurance is almost prohibitive. Usually, the big claims against errors and omissions for a large firm are much larger because the projects are larger. So consequently this is spread out over the whole profession. There is a very significant book—I've
230 got it upstairs—done by a Princeton professor, Robert Gutman, about the status of the architectural profession [Architectural Practice: A Critical View]. And no, I don't think the AIA has done enough. I think it is unconscionable, really, the salaries that beginning architects get when they go into an office.
Blum: Are they too low?
Brownson: Oh, they're abominable. You can't live on it, and the only reason that you get those kind of low salaries is because most of these young people are so interested in architecture that it is the lure of the profession. They soon discover that they can't get along on a minimum wage, which is about what it amounts to.
Blum: Didn't you say that Mies paid everyone a dollar an hour?
Brownson: He paid them all a dollar an hour because we were working on projects that we were interested in. So it's very difficult, as Gutman talks in his book on architectural practice, it's very difficult to make your way as an architect. It's tough as a profession.
Blum: How could the AIA help change that?
Brownson: Simply in the membership, like with lawyers. For example, the lawyers, when they go to work in a firm, there are certain salaries that they get, although some of them work for pretty low wages.
Blum: Only if you go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton would you get the kind of salaries we hear about as beginning lawyers.
Brownson: But I think that our profession is not recognized. First of all, look at the amount of time. You've got five years in school of undergraduate work, you've got three more years as an intern. You should at least be making a livable wage after that.
231 Blum: Just listening to how you explain things and your interest in materials and how things are put together, would have you have been better off as an engineer rather than an architect?
Brownson: Well, I don't know because I really wasn't interested in that direction.
Blum: But everything you explain has so much of that information in it.
Brownson: But I think the other thing is that architects today, since we're on this subject, in a way, architects are so poorly trained that they really have very little to offer. In other words, if you're going to pay somebody a meaningful salary, they in turn have to be able to produce a meaningful product. If they are poorly trained—this is my quarrel with architecture schools, that you come out of those schools and you can't draw, you don't know anything about the financial aspects of building, and your only contribution is going to be decorating the cake or putting phony columns on the front portico or picking out the color for the siding or whatever else it is. You can almost get anybody to do that. The other thing is everybody is not a designer. It's not that glorified work. They take these students in, and they say, "We're going to make designers out of you." But the profession requires, as I've tried to convey, a range of work that is required in doing a building today. You can't know everything. No one person can know everything. You've got to have people who know materials. You have to have people who know about the costs. You have to have people who know about the legal requirements of what you're building. You've got to have a job captain on the thing. He's got to know the organization of the working documents work in order for that building to be built. So you've got to have some merchantable skills. Well, today we're into computers. I'd probably have a hard time going into an office the way they're set up now with this CAD drafting and things. But you've got to have some kind of a merchantable skill in order to make a living wage, and my experience has been that most of these students are not getting it.
Blum: And students who were trained when you were trained, did you feel they
232 came out with skills?
Brownson: Well, at least we were getting training in construction. We knew how to draw. We could put a building together. But you go into a school today, and they don't know these fundamental things. They don't even know how to draw. I was talking to a student on the telephone, a young lady from Yale. She called me one night, and she said, "I just saw your house in Geneva in the library." I said, "Where are you calling from?" and she said, "From Yale. We don't know anything about those kind of houses. Could you tell me how it was built and what it's built out of?" I said, "Who is paying for this telephone call?" We must have been talking for an hour or so. She said, "Don't worry about that. This is the first time that somebody has told me anything about how to build a building." I said, "My god! Yale University?" And she said, "We're interested in knowing. In fact, we're going to come to see that building. We're going to take a trip," and they did. They took a trip, I guess, this spring or last fall or sometime. They took a trip and looked at some of these buildings that nobody had ever told them about. We Chicago architects are builders. We're constructors. That is the side of the coin that comes up when you talk to an architect trained in that kind of a Chicago school. I went down to the University of Colorado here because they had asked me to critique their work. There was a young man, and a professor—I won't mention any names—asked him, "Explain to Mr. Brownson what it is that you're working on." Okay, so he starts out. He said, "Well, this is a house for two lesbians. One of the lesbians went out one night and stole sperm from a sperm bank, and so now they have a young child that has to be housed." Here was this thing going in a hundred million directions. I said to him, "Well, I'm an architect. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or anything. I don't know what this is, but I assume that they're going to need a place to sleep. They're going to need a kitchen; they're going to need a place to eat. Maybe they want to sunbathe. It appears that you've got everything kind of faced backwards here. You like the sun," and I go through the rigmarole that you've been through already, I go through all of that. "Oh, yes! Yes! I didn't think of that." I said, "It doesn't make any difference where or whether these are lesbians or gays or whatever it is, there are certain things they need.
233 They've got to eat, they've got to sleep, they've got all of these kind of needs. You've got to have a bathroom. There are certain things you do. I don't know what else I can say other than you have to be able to keep the wind and the rain and the snow off of them." So how do these projects get so turned around? I keep asking, am I missing something on this or don't I understand? I'm trying to understand. They're really trying to explore these problems, but nobody has said anything to them about the question of how you live in a house. I said, "Let's take two very simple housing problems that go back thousands and thousands of years. Let's take a Greek house in Mycenae, and let's take a Greek house in the Aegean Sea. They are two different houses. In the Aegean, the house is much more open because it is protected by the sea, and they didn't have the problem of somebody sneaking right up to their house. They could see intruders coming on the sea. Consequently, the way that they lived, the openness that they had, was completely different. Now, when you get up on the mainland you're going to have these guys at your front door, and before you know it, they're going to sneak around the corner and they're going to be in there with an ax after you. So what did they do? They built these houses with one opening in them. It was much colder there. The climate was terrible, so they had an opening in the roof to let the smoke and stuff go out. They had a different way of living, and it reflected on the kind of building that they built. It had a direct influence on what the architectural consequences were going to be.” I'm saying to myself, why can't these simple kinds of things be brought out in an education rather than all of these other kinds of oddball things?
Blum: Do you think there is too much social emphasis today, with the example you just gave, in presenting the problem where the focus is not very clear on the construction and the actual shelter?
[Tape 9: Side 2]
Blum: Jacques, you said you wanted to add something you remembered.
Brownson: Yes, Betty, I'm giving you a copy of a very short paper that I wrote about the
234 Daley Center plaza, so you can read it. We discussed the plaza and the redoing of the plaza earlier. Again, it's that question of really understanding what that space means and not to trivialize the significance of it. I think that it has to be handled very sensitively.
Blum: I think your ideas about the original concept of the plaza thirty years later should be very interesting and important now that that space is being renovated.
Brownson: I am concerned again. We have that same problem that occurs over and over again, even historically, where other architects will come into previously built projects and everybody sees things a little differently. I think that you have to recognize that it is a public space. Even in the case of the present mayor, who is the son of Richard J. Daley, one of the things that his father was very concerned about was the public significance of that space. He wanted to be sure that it was something that could be used by all of the people.
Blum: May we move on to 1972 when you left Chicago and moved to Denver to become the director of planning and development to develop a campus in Denver? Was it for the state of Colorado?
Brownson: It was for the Auraria Higher Education Center, which was a consortium of primarily three schools that were funded by the state of Colorado. The three schools that were involved were the Community College of Denver, the Metropolitan State College, which was a four-year baccalaureate program, and the University of Colorado at Denver, but all of it was funded, really, by the state of Colorado. That just gives you what the project was, but let me go back to the beginning of this project. I was coming close to the end of the first initial group of schools that the [Chicago] Public Building Commission was building, and most of the things that I was trying to do, I felt that I had set those kinds of standards in the planning development of it, and so I was interested in doing something else. There was evidently some kind of a connection between Chicago and this group in Denver, the Auraria Higher
235 Education Center. They had an executive director by the name of Larry Hamilton. He didn't know me at all. He had talked to somebody—I guess it may have been at the Chicago Board of Education—saying that they were going to eventually build this campus in Denver and did they know of anybody who might possibly want to do something like that? Somehow or other Larry got in contact with me and asked me if I would be interested. I didn't know very much about it, so I came out to Denver simply to see what was going on. Larry showed me the site, which was one hundred seventy acres, plus or minus, in the original site of Denver on the Platte River, the confluence of the Platte River and Cherry Creek. It was a slum area. There was an old part. There was a Catholic church on the site, St. Elizabeth's, a very active church that had lasted over the history of Denver through a series of different changes. There was also a Spanish church, St. Cajeton’s, that had been built actually in 1923, I believe, about when I was born. It was built by the Spanish community. You know, it's interesting what parallels come back. When Henry Heald asked Mies to come to Chicago and the problem of building the IIT campus came out, and Mies went out to Thirty-third and State, or Federal, out in that area, and looked at around at this decrepit slum, his statement to Henry Heald was, "Well, it certainly can't get much worse." So I had much the same feeling. As I walked around this site, at one time we called it Denver's preserve for the brown rat population. The reason there were so many rats down there was that there was a meat packing company. They made sausage, and it was called Gold Star Sausage or Gold Star Meats or something. They made salami and frankfurters and all of these kind of things down there, and there were a lot of really old, broken-down buildings. There was also a group of old buildings which were in deplorable condition, but they were the original homes of the first founders of Denver, which has now become the Ninth Street Historical Park. It's one block on both sides of Ninth Street which have these very early, small houses. On the corner of Ninth Street is what was a small, local grocery store, which has now become a student cafeteria, and a little restaurant has been put into that space. But as I said, I was alone and I was walking around, and I was just standing there, looking at all of these different things. There was a place across on Ninth Street, the Casa Mia Restaurant. It was a very good little Mexican restaurant
236 and was in one of the old houses that had been converted to this Hispanic- Mexican restaurant. I was standing there on the curb and I felt a tug at my suit coat. I looked down, and a little kid was standing there, and he looked up at me and he said, "Are you from the FBI, Mister?" I said, "No. What do you mean, am I from the FBI?" He said, "Oh, there are a lot of FBI guys down here, looking around for drugs and things." I said, "No, I'm not from the FBI. I'm just looking around at the buildings." But it was kind of a funny occurrence. And then in talking a little more with Larry about how this the idea came about. There was a man here who is still here now and is writing the history of Auraria. His name is Frank Abbott, and he was the head of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, CCHE. The Colorado Commission on Higher Education is the one that, in effect, supervises or develops all of the facilities within the state of Colorado for the colleges, with the exception, as I said before, of the University of Colorado. We have kind of a standing thing about CU. The state university has their own form of government in the state of Colorado. They have their own elected regents, and they run their own show. They're pretty much independent from everything, except the state that is the funding source for money to run the school. But they're quite autonomous. In discussions with Larry Hamilton and then with Frank Abbott, their idea was that they wanted to have one campus with these three stages of education so that it would be possible for a student to start in without a high school diploma in a community college and could get his high school or his GED at the community college, could go on and take studies at the Metropolitan State College, or the four-year school, and then the possibility that he could go to CU and take graduate study. So he could go all through this on one campus. I became very interested in that because we were trying in the schools in Chicago to open them up so they would become much more visible. As I said, in Michigan I thought that the architects were pretty insulated from the activities, and the architects were always kind of standoffish. I said, "What an opportunity for somebody, let's say, a bricklayer or a carpenter or somebody to come to the community college to go on through this whole thing." CU was very critical and was really not interested in participating in this kind of joint venture of three institutions. Part of their autonomy would disappear because the idea behind
237 it, again, was that you would share facilities. Instead of each one of these institutions having their own private library, they would share the library facility. They would share the physical education facility. It's a lot like the Chicago schools, in a way, where there was a joint use of all of these specialized facilities. CU participated in it, but I don't think they ever really believed that this thing was going to be done. I think they still may believe that they're going to take over that entire campus as part of the university system. But anyway, that's just a conjecture. In the development of this plan, there was a very strong political group within the state of Colorado called the Joint Budget Committee. We have a very weak form of executive government in Colorado. The governor doesn't have very much power, really. He can suggest but he can't really appoint people—he can pick his own cabinet members, but beyond that he doesn't have very much influence. It's handled by the Joint Budget Committee, which is made up of Democratic and Republican members of the state legislature. He who controls the money charts the course. So the Joint Budget Committee dealing with the budget allocates funds according to the success of the lobbying of the various institutions, and they are all-powerful in determining how the direction of things go in the state. They had a chairman, Sen. Joe Shoemaker. Shoemaker was a fiscal conservative. He was very tight with the money, and he was not going to gold-plate anything. There was going to be nothing fancy about Auraria. They budgeted roughly somewhere around forty million dollars for this project, and the Urban Renewal Authority, which was funded by the federal government, was the instrument to assemble the site. The city and the state and everybody had generally approved the site locations, and then the federal government, through the Urban Renewal group, went out and started to accumulate the land. We did not have the land all at one time. In fact, we had very small pieces of it. We had to start where they could get the land in the beginning, and so there was a lot of negotiation going on with the owners. Now, the Spanish community really didn't want to move out of this area. They had that church there, and there was an activist Hispanic priest, Corky Gonzalez. He was the Jesse Jackson of Denver. Now, this was before my arrival. I'm just giving you a little of the preamble to this project. But finally it got started, and they accumulate this land. One of the things that
238 was difficult to determine was who was doing what. I'm talking now about the administrations of the various school groups—who was doing what, and what is their mission on this campus? Who was going to handle the library and the media center, as it was called? Who was going to handle the overall maintenance of all of the buildings and the janitorial services and the administration? Who was going to assign classrooms to students in the future and how were the schedules going to be accommodated? We didn't even have a common schedule. CU would have certain vacation times, Metro would have one, and they had different people they were working with. Some were working more at night, others were earlier in the morning. The community college was a very free kind of school, and the students came and went, and their curriculum was different from the other two. How do you keep track of all of the records? Do you homogenize this group? There was a long discussion about how you bring these three institutions together so they could maintain their identity but yet have a commonality through certain shared services. That was extremely difficult, to get any kind of direction for this.
Blum: What was the state of all of this confusion when you arrived?
Brownson: Oh, it stayed confusion even until after all of the buildings and everything was done, and it still is, somewhat. It's getting a little better, but there still is the rivalry. Certain schools say, "We need more space," or, "We need this or we need that."
Blum: At what point did you step in and begin to straighten things out?
Brownson: I stepped in in the building process in 1972. I moved to Denver in September of 1972. I started in alone, and then subsequently I had just one other person working with me. It was John Kreidich who arrived at the door. He was a graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology, and he stayed with me during that planning time. But he came out and simply came to work for me.
Blum: There was an article on you and Auraria in Inland Architect. The way this was
239 described was that there were five architectural firms that had done studies, and then you stepped in and pared it down to two architectural firms with you as the head. How did that change come about?
Brownson: Well, what happened is that prior to my arrival, there had been a number of studies made by different people. I can't recall now who they all were. If you remember, in the seventies on all of the college and university campuses, the things that were being built were—there was a trend towards what I call mega-building—you know, gigantic, big hulks of buildings. There were studies made to that effect here. We had a very interesting board, the Auraria board, and it was made up of several people who were involved in the construction industry and contractors. Particularly, the one that I worked very closely with was a man named Max Morton, who was the head of one of the large general contractors here in Colorado, and there was the feeling that they didn't want just one architect to do this campus. We had a lot of interviews. There are certain legal aspects that you have to conform to to do public work. You have to advertise what's called an RFP, or a request for proposal. You have to state what you're looking for, what kind of services you're looking for, and then you have to have an interview process where they can publicly talk about their firm and their office. Finally, then, the board can take a vote and decide on who they're going to have do these things. It's the governmental process, really. So we did that. We sent out this request for proposal, and we had a lot of different architects coming in. We had Caudill, Rowlette and Scott from Houston, because they had done the University of Southern Colorado down in Pueblo, and they were part of that. Then Ed Stone popped up. Did I tell the story about Ed Stone and the fountains? All of these people came in and put on their little show and presentation of what they could do. Then there was another group from Denver that was known as a5. It was made up of a general contractor and a couple of architects and some project schedulers. They were all local people. The idea was that this project was going to be on what's called a fast track so that—again, it goes back to the Daley Center—you start the foundations and you build the frame of the building, and then eventually you put the interior walls in and then it's occupied. So it was decided in the beginning that
240 a5—oh, a very large engineering firm known worldwide at that time called Stearns-Rogers was a part of that a5 group. The general contractor was Hensel-Phelps, and then Stearns-Rogers was involved in the engineering. Then there was Bill Muchow who was the local architect. There were two more that I can't recall right offhand. But anyway, they were retained to start doing this work, but it really didn't work out. The general contractor, Hensel- Phelps, was more interested in making a profit rather than trying to solve this problem. There was a lot of difficulty with it, so it finally ended up that Stearns-Rogers pretty much acted as the project coordinator, and then we went out and hired individual architects. They wanted to use local people so we hired local architects to do specific buildings on the campus. Well, in the beginning, in the master planning, I had this site which was one hundred seventy acres in downtown Denver. The question was, not having a fixed program, not really knowing the mission in any kind of detail of what these schools were—we knew what Community College did and what the Metropolitan State College did, but we didn't really have, you might say, a fixed curriculum to deal with or what the different kinds of disciplines were going to be. You have to remember, in the seventies there were a number of things happening in higher education in terms of the kinds of degrees that were being offered. Computer technology and all of the other kind of things were changing, and there was a somewhat different thrust, and so what became evident to me was that we needed simply to build flexible space. We had a small group. We had a representative who represented each one of the institutions. The one from Community College was a man named Owen Smith. The reason I remember him is because he was so helpful in getting all of these academicians to go in the same direction. The other two I can't remember, but each one had a representative. We would meet almost three or four times a week and talk about the campus and the development and the kinds of things that were needed. We had the budget, as I said, which was somewhere around forty-some million dollars, which was to do everything on the campus. That was to do all of the utilities, all of the buildings. That was a complete package. So when you put all of the numbers and the requirements of the space together, we came up that we needed about one million, two hundred thousand square feet of floor space in order to
241 accommodate the various programs. We had this fixed sum of money, and the Joint Budget Committee also said some other things. One was that under no condition is the campus ever to grow beyond fifteen thousand students. That's the maximum enrollment for eternity.
Blum: For all three institutions?
Brownson: For all three institutions. There was never to be any more than fifteen thousand students down there. Well, there are now close to thirty-five thousand.
Blum: What was their reasoning to limit an urban campus population?
Brownson: The reasoning was, I think, if you look at the state of Colorado, out of the three-and-a-half million people, three million of those in the entire state live in this Denver metropolitan area. Denver is very strong. And you have all of these outlying schools throughout the state. You have the agricultural school at Fort Collins, you have the University of Colorado at Boulder, you have the University of Southern Colorado, which is kind of a funny name, really, down in Pueblo, which is a little, industrial town to the south. You have over on the western slope Mesa-Grand Junction. You have all of these little, smaller schools who also want to protect their turf because if all of the money, then, is going to Denver, to that school, they're going to get shortchanged. Their students are going to want to come to Denver to the state school rather than stay at home in their own bailiwick. Well, the school also realized that you had a lot of older students. The age level of the students at Auraria is higher than all of the other schools. This again, as I remarked about IIT, is the poor boys' school. You can work—in Denver there are jobs—and then you can take a couple of classes and then go back to work, and you can support yourself. You can have a family. We built a day care center on the campus so mothers could leave their children there and could go to school. It was a school that was to be more utilitarian than what a small group of people thought. The University of Colorado was a kind of country club, you know. It was well known all over the country, I think, you came out
242 to the University of Colorado because the climate was nice. You could go skiing all winter, and it was party time. My daughter went to Fort Collins, which is a different kind of school than CU, and my son went to CU. Boulder was more of a party school than the other ones were. When I say that the state of Colorado is the same area as Italy, that's one hundred four thousand square miles. It's a big area. It's quite a journey to get from one end of the state to the other. Consequently, this school took on that responsibility where it acted as a magnet for all of the people in Denver itself who needed an education or couldn't afford to go up to Boulder. Boulder was too far away, for one thing, and Denver served a very local kind of need.
Blum: Jacques, when you first took this job and got into some of the problems, what was your vision for the hundred and seventy acres of this urban campus?
Brownson: When I was in Chicago working on the public schools, I had this little, old Porsche convertible that you see in the garage. I used to go to a mechanic up on Clybourn to get service done on it. He had a couple of young mechanics up there who were going part-time to the University of Illinois. I got to know them pretty well, and one day I said, "Well, I'm not going to be seeing you anymore. I'm leaving for Colorado and I'm going to build this campus out there." They said, "Well, don't build it like the University of Illinois." I said, "What do you mean?" "Well, we don't like to get up on those walkways and walk around. If we want to see the faculty, we've got to go and find them in that big, high-rise faculty building over there. Keep everybody down on the ground, plant a lot of trees, and make the space so that it becomes much more in keeping with the kinds of things that we do like sitting around in the summertime, and so that it reflects the way we're really living." So when I came to Denver and I looked at this site, there were all these small, low buildings at that time, old things that were all worn out, a slum. I went back up into the upper part of the town, which is considerably higher. The state capitol is at 5,280 feet elevation. That is a mile high. Then from the state capitol, from that height, it slopes directly down to the Platte River Valley, and this site, in effect, is all in the Platte River Valley and is much lower than the city. So when I would go into the downtown area—there were relatively
243 few high-rises built in this town in 1972—I looked out to the west at these magnificent mountains. I said, "Well, the school should not block the view for the whole downtown area. We should keep the buildings low enough so we can see across and see the mountains." So that was the predominant thought in developing the campus. The other thing was that I knew that we didn't have the land to build on, that we were going to get this land piecemeal. So how do you start building with any kind of continuity to tie this thing together? It goes back again to the Illinois Institute of Technology where Mies had a twenty-four-foot-square module based on the structure that he superimposed over the campus, and all of the buildings were related to this twenty-four-foot-square module. That was kind of a matrix to work from. So, after working a considerable amount of time and using my experience with the work at the Public Building Commission on those schools, I used the thirty-foot base size as the matrix. If you look on that plan, I superimposed this thirty-foot grid over the entire site of one hundred seventy acres and related all of the buildings one to another through that thirty-by-thirty-foot grid. The other question when you stood on the site that you became aware of was the fact that when you stood at one corner—in this case it would be on the southeast corner of the site—you were considerably above the Platte River. Somebody happened to tell me, "Do you realize that in"—I think it was 1965—"that this whole area down here was under eight feet of water?" There was a very heavy rain, and through the drainage to Cherry Creek, and that was before Chatfield Dam was constructed, and the Platte River, this whole area was under water. We have a very good history section in the library, and I went to the library and pulled out the old photos and the record of this flood that occurred in the sixties. Sure enough, you could look at it and see all of these buildings sitting there in this big sea of water, with the exception of this southeast corner where it started; it was above the water. So the first thing that we did was to make a diagram showing where the so-called hundred year flood plain was for the site, and we said that we were not going to build any of these buildings in the flood plain but would put our buildings on dry ground, hopefully. That established a general building area that the campus then subsequently used, and the area that had been under water we used for parking. That's how the parking areas came about, because
244 the cars are expendable. That's how we generally started. We made a whole series of studies in the beginning. This is an interesting climate out here. For one thing, it is extremely dry. The humidity is very low. It's not like in Chicago where you're continually wet. Here it gets warm, but it doesn't get too wet or too high a humidity. We made a lot of site studies about the prevailing winds and the sunlight studies. The interesting thing about this site, whereas in Chicago the major axis of the three-thirty by six-sixty block is north and south, here this is turned roughly about forty degrees. The streets are angled. In the original settlement, if you look at a map of Denver, this downtown area is dropped into this grid, which is the same as in Chicago outside of the city. Like where we are in my house here, this block has a north-south axis. But in the downtown area the whole thing has been turned roughly about forty degrees. So this sets up a different kind of pattern of the sun. As we said sometime ago, I guess, the twenty-first of December is the winter solstice, or as we used to call it "Hilbs Day," with the sun. In Denver you can have a very heavy snowstorm, and two or three days later, most of the snow has disappeared with the exception of those areas which are in shadow where that snow stays generally quite a lengthy period of time. In fact, there has been a new ordinance introduced for the downtown area of Denver because these tall buildings block out the sun and it makes many of these streets pretty icy during the wintertime. They are now trying to eliminate or set the heights of these buildings by the sunlight patterns on the street. Of course, the developers are up in arms because this limits the height and the density to which they can build. So I don't know how successful they are going to be in getting that through. It makes a lot of sense, but not for the immediate profit. But anyway, those problems of the sun, the prevailing winds—it's an ideal climate, Colorado; the climate is ideal here, but there are some other factors. One is the pollution that hangs over Denver, the brown cloud here. You are very fortunate you haven't experienced it, but because of its relationship to the mountains, it's in, I call it the backwaters. As the wind is coming over the top, it traps all of these pollutants and we get this inversion, and so it will stay here for a long time. I can't figure out why you want to build your athletic facilities down low in some of these areas where the air stays pretty polluted.
245 Blum: Was the campus particularly subject to such a problem, more so than the rest of Denver?
Brownson: All of Denver is—yes, yes, this is because, as I said, the state capitol is a mile high—these streets get pretty icy during the wintertime. They are now trying to eliminate or set the heights of these buildings by the sunlight patterns on the street. Of course, the developers are up in arms because this limits the height and the density to which they can build. So I don't know how successful they are going to be in getting that through. It makes a lot of sense, but not for the immediate profit. But anyway, those problems of the sun, the prevailing winds—it's an ideal climate, Colorado; the climate is ideal here, but there are some other factors. One is the pollution that hangs over Denver, the brown cloud here. You are very fortunate you haven't experienced it, but because of its relationship to the mountains, it's in, I call it the backwaters. As the wind is coming over the top, it traps all of these pollutants and we get this inversion, and so it will stay here for a long time. I can't figure out why you want to build your athletic facilities down low in some of these areas where the air stays pretty polluted.
Blum: Was the campus particularly subject to such a problem, more so than the rest of Denver?
Brownson: All of Denver is—yes, yes, this is because, as I said, the state capitol is a mile high…
[Tape 10: Side 1]
Blum: Jacques, would you say that your particular contribution to this project was to plan where things would go? To lay it all out?
Brownson: Yes.
Blum: You said the architects for the particular buildings were Denver architects.
246 How is it that there is a library by Helmut Jahn on the campus?
Brownson: Well, the library building retained an architectural firm named TAG Associates. It was Ted Grossman. Anyway, Ted Grossman and C. F. Murphy came together as a firm. Now, I don't quite know, because there was a lot of activity going on in Denver. Skidmore had work here. Skidmore had a big office here. Murphy wanted to get a—there was a lot of work going on here. This place was full of construction cranes, and all of these buildings that you see back here, this is all new, these high-rise buildings, the majority of them. Philip Johnson was building the United Bank Building, a tall building, for Gerry Hines. Skidmore was building the Republic Plaza. Grossman was a young guy, and he and Murphy joint-ventured and Grossman had the job to do this library. So that's how Helmut Jahn got involved. It was through their association. There were two things here. If you look at the campus, they're all basically brick buildings, but they all have a common structure which is reinforced concrete with a thirty-by-thirty-foot bay. All of the buildings have that. And then the exterior curtain wall on the majority of the buildings is brick, but the curtain wall on the library is aluminum. As I said, we knew that we were going to build roughly between a million and a million-and-a- half square feet, but we didn't really know how they were all to be subdivided and how many were to be small classrooms, how many bigger classrooms, how many laboratories. So you had to build buildings which in a way are almost like a speculative office building in that you don't really know who your tenant is and you know that they're going to change. I also was interested in not only having the buildings be flexible within them, but I realized that this campus over the years was going to grow, and that there is going to be need for these buildings to expand outward in all directions. I even made some studies to show a vertical expansion and in the four directions, so there were five directions that the buildings could go. The state would not allow me to make the five, because somebody evidently must have gotten wise to what I was doing because they would not allow me to spend the money to build the additional foundations for the height.
Blum: The vertical, yes.
247 Brownson: Now they're finding that, you know, we want to expand the library. The library should be expanded vertically, and the foundations cannot take the very heavy load. So you're boxed in. You can't move. So this flexibility became a part, and in working with Helmut we came up with this aluminum system whereby we could take out ten-foot wide panels, and in this case they were roughly ten feet. They all had the same floor-to-floor height, these buildings, so we could interconnect these buildings later on. We could go from one building to another and bridge it and connect these things together. In the building, working with Helmut, I said I wanted these buildings so that we could expand them. I said, "You know, the aluminum skins that we could make here, we could take that and put it in place and bolt it in, and then if we want to open that wall up again we can simply unbolt it, take the panels and put them someplace else. It's the same thing we're going to do inside. I don't want any walls in this library in terms of rooms. I just want a big warehouse to put books in," because I didn't have any money to spend for this thing. Well, Helmut came out, and we had this aluminum solution. The brick industry got into it here in Denver, which is a big brick town, when you have Robinson Brick and some of these old family brick people here put the pressure on. They said, "Well, we don't really want to use that aluminum." Finally, by that time I said, "It's pretty late. This building is pretty far along," so they let the library go. They approved the library, but they said the rest of the buildings all had to be in brick. So that's what happened. If you look from downtown Denver, I said the other thing I don't want is to have a whole mishmash of oddball colors down there. You know, architects, too, are colorblind. You never quite know what you're going to get sometimes. So we standardized on one, which is a common mountain color, which is this aggregate which is all the same for the roof color. When you stand in the downtown area you don't have all of these different colors. The joint budget committee, as I said, established the budget and the total number of students, but I knew that it was going to increase in size. I knew we had to have this flexibility. We developed kind of a universal planning standard. It showed that the farther out we stretched laboratories and dispersed it throughout that it became very expensive because of the piping and mechanical systems,
248 so we should concentrate like functions in certain areas. Now, as I said there was this Ninth Street Park which—oh, this was another thing. There was one man on the board, he was the one who made the comment to Ed Stone that "if we're going to build any fountains, we'll let you know." Well, he was the one who was the big promoter of mega-buildings. I wanted to save Ninth Street Park. First of all, I thought it was the beginning part of Denver, that there was a lot of history there. I thought that we could use that without any great cost and that we could get the support of some people in town—the idea of the campus was controversial. This was before the buildings. But the whole idea of a major university in this prime, downtown land…
Blum: I thought it had deteriorated, it was a slum.
Brownson: It had, but the land was ripe for the developer. So I thought that it would be a good opportunity also to get support from the community if we would be saving these old buildings. And so, we went in with the historical society, and they took over. There were a lot of volunteer crews that came in and took these houses one at a time and restored them. The problem is, of course, that you had an ongoing maintenance problem with them, that you have to keep them up. But they serve as faculty offices, they serve as student activities areas, they serve a smaller scale of things, and they work extremely well and are used extensively by the campus. So we managed to save that, and then we started in with a small group of buildings up on the southeast corner for the community college. That was the first land that was available for building. We didn't own the rest of the land. The question in one of these campuses is that they require a lot of services, a lot of mechanical services. You've got to have water, sewers, gas, electricity. You've got to provide for the electronic revolution with all of the communication things that go on. So what becomes a very costly element are the things that are below grade. One of the things that I said, and this goes back again to IIT and Hilbs and Mies—we accepted the layout of the streets, the existing streets, we accepted the utility systems that were in those streets, and we simply accommodated those into the plan. Now, in contrast I don't know how much money was spent at Circle Campus in completely redoing all those utilities before the
249 buildings were built. We didn't have the money to do that. We accepted all of these underground things with the idea that gradually these streets would be closed. If you look at the photograph, this photograph which was done a number of years ago while even part of the campus was under construction, Lawrence and Larimer were two major streets that in the master plan we wanted closed because they ran right through the center of the campus. One of the things I didn't want was to have cars and pedestrians mixed. I wanted to keep the cars outside of the campus, and I think that as you found out when you drove down there you can't get through.
Blum: That's right.
Brownson: It was not until, I think, two or three years ago—twenty-some years after this campus was built—that Lawrence and Larimer Streets were closed and the viaducts were taken out, the thing that everybody was against—the traffic engineers and the city planners for Denver would say, "Oh, you can't close our streets!" We finally got that accomplished. Then we made this very flexible plan, and at the same time—we built the library for around, if I recall at that time, it was around twenty-seven dollars a square foot. CU was building a library up in Boulder, and they were spending well over a hundred dollars a square foot for their library. Of course, they had fancy wood paneling, they have all of these finishes in it. One of the regents, Byron Johnson, when the library was opened he came up to me as I was walking around. Byron is involved in this co-op business with grocery stores. He came up to me, and he said, "What do we need for the library?" I knew very well what he was getting at. He wanted to know what kind of decoration and carpets on the floor and finishes and all of these things. He wanted to make it more livable, I guess. And so I said, "Byron, what we really need are books." The library is a pretty plain structure inside. It’s reinforced concrete.
Blum: Well, it's a handsome-looking structure from the outside.
Brownson: Everything inside is very utilitarian. There are no subdivisions in terms of walls. There is an extensive television production facility on the lower level
250 in the basement. It's tied in with the rest of the campus electronically.
Blum: Do you take particular pride in that building because it's in metal and not brick? Or maybe because someone in your old firm designed it?
Brownson: No, actually the one who worked—there were two fellows who worked extensively on that for Murphy. One was David Hovey, who is very active around Chicago now. I guess he's doing a lot of housing and other things. The other young man was also a graduate of IIT. They were out here in Colorado and worked extensively on this because Grossman had dropped out. He didn't like the concept of the building, and then the Murphy-TAG organization was disbanded. So Helmut and the Murphy office proceeded with it, and again, a number of the people that I had worked with at Murphy also worked on this building.
Blum: Jacques, did you do any buildings yourself? Were any of your own design?
Brownson: No.
Blum: Did you work with anyone in any of them?
Brownson: I think mainly with Helmut on the library, because that was the way that I wanted the buildings to go. But I think that generally the campus now does have an overall character to it and a continuity to it that I think is worthwhile.
Blum: You have been quoted as saying, "What I'm looking for from greenery is to make the buildings disappear." Can I assume from that, if you want greenery to hide the buildings, that you don't feel this is a totally successful project?
Brownson: No, I don't think so. When did I say that?
Blum: This was in the article in Inland Architect (August 1976) that Nory Miller wrote.
251 Brownson: You know, I don't really remember saying that or the context in which it was made.
Blum: You were talking about the modesty of the buildings.
Brownson: I think that's true because when you go around a city like Paris, for example, you're very conscious of the gardens and the trees and the planning. It gives kind of a scale to it, and depending on the use of how it goes. If you look at the master plan that I gave you for the landscaping, which is that small green book, there is one page, I think, on which I refer to it as the Auraria Green. What has happened to the campus now is that it's only been in the last few years—I think this is the second or the third year in which the trees will become evident on this campus, because they were recently planted. One of the things the joint budget committee would say is that "there is no money for landscaping." There were a number of things. One was, "These buildings are to have no air conditioning." Well, they are air-conditioned now. I said, "Were you ever in a room with thirty or forty sweaty kids? Don't tell me you're not going to air condition it. Everybody else has air conditioning." So we planned for it to be air conditioned in the future, and all we had to do was—which doesn't even show on this early photograph—we had to build two big refrigeration plants. They are simply very small buildings where we have refrigeration equipment, and then the supply goes through this central spine that runs down Tenth Street that feeds all of these buildings, this kind of mechanical tree that services the buildings. They said, "No air conditioning." John Love, who was the governor of the state of Colorado, a Republican governor, went to Washington as President Nixon's energy czar, and that's where that all came from. The other thing was no landscaping. Well, I said, "Could we have a few sticks, then?" remembering Caldwell. Caldwell said, "It's better to just put sticks in the ground anyway, because then you're not forcing the issue. The trees don't like to be moved when they're old, so just put sticks in the ground. They grow very fast." Well, now we're starting to see those sticks grow. There was no money for landscaping, so I went to the National Endowments for the Arts, to Ada Louise Huxtable. They gave us fifty thousand dollars to make that master landscaping plan,
252 which is in that green book, because the state wouldn't fund it. Then the other thing that they established, as I said before, was the fifteen thousand student limit, which I also knew was going to change. Then the other thing was that there was not to be very much parking. Well, they get overwhelmed with parking, and it's become the single largest factor to deal with in terms of the physical space. A human being doesn't take that much space, maybe two- by-two feet, but every car takes, what, eight feet wide and twenty feet—it takes a hundred and sixty square feet. The world is inhabited with cars to the tune of fifteen billion people just for the space that the cars occupy, so here you've got this major problem of automobiles to deal with. This was another thing that later on, oh, I think two or three years ago, they built a multistory garage which is down in the flood plain area, fortunately. But the whole idea for this parking was to create usable space and to put the cars below the buildings and to build on the air rights over the parking area. That was just like what we did in Chicago when I was with Murphy. We did those things for the Illinois Central air rights that is now that area by Wacker and the lake where we built on air rights. That's what I wanted to do here. In fact, some of the early photographs and sketches of the studies show all of these cars down below so that you would come up to the plaza level from below, and then it became all pedestrian, in effect, on the roof over this parking area.
Blum: A lot of this further development has gone on since you designed your master plan. Have you been involved in any of this further development?
Brownson: No—like they say in Chicago, "Yes, we owe it to them to let them run it," you know? That's what is rather irritating about being an architect. They run this stuff and some of it is pretty mediocre. The thing, of course, that has crept in on this campus is this lousy cake decoration. It's very innocuous. But you can't do too much. But the other thing that just opened is the light rail system. It just opened within the last month in the city and is the first light rail system. It's in today's Denver Post. We continually keep making the same mistakes over and over again. They built this light rail system at grade. Here is this train which can run easily at fifty miles an hour, so they have this very nice train and all of these latest things, and the train continually runs into
253 cars. They killed one pedestrian already. They run this thing at grade level through the downtown area of Denver.
Blum: Does this go through the campus?
Brownson: No, it comes on the south side of the campus along Colfax, but there is a station there that they built with arches and all kinds of gewgaws on it. So now this interurban, even though it's on the very perimeter of the campus and doesn't really affect people who are sighted and can see, it is a problem for the ones who have sight difficulties and hearing difficulties to become aware of it. Instead of clearly separating such a device from the pedestrians, there was no consideration of that given. In this morning's paper, the transportation district is now proposing to fence this in, to put fences along. Well, they can only fence within the block. They can't fence at the intersections. I said, "Are you going to run your elevators in a building with open doorways? Somebody is bound to—and there is going to be a conflict." But anyway, this light rail has just come into being. We have the bus connection, and there are good bus connections down to there so it's relatively easy to get to this campus.
Blum: Well, it's an urban campus, as is IIT.
Brownson: And the University of Illinois. The University of Illinois is very easy to get to because of the elevated or the CTA, and the Dan Ryan and Eisenhower expressways. It's got good transportation.
Blum: I can't help but think as you speak how much of your career has paralleled that of Mies. You were the head of a school.
Brownson: Yes, it has. It's frightening.
Blum: Was this deliberate? Was it a conscious effort on your part?
Brownson: I don't think so. No. It's just, how did I get to Denver? I didn't know a soul in
254 Denver. I didn't know anybody, and here I am, I'm out in Denver.
Blum: And you're still here.
Brownson: I like it here. I like the climate, I like the mountains, I like the space. And also, it's a young city. There is another thing, I think, if you look at my work, is that most of my work has been associated—with the exception, I suppose, of the Civic Center—but most of my work has been associated with younger people. There is that marvelous story of Charlie Chaplin. I think it's in Modern Lights. Do you remember when he rescued this young girl who thought she was paralyzed and couldn't dance anymore? One night Chaplin comes back to his home, and he finds her trying to kill herself by putting her head in the oven, and he picks her up and carries her away from there. She keeps asking him, "What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of life?" and Chaplin says, "There is no meaning, only desire." I've become much more active in the last couple of years here in Denver—there is so much going on and so many possibilities, you know. I made a study for the Platte River Valley for building Lake Denver. When I picked up a local newspaper one day I saw this overview of the Platte River Valley. There are about four- thousand-and-some acres of old, derelict train yards in this Platte River Valley, because this was the main hub of the railroads at one time. The river runs through there, the Platte River, and Cherry Creek. I looked at it, and for some reason it hit me, What a place for a lake! and I did a project for myself. So then I found out, well, how could you build something like this? How could you finance something like this? So I went to the state geologist. I was still working for the state when I did that. I went to the state geologist, and I said, "What goes on in this Platte River Valley?" He said, "Well, for one thing there is about a billion dollars' worth of construction aggregate in that valley." One of the things that we don't have even with all of the mountains, the Rocky Mountains are of very soft stone, and we do not make good concrete out here because the aggregate is soft. For example, most aggregate is made out of these river stones, the gravel, and it's very hard. Certain buildings in Chicago up on North Michigan Avenue are six-thousand-, seven-thousand-pound concrete. The stone that we use out here coming from
255 this mountain area, the so-called surface stone, is relatively soft. This is prime construction aggregate that has come down for millions of years down through this valley, so one of the possibilities would be to excavate that hundred feet of gravel in depth. I mean, this is a thing that has to be done in stages over many years, but you could build an unbelievable lake in that area. I'm known around here as the guy who is selling marina franchises on this lake that I intend to build downtown. When I'm talking to somebody I say, "Would you like to keep your boat down by the Union Station?" He says, "What are you talking about?" I say, "Well, when my lake gets built, why, you can have a dock down there." When you look at the planning for the city you would have a chance to completely change that area and to build a new kind of city that would rise up out of that lake. It's really grim in this whole section now. You know how many areas around IIT are pretty rundown, and the question is, how long is it going to take to develop it? But in Denver there is an activity going on, and one of the things that's happening is that the Platte River Valley is being developed for, well, there is a new baseball stadium that is going to open next spring, and then there is Elitch Garden which is an old amusement park that is going to open this spring. All of the stuff is up already. That's an experience, to stand on that bridge and look at that Platte River Valley, to imagine. I did this project in 1985 for the valley, and a friend of mine came one day and he had a whole bunch of bumper stickers, "Imagine a Great Lake." I've got one on the back of my old pickup truck, "Imagine a Great Lake." It is. It's the planning concept. Where in the hell are the architects? What have we been doing? The opportunities are there. We talked about one of the other problems. As I said, I went to Rainy Lake, and I've been going up there since 1965. All of the water comes down from the Hudson Bay drainage area, down through Rainy Lake, through Lake of the Woods, out the Churchill River and back into Hudson Bay again. It makes a big U-turn, a phenomenal amount of fresh water. I'm saying when I drive up through the Dakotas and Wyoming and through that area, I can just see this big Roman aqueduct coming down, carrying water down to Arizona. You know, we're going to have beachfront property. There is some singer who sings of selling beachfront property. But nobody is dealing with these kinds of problems. I alluded a little bit to it with the light rail system, and these
256 things admittedly have to start very small. But Joe Passanneau, when he built highway I-70 through Glenwood Canyon here in Colorado, now there is a spectacular piece of sculpture that's so good he can't believe how good that thing is. And yet, I don't care about a lot of these—it takes me back again to the TVA. If you look at the things that were built for the TVA, those are gems of architecture. That is it. That's the Pitti Palace of Tennessee.
Blum: Jacques, do you think it has been your experience, along with your maturity, that has led you to develop this sense of values? It's critical, in a way, but it's also visionary.
Brownson: But I think if you look back on the so-called years of the Depression in this country when I was younger and all of the things that were going on, although I was a part of it to the extent that I walked around when it was going on, there was a vitality. It seems to me that the country today lacks a kind of vision as to what we can do in terms of the United States. We get into these personalities, and that's why I think it's so futile to argue about Deconstructivism and Postmodernism and all of these other kinds of -isms. But what is it that is the will of our epoch? It's not individuals as such but rather we are only the instruments or the conveyers of ideas, and I don't see this kind of vitality, a desire to start things. The thing that interests me about Auraria is that here you're bringing together somebody who doesn't have a high school education, and he can go on to get a doctor's degree if that's important to him, he can open up his horizon. And there were people involved in Auraria who couldn't understand how you could associate bricklayers with—these knobby-handed guys coming here to study—with the more esoteric kinds of things that are going on. Where in the hell do they think this stuff comes from?
Blum: But aren’t you talking about a social solution?
Brownson: Yes, but I'm talking about this school, and it goes back again—somebody who reads this could say, "Here comes IIT again." "Here comes the architecture school again." Here was a big room with everybody in it. Guys
257 like me that asked Mies when he first saw him, "When are you going to move into your apartment?" Guys who don't know anything—and over on the next place somebody is working on a plan for the island of Hawaii, or somebody else is working on a thing in Bangladesh, or somebody else is doing a concert hall in architecture, or a library or any of those other kind of projects, that here as a beginner you become aware. Isn't education becoming aware? It's so simple. The thing that I like about Auraria is that it has the opportunity of opening up those horizons, and that's what interests me most, I think, in any of it.
Blum: Where is the hope and the vision that you obviously shared with people at IIT? What happened to it?
Brownson: I don't quite understand.
Blum: You said today's architects don't have any vision, and you're critical of them as cake decorators and things of this sort.
Brownson: All of us—and I throw myself into that same milieu—I think there is a cynicism that is going on. It seems that we're all so tired, or something, that there doesn't seem to be the energy to get out and work on these different kinds of projects anymore. What was it Jimmy Carter said, a malaise? The French call it ennui. Henry Van de Velde called it newness and novelty. The writer Brendan Gill in his discussion calls it Disneyitis.
Blum: Was that the way you would describe the atmosphere at IIT after the war when you went back?
Brownson: No. There was a period of time in there in which there was a real vitality in the school, and then it seemed that towards the end—Mies got tired and Hilbs got tired. The people were getting older and the younger people coming along didn't seem to have the energy in order to go beyond it. The one criticism at IIT was that the problems never changed. Students were still going back over and rehashing all the same kind of things. There was never
258 any kind of new vitality or energy put into it.
Blum: So you think it just sort of dissipated somewhere out there?
Brownson: It's energy, and energy dissipates.
Blum: Yours doesn't seem to have.
Brownson: I guess it's the second law of thermodynamics. If you're hot and it's cold, your heat is going to go to the cold, you know? The other thing I have to be careful about is that I'm somewhat out of touch with this electronic thing, this cyberspace, as they call it. But I must say, in last Sunday's New York Times was an article by, I think it was Herbert Muschamp, talking about Cyberpalladio. Somebody asked me at a computer conference what we were looking for in computers, and I just kind of kiddingly said to him, "I want to get one of those word processors where I press a button and tell them to go to hell like Hemingway would say it." That's unfortunately exactly what's happening in architecture. One time on the tube I saw this boss come in, and he hands something to this guy sitting at the computer, and he said, "Take the bicycle out and put a car in." It's like what Karl did at Murphy's, "Take the sport coat off and put him in a business suit," only now you can do it just clickety-click and it changes. When I say that I have to be careful, because it's certain that when I am going to saw, I’ll pick up a Skil saw or one of those motorized saws to cut a piece of wood, if I've got one of them. I'm not going to take the handsaw just because I want to saw it by hand. I want to cut the piece of wood. Now, what are the capabilities of this technology? The Parthenon is not going to be improved with fluorescent lights, you know? You're not going to improve it with technology. There is a spirit there, a padiea, as the Greeks say. Technology won't change that.
Blum: And you think this spirit has dissipated?
Brownson: I can't generalize about that. I have a feeling like that, but, on the other hand, when I see some of my young grandchildren, when I was having all of this
259 difficulty with my eyes, my grandson, I think he's about nine or ten years old, he gives me a long dissertation on the eye, that he had studied the structure of the eye in his science classes. At his age? So then you've got to ask, Why are these kids so turned off? Perhaps we can't keep up with them.
[Tape 10: Side 2]
Brownson: This is involved with education, but I would defy you or me to, at our ages, learn the multiplication tables. We couldn't do it. Two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is—to go through all the rote of learning that thing. The thing that we don't recognize is the capabilities of these younger people and their ability. They are exposed to so many things that we have to somehow or other open that energy and get that energy flowing. It will atrophy otherwise.
Blum: Are you doing anything in that direction?
Brownson: About the only thing I am thinking about is, particularly after this—well, not only was it the flooding with the Mississippi River but the summer before there was a drought and they couldn't use the Mississippi. One day it's feast, the next it's famine. We know that the Mississippi River is higher than all of the surrounding land. It's been built up over the years, and it's been leveed to death with all of these walls and things on it, and the main question is how that thing really works. And with this tremendous population shift the energy in the country is moving from the East towards the West. There is no question. I suppose it is moving from East to West because all of the energy of the earth is moving that way, too. But it gets into the problems of planning, with California, thirty-two million people in the state of California. That was the population of the whole country when Abraham Lincoln took office as president. Frank Lloyd Wright, when he died in 1959 there were, what, one hundred fifty million people in the United States? There are now almost three hundred million people.
Blum: Our problems are different, and the solutions…
260 Brownson: The problems, and the solutions and the way of looking at things must all be different. We're talking about the population in Colorado becoming somewhere around five million in the year 2020. The main question is, Where are you going to get the water to support this many people? This is desert country, and we pumped all of the water out. We had at one time in the United States a National Resources Planning Board during the Roosevelt administration. We made the agricultural atlas under the WPA. But I don't see these kinds of studies going on now. We have an office of state planning and budgeting in Colorado. What are they doing? What are these guys doing? I don't see them doing anything. There doesn't seem to be any discussion because there is the kind of feeling that there is nothing to do—it is inevitable, fate.
Blum: And that isn't the way you felt in 1947. You felt you could do something.
Brownson: We were going to change—after we came back from the Army we were going to make a change. There was change. There was the United Nations coming. There was new housing. There was the Lustron House. Do you remember the Lustron House?
Blum: Yes, I do.
Brownson: It would come up on a truck and be complete—that night you could move in and eat off the table. There were all kinds of things going on. Now it ends up, you sit down at zoning and political administration meetings and discuss the manipulation of the stock market and the problems in Orange County and all of these kinds of things. But I'm not pessimistic. I think these things are all out there, and it's simply a question of how to get the discussion going. I think it is through our schools and that process. I don't know how the Disney Magnet School in Chicago worked out. Has anybody made any kind of a study of how those things are working? All we hear out here is the difficulty with the schooling in the inner cities. We have that problem here in Denver, too, because of the changing demography and the demographics of the area.
261 Blum: Were these broad problems part of your concerns in, say, 1947?
Brownson: Oh, yes, sure.
Blum: Was that because you were curious or was it because the school itself was connected to the world around itself?
Brownson: The school was curious. One of the very strong points of Chicago is the resources that you have to draw on there. I think I mentioned the Oriental Institute. There was also the group, the so-called political scientists working down at the University of Chicago. The geographers were there. Take the University of Chicago alone. Fifty-one Nobel laureates out of one institution? There is no other place like that.
Blum: So was it through the proximity to this kind of resource that IIT was very realistic in its approach?
Brownson: Yes, through this experience and contact with them. Rexford G. Tugwell was at the University of Chicago. Before that he was with Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal. Then you take Saul Alinsky. People forget about the labor activity in Chicago and the kind of things that were going on. And we would be down at the University of Chicago from time to time, different group meetings there.
Blum: Students from IIT?
Brownson: Yes, students from IIT would meet down there. Then there is that marvelous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Do you know that one?
Blum: No.
Brownson: That is about the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, and about the guy, Zen, and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's the most
262 fascinating book to read. It asks, what is quality? Everybody talks about "Quality is Job #1," as Ford Motor Company says. This is an old book that goes back. I learned something from it, really. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about this guy that was always searching for what quality is, and he ends up traveling across the United States with a friend of his who also has a motorcycle. But the difference between the two of them is, he maintains his motorcycle and keeps everything spotless and is always working on it while the other guy simply rides his motorcycle till it doesn't work anymore, throws it away and gets another one. So it's a different way of looking at things. Where the Zen comes in is that if you're putting a nut on a stud and you're turning that thing, you never force anything; there is a rhythm to work that transcends all force in order to do it. He talks about his journeys, how he went to Navy Pier to find out what quality was, and what he found out at the University of Chicago and the forces behind that university. In a way, IIT, in the beginning when Henry Heald was there, was involved. Henry Heald was an interesting man. He was responsible for the South Side Planning Board, and his horizon was much wider than most educators.
Blum: Jacques, as you think back over your career, how do you hope people will remember you?
Brownson: Well, it's like I guess we say the saying about the mountains—they don't care whether you're here, or they don't care whether you're not here. They simply don't consider it. It has no real meaning. I think the only thing that I would hope is that I have been fair and that I have been able to build on what has come to me from the many generations before me, and that I have made some contribution. As I walk around the Auraria campus today, probably nobody will even know who I am, and they shouldn't know who I am because I'm not a part of their activity. I give you very convoluted statements, I guess, but I remember one time there was a group of us with Mies, and Mies was talking about Braque and Klee and some other painters, and somebody asked him about a group in Chicago called the Hairy Who, and they asked Mies what he thought about these different artists. He said, "I
263 really don't know anything about them," and somebody said, "Why is that?" and he said, "They're not a part of my life. That's another era. I can tell you about things that I was a part of or that I can go back to, but I don't really know what's going on with those things." You only can do what you can do. We talked about all of the people that I've been involved with in terms of all of the work that I've done, and this whole question of originality I think is a real curse. I think that you just do what you can do and what you think is needed. If it's original or if it has any quality or if it has any kind of significance, so be it. But I think the whole idea of doing things simply to be different makes no sense, and I've tried to avoid that. I would much rather make something that is serviceable. If I'm making a pair of shoes, I would hope that the shoes don't hurt your feet and that you can walk around comfortably in them. I don't want to design them as such. I don't want to make designer shoes out of them. Nobody should be able to say, "Who in the hell made this pair of shoes? They hurt my feet all the time." So I think that's what we do in building. Who was it?—Ruskin, I guess, said they should be serviceable, they should have commodity, they should give you a reasonable value, they should satisfy certain fundamentals, and then hopefully they can also sing to you and can also have a spirit to them that comes across and comes through all of that. It's interesting, you know, Kurt Schwitters—I've got a couple of old chairs here in the back. I call them Schwitters chairs. Nobody really knows what I mean by Schwitters chairs, but you know. Schwitters was a collector of old junk and in his house he had this collection of stuff that started out originally on the ground and went up, and then he cut a hole in the ceiling and it kept on going and piled up. So these are a couple of found chairs. They're of no significance at all, just a couple of found chairs. But anyway, Schwitters would give these tone poems or tone sessions where he would go before kind of group gatherings, and he would get up and he would go, "Ooh, aah, eee, ooh, aah, oh, eee, eee, ooh, ooh, ooh," and people were just enthralled by listening to that. Here was the profundity of all of that. Schwitters, in effect, would say, "What kind of nuts are these? I go up there and I do these, ‘Eee, eee, ooh, ah,’ and they think I'm really telling them something.” And it's also like a friend of mine. He's a flamenco guitarist, an old guy down in Taos, New Mexico. He went to the University
264 of Kansas at Lawrence, Kansas, and he took this old bus and went over there and he gave these concerts. And then he says, "Everybody asks me what I'm doing and all of these kinds of things. I'm just playing my guitar. If you enjoy it, that's what it is. Don't ask me to explain everything." So you ask, "What do I want to be known for?" I want to be known that I did some quality work.
Blum: That sounds good to me Jacques, thank you very much.
Brownson: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to do this. It brings back a lot of thoughts and memories, and hopefully I've tried to convey these to other people who will read this.
Blum: I know that this oral history will be best appreciated by people who read this to learn more about your career and times.
Brownson: Thank you.
Blum: Thank you.
265 SELECTED REFERENCES
"A Downtown Denver Campus Will Accommodate Three Colleges." Architectural Record 158, 2 (August 1975): 40. "Architectural Record Houses of 1956." Architectural Record 119 (Mid-May 1956): 206-07. Boudaille, Georges. "L'Urbanisme aux USA." Lettres Francaises 6 February 1958. "Brownson's New Work in Denver." Inland Architect 17 (November 1973): 16-17. Brownson, Jacques C. "Richard J. Daley Plaza Revisited." September 1992. (typescript) Brownson, Jacques. "The Urban Space Concepts of Mies van der Rohe." In Four Makers of Modern Architecture. New York: Columbia University, 1963. "Chicago Civic Center: Dignity and Continuity." Progressive Architecture Observer 47 (October 1966): 244-47. Douglas, Anne. "Geneva Residence A Blend of Steel, Glass and Brick. Sunday Tribune, 12 July 1953. In Scrapbook on Architecture, pp. 32-33. Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. "Fourth Annual Design Awards Program." Progressive Architecture 38 (January 1957): 88-135. Grube, Oswald, Pran, Peter, and Schulze, Franz. 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago. Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1976. Guevrekian, Gabriel. "Jeunes Architectes aux Etats-Unis." L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 28 (19 September 1957): 72-95. Heyer, Paul. Architects on Architecture. New York: Walker and Company, 1966. Hilberseimer, Ludwig. Urbanisme aux Etats-Unis. Paris: American Cultural Center, 1958. (exhibition catalogue) McCarthy, Ray. "Architects Chosen for Loop Civic Center," Chicago's American, 10 March 1960. Miller, Nory. "Jacques Brownson: A Chicagoan in Denver." Inland Architect 20 (August 1976): 7-15. Newman, M. W. "A Sandwich by Picasso." Chicago Daily News, 21 September 1966. "Pick Architects to Supervise Civic Center." Chicago Sun-Times, 10 March 1960. "The House That Jacques Built." Popular Mechanics Magazine 87, 4 (April 1947): 89, 105-112, 252, 256, 260, 264. Tredant, Paul. "L'Amerique a trois dimensions. "Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 30 January 1958.
266 "With Steel Components Like These You Can Build A Home." House & Home 7-8 (December 1955): 138-51. Zukowsky, John. "The Civic Center, 1965." In The Sky's the Limit. Edited by Pauline A. Saliga. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
267 JACQUES CALMAN BROWNSON
Born: 3 August 1923, Aurora, Illinois
Education: Illinois Institute of Technology, B. S., 1948 Illinois Institute of Technology, M. S., 1954
Government U. S. Army Corps of Engineer, 1944-45 Service:
Employment Office of James A. Speyer, 1947 History: Office of Frazier & Raftery, 1950-53 Bruno Conterato, 1955 C. F. Murphy Associates (formerly Naess & Murphy), 1959-66 Chicago Public Building Commission, Managing Architect, 1968-72 Auraria Higher Education Center, Denver, Colorado, Director of Planning and Development, 1972-76 Department of Administration, State of Colorado, Director, State Buildings Division, 1976-86 Private Practice, 1986-present
Teaching: Illinois Institute of Technology, 1948-59 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Chairman Department of Architecture, 1966-68 Guest Lecturer, 1961-1986
Honors: Geneva House, Architectural Record, 1956 Plate Shop for Allied Lead Construction Company, Award Citation, Progressive Architecture, 1957 Richard J. Daley Center (formerly Civic Center), Award of Excellence, American Institute of Steel Construction, 1966; Honor Award, American Institute of Architects, 1968
268 Selected "Planning in the USA" [Urbanisme aux Etats-Unis], American Cultural Exhibitions: Center, Paris, France, 1957 "Work in Architecture 1950-65," University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966 "100 Years of Architecture in Chicago: Continuity of Structure and Form," Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1973 "Mies Reconsidered: His Career, Legacy and Disciples," Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1986
269 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS
Abbott, Frank 237 Callanan, John 229 Addams, Jane 79, 221 Callery, Mary 57 Adler, David 110 Candido, Anthony 43 Albano, Joseph 210 Carlson, C. I. (Pop) 2, 4, 105 Alinsky, Saul 262 Caudill, Rowlette & Scott 240 Allen, Frank 207 Century of Progress International Allied Lead Construction Company 113 Exposition, 1993-34, Chicago, Illinois 13, American Institute of Architects (AIA) 16, 17-18, 19 73 Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France 36, Arnold, Tiger 189 141-42 Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, New Illinois 25-26 York 156 Arup, Ove 95 Cherry Creek Shopping Mall, Denver, Auraria Higher Education Center, Colorado 40 Denver, Colorado 22, 42, 93, 100, Chicago Civic Center (now Richard J. Daley 135, 144, 145, 161, 219, 235-54 Center and Plaza), Chicago, Illinois 155, 159, 163, 168, 169-78, 183, 184, 185, 187, Bach, Ira 170 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 201, Beeby, Thomas 218 202, 218 Behrens, Peter 101 Chicago Civic Center Architects 169, 170, Benjamin, Asher 110 172, 175, 192 Bennett, Edward H. 150-51 Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) 149 Bennett, Richard Marsh 193-94 Chicago Seven 215 Bethlehem Steel 185, 198 Cho, Al 172, 177 Blake, Peter 86 Christensen, Robert W. 170, 175, 186, 200 Blaser, Werner 30 Clemente, Roberto High School, Chicago, Bluestein, Earl 142 Illinois 220 Borges, Jorge 32 Cloisters, New York, New York 38 Boyle, John 107 Commonwealth Promenade Apartments, Braff, Ruby 217 Chicago, Illinois 167 Brenner, Daniel 124, 125 Conterato, Bruno 111-113 Broadacre City (project) 88 Continental Center (now CNA Center), Brownson, Clyde (father of Jacques) 4-5, Chicago, Illinois 132, 159-161, 165, 166, 6, 10, 13, 14, 15, 18, 23-24 167, 168, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184 Brownson, Doris (wife of Jacques) 15, Corner, Malcolm D. (Mack) 185 62, 69, 97, 116, 118 Crystal House (Century of Progress Brownson, Jacques (house) Geneva, International Exposition, 1933-34), Illinois 114-129, 162, 175 Chicago, Illinois 16, 17 Buckingham Fountain, Chicago, Illinois 19, 168 Daley, William (Bill) 68, 69 Bunshaft, Gordon 155-56 Daley, Richard J. 186, 219-21 Burgee, John 173 Daley, Richard M. (son of Richard J.) 235 Burleigh, Thomas R. (Tom) 27 Danforth, George 26, 28, 29, 101, 114 Burnham, Daniel Hudson 150 De Stefano, James 160 Dinkeloo, John 183 Cabrini Green, Chicago, Illinois 21, 90 Doxiades, Konstantinos 212 Caldwell, Alfred 70-71, 103, 134, 142, 252 Dubin, Arthur 15
270 Dunlap, William (Bill) 68, 69, 72, 117, Graham, Bruce 20, 155, 186, 192 172, 173, 192 Graham, Ernest 154 Durham Cathedral, Durham, England Graves, Michael 39 141-42 Greenwald, Herbert 110, 181 Dyett Middle School, Chicago, Illinois Gropius, Walter 142, 144 221 Grossman, Ted 247, 251 Dymaxion Car 16 Gutman, Robert 231
Eaton, Leonard 110 Haid, David 200, 221 Edwards & Hjorth 181 Hamilton, Larry 236, 237 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Harla, Ralph 69, 72 Illinois 34, 84, 94-95, 131-32, 149, 156, Hartmann, William (Bill) 200 166, 167-68 Harvard University, Cambridge, Ellington, Duke 106-07 Massachusetts 143 Erenkrantz, Ezra 228 Heald, Henry 75, 236, 263 Henrici's Restaurant, Chicago, Illinois 174 Farnsworth, Edith (house), Plano, Hilberseimer, Ludwig 28, 32, 39, 44, 65, 66, Illinois 31, 117-121, 134, 137 67, 68, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 94, Federal Bureau of Investigation 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 114, 121, 142-46, Building, Washington, D. C. 155 148, 150, 201 Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 171, 190 Holabird & Root 204, 205 Ferris, James (Jim) 153, 160, 168 Holabird, John A. 2 Field Building, Chicago, Illinois 161, 172 Hovey, David 251 First National Bank of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 158, 195 Illinois Bell Long Line Switching Building, Folgers, Kenneth 106, 171, 173, 192 Chicago, Illinois 203, 204 Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Florida 84 Chicago, Illinois 2, 13, 25, 31, 39, 42, 45, Ford, Henry 11 66-67, 70, 73, 74, 76, 93, 96, 108, 129, 142, Ford, Jack 14 145, 149, 155, 208, 216, 236 Francik, Al 196 Illinois Institute of Technology, Alumni Frazier & Raftery 109, 110, 203 Memorial Hall (formerly the Navy Frazier, Raftery, Orr & Fairbank 109 Building), Chicago, Illinois 102 Frazier, Walter 109, 111 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chemistry Freund, Karl 117, 118, 137 Building, Chicago, Illinois 102 Friedman, Yonna 215 Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown Hall, Fuller, Buckminster 16, 19, 68 Chicago, Illinois 106-07, 130-33, 167 Fullham, Noel 171, 173 Illinois Institute of Technology, Old Main, Chicago, Illinois 30-31 Gabo, Naum 35 Institute of Design, Chicago, Illinois 66 Gage Building, Chicago, Illinois 67 Isaacs, Reginald R. 216 Gehry, Frank 31 Genther, Charles (Skip) 95, 101 Jahn, Helmut 154, 161, 218, 247-48, 251 George Washington Bridge, New York, Jarick, George 172, 177, 192 New York 37-38 John Deere Building, Moline, Illinois 183 Germeraad, Gerritt 155 Johnson, Kelly 213 Gladych, Stanislav Z. (Stan) 158, 218 Johnson, Philip (house), New Canaan, Goldberg, John E. 181, 182 Connecticut 119-120, 136, 137 Goldsmith, Myron 117-18, 161 Johnson, Philip 91, 119-20, 247 Graf Zeppelin 101
271 Kahn, Albert 20-21, 177-78, 212 Moeller, Marta 45, 67, 69 Kamel, Abdel 115 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 21, 66 Keane, Thomas 220 Moore, Henry 196, 200 Keck, George Fred 18 Murphy, Charles F., Jr. 153 Keck, William 18 Murphy, Charles Francis 65, 108, 152, 153, Khan, Fazlur 182, 192 157, 158, 159, 160, 170, 178, 200 Klay, Pafford 151 Murphy, C. F., Associates 64, 65, 132, 149, King, Saul 212 150, 154, 155, 169, 171, 172, 173, 247, 251 Klinefelter, Clara Fahler (grandmother Murphy, Robert 153 of Jacques) 7-9 Muschamp, Herbert 20, 259 Klinefelter, Joel (grandfather of Jacques) Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New 7-9 York, New York 56, 57, 100, 117 Kommenda, Irwin 36 Myhrum, Arthur 12 Koolhaas, Rem 21 Kornacker, Frank 95, 123, 131, 132, 133, Naess & Murphy 150 167 Naess, Sigurd 150, 154-55, 161 Krehbiel, Alfred 28-29 Nakonechny, Bohdan (Dan) 172, 200 Kreidich, John 239 National Endowment for the Arts 259 Navy Building: see Illinois Institute of Lambert, Phyllis 95 Technology, Alumni Hall Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Netsch, Walter 144, 155 Jeanneret 31 Newburg, Gust K. 186, 187 Leckey, Wayne 96-97 Newburg, Gust K., Construction Company Lesher, Edward 213-214 187 Liang, Yen 55, 56, 57 Ninth Street Historical Park, Denver, Lion Gate, Mycenae, Greece 82-83 Colorado 236 Loebl, Jerrold 2, 3, 173 Northern Trust Bank, Chicago, Illinois 151, Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett 169-173 153 Lohan, Dirk 220 Ludeking, Robert 200 O’Hare Field, Chicago, Illinois 40, 150 Lustron House 68, 261 Olencki, Edward 210 Otis Elevator 158 Mackinac Bridge, Mackinac Island, Michigan 37 Paepcke, Elizabeth (Pussy) 111 Maillol, Aristide 196 Passanneau, Joseph (Joe) 257 Malcolmson, Reginald 83, 115, 192, 206 Penrose, Roland 200 Manny, Carter 68, 150, 154, 158 Pepsi-Cola Building, New York, New York Marovitz, Abraham Lincoln 107 156 Marshall, Benjamin 110 Perkins & Will 227-28 McKinsey, Richard D. 6 8 Peterhans, Walter 67, 71 Mell, Alfred 28 Picardi, Al 181, 182, 192 Mendelsohn, Erich 67 Picasso, Pablo 34, 57, 135, 199, 200, 266 Meyerson, Martin 216 Popular Mechanics House, Aurora, Illinois Michaels, Tom 172, 179, 180 96-100 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 1, 24, 25, 30- Prudential Building, Chicago, Illinois 157, 31, 34-37, 39-40, 43, 45, 56-57, 71, 73, 161, 172, 187 74, 82, 84, 94, 101, 102, 117-21, 128- 29, 131-32, 149, 156, 166, 168, 190-93, Raftery, Howard 109-11, 203, 268 206, 208, 210, 231, 236, 249, 254, 258, Rapson, Ralph 21, 66 263 Reckitt, Squire 116
272 Richard J. Daley Center and Plaza 333 North Michigan, Chicago, Illinois 2, 203 (formerly Chicago Civic Center) 1-3, Tigerman, Stanley 16, 62, 215 38, 92, 104, 107, 127, 132, 135, 155, Tritsis, Anthony 115 158, 195-97, 240 Tugwell, Rexford G. 216, 262 Robertson, H. H, Company 162, 163, 182 Roche, John 132, 133, 151, 164-65, 172, United Nations Secretariat Building, New 177-83 York, New York 57 Roche, Kevin 115, 132-33, 183 United States Steel Corporation 185, 212, Roebling, John Augustus 37, 38, 89 213 Rome, John 123 University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 142, Root, John 2 144, 216, 221, 262 Rummel, Charles 154, 203-204 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Rutan, Bert 14 Michigan 207-209 Usonian House 40 Saarinen, Eero 67, 183 Santa Fe Building, Chicago, Illinois 154, Van de Velde, Henry 38, 82 161 Veranzano Bridge, New York, New York 37 Schlossman, Norman 200 Vlad, Ernest 123, 133 Schweikher, Paul 138, 209 Schwitters, Kurt 264 Wachsmann, Konrad 21 Shaw, Alfred 118 Walt Disney Magnet School, Chicago, Simpson, Otto von 216 Illinois 227 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 20, Weese, Harry 230 61, 152, 155, 169-73, 181, 210, 219, 247 Wegner, Karl 65, 259 Sojourner Truth Primary School, Wong, Y. C. 222 Chicago, Illinois 220 Wright, Frank Lloyd 17, 38, 40, 68, 90, 138, Sollinger, Robert 161-162 260 Solomon A. Smith 151, 153, 170 Wurman, Richard Saul 215 Solomon Cordwell 170 Spencer, Henry Cecil 29-31 Young, Whitney, Magnet High School, Speyer, A. James 69, 71, 72 Chicago, Illinois 226 Speyer, Darthea 77, 86 Stein, Clarence 143 Steinman, David 37 Stone, Edward Durell 112, 240 Straus Building, Chicago, Illinois 160, 168 Summers, Gene 218 Sun-Times Building, Chicago, Illinois 154 Swenson, Alfred 175
Takeuchi, Arthur 171, 173, 192, 222 Tavern Club, Chicago, Illinois 172 Tawney, Lenore 71-72 Taylor, Robert, Homes, Chicago, Illinois 90, 149 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 76 Thompson, D’Arcy 133
273