ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES LEE NAGLE Interviewed by Annemarie van Roessel 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 © 2000 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 this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago. CONTENTS Preface iv Outline of Topics vi Oral History 1 Selected References 155 Appendix: Curriculum Vitæ 159 Index of Names and Buildings 161 iii PREFACE A true son of the Midwest, James ‘Jim” Nagle was born into a family where building skills were paramount. Always passionate about carpentry and construction, he expanded his expertise by studying architecture on both the east and west coasts and by sating his interest in early modern Dutch and Scandinavian design philosophies though international travel and study. Nagle began his career in Chicago in a small atelier of like-minded architects, soon opening his own firm with kindred spirit Larry Booth. In the midst of Chicago’s fledgling preservation movement in the 1960s and 70s, he contributed his expertise and enthusiasm to the rescue of H.H. Richardson’s magnificent Glessner House and was a founding member of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. In the mid-1970s, he accepted an invitation to join the Chicago Seven, a brotherhood of brash young architects that challenged the reign of Miesians in Chicago through architecture and sought to reclaim the legacy of lesser-appreciated architects through writings and exhibitions. Although the most well-defined activities of the Chicago Seven ended in the mid-1980s, these choices, and others, have led Nagle to his current position as one of Chicago’s most respected architects. Now, nearly twenty-five years after their debut in "Chicago Architects," the first of their controversial and thought-provoking exhibitions, the definitive history of the Chicago Seven has yet to be written. It is our hope that Jim Nagle’s recollections, reminiscences and interpretations of the Chicago Seven’s activities and his own career will shed a bright light on this critical period in Chicago’s architectural history. I met with Jim Nagle in the conference room at his firm, Nagle, Hartray, Danker, Kagan, McKay, on June 16, 17, and 18, 1998, to record his oral history memoirs on five ninety- minute audio tapes. We conducted the interview in a spirit of thoughtful reflection, recognizing that this oral history would address only a fraction of his career. The transcription has been minimally edited to maintain the spirit, tone and flow of Nagle’s original narrative and has been reviewed for accuracy and clarity by both Jim and me. The selected references I found useful in preparing this interview are appended in two sections: those of general interest about the Chicago Seven, and articles written by others about Nagle’s work. Nagle’s oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago as well as on The Art Institute of Chicago’s web page. iv Thanks are due to many people in the process of bringing this oral history to completion. First, I am deeply grateful to Jim Nagle for his eloquence, candor, and ready willingness to commit the hours needed to record his oral history while balancing the heavy demands of a busy practice. Special thanks go to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts for funding this group project. For her canny eye, unflagging patience, and good humor in editing this manuscript—as well as for her ongoing mentoring in the art of oral histories—I am deeply indebted to Betty Blum, Director of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project. Annemarie van Roessel August 2000 v OUTLINE OF TOPICS Family Background 1 Stanford University and California Architecture 2 Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 14 At Harvard University 20 A Fulbright in Holland and a Recent Revisit 28 Working in Stanley Tigerman’s Office 35 Larry Booth and Jim Nagle Open Their Office 37 Housing Jobs 38 How the Office Worked 41 More Projects 43 Preservation 49 Changing Attitudes of the Times 56 An Exhibition of Architecture in Chicago of the 1930s and 1940s 60 Two Architectural Exhibitions and the Ideas Behind Them 60 Symposium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 69 “Seven Chicago Architects” at the Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago 71 “Forty Under Forty” Exhibition 79 “The State of the Art of Architecture” Symposium 82 Change in Design 84 More about the Symposium 86 “The Exquisite Corpse” Exhibition at Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago 88 “Town Houses” Exhibition at the Graham Foundation, Chicago 94 American Institute of Architects Awards 98 Revival of the Chicago Architectural Club 103 “Late Entries to the Tribune Tower Competition” Exhibition, Chicago 112 Booth, Nagle & Hartray Becomes Nagle & Hartray 117 “New Chicago Architecture” Exhibition, Chicago 119 Reflections on Projects and Issues 124 “Tops” Competition and Exhibition, Chicago 128 Involvement with the Chicago Architectural Club 130 7 + 11 Symposium 132 vi What Lies Ahead? 138 Assessing the Impact of the Chicago Seven and What It Led To 143 Nagle’s Approach and Ideas About Architecture Today 146 vii JAMES LEE NAGLE vanR: Today is June 17, 1998, and I’m with Jim Nagle in his office in Chicago. Jim, you’ve been practicing architecture for over thirty-five years. You worked briefly in Boston while you were finishing your degree at Harvard, and you came to Chicago, where you’ve developed a thriving practice doing a variety of projects, including commercial, institutional, and residential commissions. You’ve been very active with civic and professional work, including positions with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. You’ve been a visiting lecturer and critic at universities across the United States. Your work began to attract attention in the late 1960s in your partnership with Larry Booth and the two of you received much wider recognition in the 1970s as your work began to win many awards. In the 1970s, you became part of a group of rebel architects called the Chicago Seven. That part of your life has been fairly well documented, so I’d like you to speak about the environment in which you became an architect and your impressions of the architectural scene against which you and your colleagues were rebelling. You were born in Iowa City in 1937. Would you describe your family? Nagle: The name Nagle in German means “nail”, like the carpenter’s nail. My family was in the retail lumber and carpentry business. My father, grandfather, and uncle began the company in the 1920s and so I grew up in the lumber business and I worked in the company and spent a lot of time on the weekends and in the summers working as a carpenter. I also spent a summer working as a mason’s apprentice. I started all this in junior high and high school. So I grew up building. It was a nice environment, a small town and a university town. There was no school of architecture there—that was in Ames—but we did have a strong arts school at the university. When I was 1 in grade school, I went to school at the edge of town with only two classrooms and there were two students per class. I went to the regular high school and that’s when we started doing a lot of building. So I grew up in that tradition and took a lot of training in building and drawing. I also started out working in drafting and putting together houses at the lumber company, before I went to college. vanR: Did your parents encourage you to pursue the artistic side of architecture? Nagle: Actually, they wanted me to work in the lumber company. My brother ended up going into the lumber business. I ended up being an architect, which I decided to do when I was a sophomore in college at Stanford. The reason I went to Stanford was that it was the hardest school to get into. It was the one that took me the longest, I wasn’t accepted until August 5th, which is my birthday, so I barely got in. I got into a lot of other schools, but I really wanted to go to Stanford. My brother had gone there and my father had wanted to go there, but the real reason was that Herbert Hoover had gone there and my dad was a good Iowan. Stanford had a very good school of architecture, even though it was small. When I was there it was under the art department, but after I left it went to the engineering department. Stanford abandoned the school in 1972, largely because it didn’t make any money for the university because it was such a small school. It was really sad because there were a lot of us who had gone there—that’s where I met Larry Booth and later, Diane Legge and Cal Audrain. Cal was a year ahead of me and had been at Harvard in the planning department. The reason that Stanford threw it over was that it didn’t generate what that university felt was important in terms of their school. But when I was there, it was wonderful because we started right out freshman year and we all went into architecture and it was in the second year that the engineers started getting out of engineering school and coming into architecture.