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. We had a class of twelve or fifteen people who were quite talented. Looking back on it, half of those people have their own offices now and I stay in touch with them. Again, I had this small environment to work through, which I really enjoyed. The interesting thing was that when we went there in the 1950s—I got there
2 in 1955 and graduated in 1959—that was when California was really being built. It was a big time in the Bay Area and all of El Camino Real—there were those wonderful car washes and all that zippy stuff and the boomerang Formica and all that stuff that everybody loves now. That was the sort of thing that we were all fascinated by. I liked it a lot because it also had to do with the building tradition that I understood, which was carpentry and woodworking. Our hero was Bernard Maybeck and that whole Bay Area school. It was really what Stanford was all about. As a result of that, it may be even stronger in that tradition. While I was a student at Stanford, I designed two or three houses. One that I worked on was built out there. vanR: I’d like to go back a minute to situate you before you get to Stanford. You talk about doing drafting work and other jobs for your family’s lumberyard in Iowa. Were you aware of what an architect did at that time?
Nagle: Oh sure. At that time, our hero always was Frank Lloyd Wright. We knew about him from way back. vanR: How did you first find out about him?
Nagle: Oh, I think it was from reading. I was always interested in architecture. I used to draw all the time and I picked up books. My brother was four years older than I was and he was interested in architecture and went to architecture school too, although he ended up running the lumber business. So I picked it up from him. vanR: Did you travel at all in the Midwest to see the work of Sullivan or Wright, for example?
Nagle: We knew a little about the banks that Sullivan did. Then I took some courses and I picked some up that way. I don’t remember exactly, I just did it. vanR: Did you ever go to Chicago?
3 Nagle: Oh yeah. It was marvelous. We used to stay at the Edgewater Beach Hotel and the waves lapped right up to the dining room window—it’s now all fill land. And, of course, we used to go to the Cub games. We used to travel all around the city and look at the new buildings and architecture. What we used to do for recreation at home on Sunday afternoon was, after we’d go to church and have dinner, we’d drive around to find out what was being built. My father used to have to find out what was being built in case somebody was using something that he didn’t get to furnish. vanR: Do you recall what kind of houses were being built in Iowa City at that time?
Nagle: Oh, they were just 1950s ordinary split-level houses. Actually, looking back on it, they were probably pretty pleasant, not very stylistic, but that was mostly what was going on. vanR: You also said that you took drafting in high school. What kind of influence did your teachers have on you?
Nagle: They were encouraging. But by then I knew that I wanted to be an architect. vanR: You have spoken briefly about Stanford. Did you know that Stanford had a pre-architecture program when you applied?
Nagle: Oh sure. My brother was doing it—he was two years ahead of me. He spent a couple of years at Iowa and then he went into the architecture program at Stanford. vanR: How did that affect your preparation for the program?
Nagle: I was a little bit more prepared than the other kids. The reason was that I had done building work and a lot of people hadn’t. But we set about learning in a constructivist way, that was always my attitude toward things.
4 vanR: Did you want to begin your architectural education away from the more codified schools on the East Coast?
Nagle: Well, it was good to get away from Iowa, too—it wasn’t terribly stimulating beyond the building aspect of things. Of course, California had a tremendous amount of building going on. It was really interesting to see. We got out there and we found out about people like Maybeck and that whole Bay Area school. But even at Stanford at the time I knew about Rudolph Schindler and I started to find out about De Stijl and all the things that I’ve been interested in since. vanR: How did you find out about these architects? Were they taught in your classes?
Nagle: No, we got some history courses, but it was mostly finding out about Wright and then finding out about how De Stijl worked before and after that. vanR: One of the things that is often noted about that period of time is that there were relatively few books about architectural history around. What kind of books were available to you?
Nagle: I found books in the library and at bookstores. Also, one of the things that we used to have a lot of fun doing—along with going to school and doing liberal arts work and all that—we were just doing a lot of fun things and we used to go around and see a lot. One of the people who was in my class was John Pflueger. His father and uncle were very important architects in the history of San Francisco—Timothy Pflueger had designed the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. John took us out and showed us all the art deco buildings that they had done and that sort of thing. vanR: So you were also trading ideas with your peers. What were your professors teaching you about architectural history?
5 Nagle: There was a very good professor, his name was Edward Farmer, who taught the history of architecture. My brother was his teaching assistant and put the slides together and all that. My wife and I—we were married in our senior year in college—took the course together and it was really quite good. He covered architecture from day one through the current period—it was taught in my sophomore and junior years. The other exposure that we had was from the visiting professors in the studios. Because it was in the art department, there was a very good artist there whose name was Matt Kahn. He was an important local artist. He felt strongly about the collaboration of art and architecture—he truly believed the Bauhaus theories and we really began to understand what composition and all that had to do with graphics and architecture. It was all interrelated and it was all taught in the Bauhaus way. vanR: That was the prevailing method of teaching at that time, since the Beaux-Arts method had fallen out of favor. Were there any remnants of the Beaux-Arts system left at Stanford?
Nagle: Oh, sure. Maybeck was one of them, his work and all that, and we sketched his buildings. But it wasn’t anything that we took seriously—we didn’t do classical buildings—we did modern architecture. That’s what we were taught to do, that’s what we were supposed to do, and we believed in it. vanR: What did your professors tell you about classical architecture?
Nagle: That it was out-of-date. Victor Thompson was the head of the school—he was quite a talented architect and he had a small practice and did some very nice houses in a low-key kind of way. The interesting thing was that because of this Bauhaus attitude we did planning and graphics and watercolors. So we were exposed to and did a lot of different things. vanR: Were you taught to make models as well as to do drawings?
Nagle: Oh yeah, we did a lot of that.
6 vanR: Did you see your time at Stanford as more of a training or an education?
Nagle: Well, they had courses in putting together working drawings—you hardly ever see that any more. There was one professor who was actually a structural engineer as well as an architect, I forget his name. We’d take pieces of buildings and make working drawings and we’d make mock-up models out of balsa wood and we’d also go out to construction sites and draw the way things fit together. vanR: Can you describe the course work that you took?
Nagle: Well, I took all the liberal arts courses that we needed—the history of western civilization and economics courses, and all of that. Then at the same time that we did that, we had a home studio: the desk that I had in the architecture department was the desk where I did all my studying. We all started out as freshman and moved in to the studio and by sophomore year we were there all the time. Now, we’d also go to the library and study some in our dorm for other courses, but the studio had the nice advantage that it was like our office. I think that all good schools of architecture are like that. Certainly when I went on to MIT and Harvard it also was that way there. But it’s not that way at a lot of campuses; UIC and IIT have some of that, but they don’t work late in the evenings and it’s different. The nice thing at Stanford was that since we were there all the time, there were visiting people coming in and you were exposed to other architects and disciplines and all that. vanR: Can you recall any of the architects who came to visit?
Nagle: Well, the Bay Area architects came. Frank Lloyd Wright came twice—it was wonderful to listen to him bellow away. vanR: Did he come to lecture or do crits?
7 Nagle: Well, you couldn’t keep him from doing a crit. Anything he’d walk by, he’d have a comment about. But he had come to talk—it must have been my junior year since he died in 1959—and he was doing the Marin County Civic Center at the time. He came out and he gave a little talk at Stanford. I sat in the back of the auditorium and he was talking about how William Wurster was a "shack builder." William Wurster was, of course, the dean at MIT at the time, and he did wonderful houses and lots of other buildings in the San Francisco area. Wright was always very critical of that kind of building, but that’s the way he was. Then we had other people who came who were primarily Bay Area architects. Henry Hill was really quite good—if you pick up books on Bay Area architecture, he’ll be in it. And, Gene McCarthy was another one. They’d come up from their offices and teach and then go back to San Francisco or where ever they were from. There was Ernest Kump, who was right in Palo Alto, and he taught, and John Worsley, who was a designer, taught. Larry’s class had a fellow, Art Sweetser, who was really a talented designer and had done these marvelous drawings—he was Kump’s designer. This was when Foothill College was being built and there was all that kind of Bay Area attitude. We didn’t have a lot of chrome at Stanford—we talked about the Bauhaus but I didn’t see much chrome. vanR: Was the emphasis on natural materials instead?
Nagle: Yes. The real argument that was going on at the time in modern architecture in the 1950s and early 1960s—I remember it when I was at Harvard—was whether the International Style was right or whether organic architecture should prevail. There wasn’t any argument about historical buildings; we didn’t even talk about them much other than to admire them but they weren’t anything that you’d emulate. We were very much slanted towards that way too and the sad part is that northern California only has one school of architecture now. There are fifteen or so million people in northern California and they only have the school at Berkeley. It’s too bad that Stanford dropped out—it’s a good private school and they should have an architecture program. I’ve banged on President [David] Kennedy a few times about it, but he’s told me that they gave up the school of architecture,
8 nursing, and physical therapy and they felt bad about that. He kept talking about moving into the new century and I said, “How can you do that without an architecture school?” vanR: You mentioned that Stanford was under the Bauhaus influence and that architectural history was something that you studied but didn’t apply in everyday practice…
Nagle: But of course, Gropius—I realized this when he was still alive and I worked at TAC—he wouldn’t even teach history until the end, otherwise you might be influence by it, see? That wasn’t the attitude at Stanford, however. vanR: Would you describe some of the projects that you worked on at Stanford?
Nagle: It’s funny, I can always remember projects. It’s like with students of mine: I can’t remember their names, but I can always remember their faces and their projects. The first project I did in my freshman year was a bus stop for the Stanford campus and it was a hyperbolic paraboloid, which was what a lot of people were doing then. Looking back on it, I think it was pretty good. It was a simple little thing and we had a screen wall in the back. The other person who was very influential at the time was Edward Durell Stone. He was doing this sort of romantic architecture that I never really liked very much, but they did all those screen walls all over the place, so that, of course, was the windbreak. It was the classic way of teaching architecture: you did a little building and then you did a bigger building and then you did a bigger building and then you did an even bigger building and by the end you were doing town planning. By senior year we were taking all the piers on the San Francisco waterfront and figuring out how to build out on them. It just graduated up like that. vanR: Was the pier project your senior project?
Nagle: Yeah, but there were a couple of major projects in senior year. Thompson had us spend a quarter working on the piers. He had us do a lot of sketch
9 problems and a lot of building problems. He’d teach by the method of learning by doing. I remember in the spring, for instance, we made kites as a one-week project. But you couldn’t make a kite that looked like a kite, you had to make something that was different. So everybody had a different way of doing it. Some guys made these very elegant box kites. I made a flying wing that was six feet long and I made it out of plastic. I bent it all and put it together. There was an aeronautical engineer who was a friend of mine—I lived in his coach house then—and we put it together and put the paper materials over it. So then the class was all to meet at the top of the hill at Stanford. I had a convertible at that time and what I did was I got in the convertible with my wife and she drove and I held the kite and we got the thing going—it was a delta wing idea—we got it up to the top of the hill, stopped the car, and then the kite came down and it broke into a million pieces. That was the end of the kite—it was a one-shot deal. But we used to have a lot of fun making things, that was one of the nice parts of being at Stanford. vanR: You spoke of doing large urban projects. Was there an emphasis on the idea of planning as an important aspect of architectural design?
Nagle: There was to some extent. We knew about urban planning because of all the highways that were being built. But we had a different attitude about the automobile—people really liked cars in the 1950s—so we sort of accepted it. If you think about all those houses that were built, they all had carports that showed off the car. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed one he’d make you actually walk past the car to get to the front door—you had to tuck under the carport to even get to the front door. Wright had done the Hanna house on the Stanford campus and that was the other time that I met him. That was probably the most organic house that he’d ever done at that point—it wrapped around the hill and all that—and we were very influenced by that. vanR: Were there distinct factions on campus between the Bauhaus and the organic camps?
10 Nagle: I don’t think that we were all that serious about it, actually. We were having more fun than anything. Maybe we weren’t serious enough. Stanford had a graduate school at that time and you could stay on after your four years. I got a degree in pre-architecture. A number of my colleagues stayed on and got the fifth year in architecture and their bachelor of architecture degree. I chose to go to MIT for that and I got my master’s at Harvard. I was glad that I left because I didn’t want to stay out in California. It was a wonderful lifestyle and we had a lot of fun, but I didn’t really want to build more plywood buildings. I wanted to find out how to make other things and learn how to put other kinds of buildings together and live in other kinds of environments. So that’s why I came to Chicago. I was very tempted to go back to California after I got through graduate school and it was very seductive. I went out there with my wife and was offered a job at three dollars an hour or three dollars and ten cents an hour by Ernest Kump’s office where one of my friends was working. They were doing work like Foothill College. It was very tempting to live out there and have a little MG and go down to Palo Alto a lot. But I realized that it just wasn’t as serious as what I wanted to do and it wasn’t as urban or urbane as I wanted either. San Francisco was urbane, but I don’t think it was as serious. At Stanford we were not as serious as we should have been, probably, about architecture and all that controversy with modern architecture. vanR: But you were well aware that there were more serious schools, like IIT and Harvard and MIT?
Nagle: Oh, yes, but I didn’t understand quite how rigorous IIT was, for example. I learned that when I came to Chicago and my first job was working with Larry for Stan Tigerman. I had done ink drawings before but Stanley taught me how to do hard-line ink drawings the way Mies would have done them and he taught me to do the Mies trees and all that. I actually did that at MIT, too, there was rigor there too. There were a couple of guys from Stanford who had also gone to MIT—Scott Danielson and some other friends—and we marveled at how completely different MIT was from Stanford in terms of the
11 rigor of structure and other things. The whole atmosphere there was very different, of course. vanR: In terms of what your Stanford professors were teaching you about contemporary architecture, how did they introduce the works of historians like Sigfried Giedion?
Nagle: Oh yeah, Victor Thompson gave us Space, Time and Architecture in about our junior year and we read it from one end to the other. vanR: Was that considered the main text at that time? Did you have an opinion about how it presented architecture?
Nagle: It was the main text, but I wasn’t sophisticated enough at the time to really understand it. We read it and then we challenged it later on. I waited until the Chicago Seven to challenge it. Really, if you think about it, history didn’t go the way Giedion said it did—it just wasn’t that clear—but it was good reading and we bought it. vanR: So you got your bachelor’s in pre-architecture from Stanford in 1959. Then you went into the Civil Engineers Corps in Boston in 1959?
Nagle: Yes, I went for two years. vanR: Was that before your time at Harvard?
Nagle: Yes. In 1959 if you hadn’t gotten into the navy ROTC, as in my case, I would have been drafted the minute I got out of school. I didn’t want that and I wanted to be in the navy anyway so I went through the navy ROTC program at Stanford during the four years that I was there. I think Larry did that too, but he was in the army ROTC. Larry ended up in Germany and I ended up in Boston. Before I went to Boston, when I got out of school, I was given a choice about what I wanted to do. In my junior year I desperately wanted to be in the Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) and I wanted to be a frogman.
12 I was in pretty good shape and I really worked at it—we spent the summer as midshipmen and I was on the Ticonderoga and went down to school in San Diego to do that. Then by senior year I was all set to do that, but I flunked out because of my eyesight. So then I chose to go into the Civil Engineering Corps and I got a position there. I went to Port Hueneme for two months and I studied industrial engineering. vanR: Had you studied engineering at Stanford?
Nagle: Oh yeah. We’d done civil, mechanical, surveying, lots of engineering courses. The civil engineering program really taught about management and it was industrial engineering. It was dreadfully boring, really boring. I think I graduated forty-seventh in a class of forty-eight. But I learned how to surf that summer and that was really neat and I really had a lot of fun. My wife’s family lived out there and we hit the beach a lot. Then I went around southern California and saw a lot of architecture there too, like Schindler’s work and other things I had only seen in magazines. There was a lot published. The best all-time magazine was Art and Architecture and we all subscribed to it or read it in the library, along with Architectural Record, Architectural Forum, and Progressive Architecture. Of course, we don’t have all those wonderful magazines anymore, it’s really sad. But anyway, Arts and Architecture was John Entenza’s baby and the Case Study house(s) were all going on then in southern California, although there were a few by Quincy Jones and others that were done elsewhere. So I went around and saw all the Case Study houses. vanR: Do you recall any that made a particular impression on you?
Nagle: Oh, yeah. Charles Eames’s house was all-time. I think it was built in 1949 or 1950, but when I saw that and saw how all the bar-joists went together and how that was made, that was really great. vanR: How did you get in to see that house?
13 Nagle: I just walked in. The Eameses were there and they let me in and I just looked around. I still go to southern California about every other year. I did a house or two out there—including one in Malibu—and I still go the Eames house every time I’m out there. Actually, I think they got a grant from the Graham Foundation to document their house because I think their son still lives there. They are trying to get it all fixed up because it’s looking a little weathered, as you might imagine. It’s just a great house and it’s right there at the bottom of the hill in Pacific Palisades. That was quite a nice summer for me, actually, because I got to go around and see a lot of things and understand southern California. When I got out of the Civil Engineering Corps, my wife and I drove across the country. vanR: Were you able to choose Boston as your assignment?
Nagle: Well, I tried to get into construction and I put in for Guam and a couple of other places because I wanted to do construction and also surf and have fun, but they were all filled. So the choice that I got finally was Boston, which I figured was a neat place because I wanted to see what the architecture schools there were like and I wanted to live on the East Coast. vanR: Did you have an idea that you would eventually go to graduate school?
Nagle: Oh yes. I knew I was going do that. So we ended up in Boston and we lived there for five years. When we got to Boston, that was really nice because that’s where I wanted to be. I spent twenty months in the Boston shipyard and I really didn’t have much to do because young ensigns weren’t given a whole lot to do, no matter what. We built some dry-docks and I learned some more about construction and transportation. What I really did was to take time to travel around and see all the buildings and all the architecture. I did a lot of drawings. The thing that was fun was that I had to stand watch at nights, which was boring, so I read all these books. I probably read a hundred books. I read architecture books and everything… My wife was an English major—thank God she wasn’t an architect—and she put me on to all
14 kinds of books and continues to do so. I read all the classics and the Modern Library series and architecture books. vanR: What kind of buildings were you looking at during your travels around New England?
Nagle: Boston is such a beautiful town the way it’s all put together. It’s probably one of the most European of the American cities. At that time it was even more so, because there was only one really big new highrise, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was the Travelers Insurance building. We traveled around and saw historic architecture and the way towns were laid out. Then we saw lots of modern buildings that were going up. We saw Pietro Belluschi’s churches in New England and other buildings. I was taking photographs with a Ricohflex camera but you can’t even project those huge slides anymore. I was also doing sketching. We took the time to really go around and see a lot of things and we picked what we wanted to see. Then towards the very end, I did take a course in engineering at MIT and I realized how hard it was. Those guys were serious engineers and I barely passed the course. It was in structural engineering and I never did understand what all those forces were all about. vanR: Did you begin to reevaluate your education at Stanford?
Nagle: No. I’d taken structural engineering and all that at Stanford, but frankly I think that the professor at MIT was using a system of teaching that I just didn’t get. I didn’t have any problems when I went to MIT, in fact, I did very well. At MIT I was Tau Beta Pi, for instance. But it was the NROTC that really did me in. We were studying parts of guns that weren’t even being made anymore and I couldn’t stand that sort of rote learning, so, of course, I didn’t study. The history of naval architecture was much more interesting. At MIT I learned that they were much more serious about the way that structures worked and all that engineering. The reason that I chose MIT—I looked at Harvard and I loved it and I loved Gropius and the work that they were doing at the time but I felt that I needed the rigor of MIT. I was really
15 interested in two things that were going on simultaneously there: Belluschi was the head of the school and he was a wonderful director and father figure and he did softer architecture. I remember that I once asked him, “What’s the most important thing that an architect needs?” Belluschi said, “You have to have a good eye. And good taste.” Meanwhile we had Eduardo Catalano and Horacio Caminos and other people who had come into the school and there was a system and it was rigorous. You had to understand the system and you had to work in the system. If you choose not to do the system on your own, at least you’ll understand the way it works. I used to dodge those people and stay away from their classes. vanR: That begins to sound like the way things were at Harvard, having to buy into a very specific and rigorous system.
Nagle: Well, yeah. But it was a little different. There was real controversy. There were two things: there was Belluschi on one hand and Catalano on the other. What Belluschi used to do every Tuesday was, he’d have a faculty lunch to talk about what they were doing and what their projects were. He could take a very diverse group of people, which was what I liked about MIT, and he’d have different people doing their things. Marvin Goody, for instance, was a wonderful teacher at the lower levels, teaching people how to get their drawings together and how to be excited about architecture. I took courses from a number of different people: Jack Myer, for instance. He was with Arrowstreet Associates and Ashley, Myer and Associates when I was there. I also worked in that office when I was in school at Harvard and we did the competition for the Boston Architectural Center. Jack was a wonderful teacher and he ended up running the school. There was a very diverse group of people at MIT but there was an overall structure that had to do with the ways in which you put buildings together. It had to do with the way you solve problems and functional issues. The artistic part of it was very important, but you could really work within a very wide range. vanR: So style was just not as important?
16 Nagle: Yes. But Catalano didn’t feel that way. He had a certain way of doing things where everything was bilaterally symmetrical. We were influenced some by that.
[Tape 1: Side 2] vanR: Do you recall what your fellow students were studying at that time?
Nagle: Actually, one of the reasons I went to MIT was that I knew Larry at Stanford, although not very well. He only went for a very short time to Harvard and then he bumped over to MIT. He didn’t like it at Harvard and I asked him why and he said that he felt that MIT was more open, like I’ve just talked about. So that was one of the reasons I went there. But by the time I got there he had graduated and moved on. So the other thing that they had at MIT was the legacy of Alvar Aalto, of course. Probably if you’d said that Frank Lloyd Wright was the master at Stanford in people’s thoughts, then Aalto was the master at MIT. vanR: He had done the Baker House Dormitory there in the late 1940s.
Nagle: Yes, and we all loved Aalto’s work. Of course, in the 1950s he did some sensational buildings and the town halls and all that. He actually came to MIT and talked one time. I vaguely remember that. But Aalto was kind of the main man and everybody was really influenced by him. Viljo Revell was there at the time and I actually was doing thesis and he helped me with my thesis and he was teaching a class. Revell was—how can I put it?— a functionalist Finn. He had his own way of doing things. He never dropped the functionalist aspect from the 1930s. He just did it sort of flat out. The reason he was there was that he had won the competition to do the Toronto City Hall. He designed two towers that cupped around the city hall. He was terribly disappointed by the building process there because his competition entry had these flared ends that were very sharp. They didn’t use the term “value-engineering” then, but they cut out and value-engineered the thing so that it didn’t just come around and flare out but it ended up being rounded.
17 It just drove him nuts. He was a great, big, hulking Finn and he had difficulty with English, but he was a wonderful guy because he was dead serious about his work. He was kind of the John Madden of architecture. I appreciated that and I got it in my head that I really wanted to go to Finland and see Scandinavian architecture. After I finished at Harvard then I put in for a Fulbright scholarship. But the billets were filled for Finland at the time—maybe they didn’t even have one in architecture the year I applied. I think it was the same for Denmark, so I chose Holland. The reason I chose Holland was because of Mondrian and the De Stijl and all the things that I was interested in at that time. There was also the fact that Holland had the most concentrated population of any country in the world and so it had the greatest density. Japan has surpassed that now, I’m sure, and Holland has since made more land with their polders. So that European connection really came through MIT. You know, it was interesting that it was even more so than at Harvard. You would have thought not. If it was Belluschi and Catalano at MIT, as opposites, then at Harvard Sert and Ben Thompson co- existed, one as chairman and one as dean or as head of the school. Ben Thompson was very soft and kind of into the idea of the collaborative process, you know, like with The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Sert was like Le Corbusier and more rigorous and all that. When you looked at them you thought of the kind of humanist attitude with Belluschi and Thompson, and Sert and Catalano were the rationalists. There was a tremendous amount of controversy about that. I, frankly, thought that one of the neatest things about Sert’s work was that he was Spanish and the way he used the materials in his own buildings that he designed himself, not that the office did necessarily. His own home, for instance, was a spectacular house and you had this sense. Labels, I realized, didn’t work. This man was clearly a very sensuous architect in a way. He was criticized because he was so complex, whereas Thompson was always going for the simple things. There was always a lot of controversy and argument. It was a really interesting place to be located and to learn, as a young person. vanR: You’ve talked about architecture more generally. Was there any emphasis on urban projects as opposed to suburban residential work?
18 Nagle: By the time I got into graduate school at Harvard, that’s what we did. vanR: Do you recall any of the specific projects that you did at MIT?
Nagle: Well, they all stick in your head. At Stanford, I did a hotel somewhere up in the mountains that I still remember as being one of the things that I really liked. Stuff like that you sort of carry with you. When I got to MIT, my thesis project was to do a medical building. vanR: Was that your choice?
Nagle: Yes. I wrote the program and I wanted to do something with the way that people use buildings in a nicer way than I had done before. So I picked a pretty site and I used a couple of doctors who my wife had worked with. I did a kind of rationalist building but I did it with soft materials. vanR: Was there a particular style that you would attach to it?
Nagle: Oh, it was very post-and-beam. The other thing that we did was a housing project with Jack Myer at MIT that was for a big hill site in Boston. We were doing row houses there and I started to make courtyards and things that I had been doing all my life. I was approaching things as using buildings to shape spaces. That was really reinforced at Harvard when I went there. I mean, Harvard itself is that way; it’s sort of the perfect campus. Camillo Sitte’s book had been written. The Harvard campus was made of the kinds of spaces that had been described in the book. Another person who was very influential at MIT was Albert Bush-Brown. He was teaching the history of architecture. Henry Millon was there and he was teaching with Bush-Brown. He was really a bright guy and he’s now in Washington at the Smithsonian. vanR: Were you doing models or drawings or a combination of the two in your classes?
19 Nagle: Both. At Harvard there was more of an emphasis on models. We did everything with chipboard. Almost before you drew it you’d start making a model. You looked at everything three-dimensionally. vanR: Did you prefer one method over the other?
Nagle: I always could draw well. It was fun to do that. vanR: Were your professors asking you to do finished renderings or more schematic line drawings?
Nagle: We learned how to do renderings at Stanford. There were courses that you could take. There was one of Aalto’s guys who taught a course in rendering that taught you how to take a soft pencil and make it look so good. One of the things that I did, which I think was smart, was that I audited a lot of courses, especially at Harvard. One year I took a course on the history of landscape architecture from Norman Newton who, I was given to understand, had worked in Olmsted’s office. He had worked on a whole bunch of important public-works projects. He was old but he was really good. I was always interested in landscape architecture. One of the things that I’ve been pushing at the Graham Foundation lately is the landscape aspect of architecture. We just had a special incentive. I’ve always been, in teaching at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and other places, critical of architects not knowing what goes on five feet out from their building and not understanding plant materials and how they should be used and all that. It’s hard and I’m still learning a lot, I think. What they did at Harvard was they had all the classes in one place, Robinson Hall, so that you could go down and sit in on a landscape course or you could go find out what urban plant materials were. Fumihiko Maki was the head of the urban design school at the time—he was a very young man—and he would have us come in and have us talk about urban design. Everybody was critical of Maki—he was just a wonderful guy and really a good teacher—because he was too much of an architect, you see. What happened to urban design was that it moved out of Harvard and went into the School of Business and
20 became dry toast, I think. That’s one of the things that we’ve lost as architects; you have to be a planner. When Larry and I were partners, we decided to put “Architects/Planners” on our door because we figured that we’d get grandfathered in that way because we thought that sooner or later we’d have to take a test. We still call ourselves planners in this office and we are planners. The projects we do all the time have to do with planning. vanR: Do you recall what kinds of landscape architecture that you were studying? Was it historical or modern?
Nagle: Well, it was both. Sasaki taught at Harvard at that time and he was very talented. When I got to Harvard I studied one semester under Ben Thompson and his people and one semester under Sert and his people. It was a marvelous time. Both Sert and his people and Thompson and his people were very different in terms of attitude. I also worked in Ben’s office while I was in school. I appreciated them both. The neat thing about the Sert part of it was that he took a town that he actually worked on up near Calgary in Canada—it was to be a new resort town. The best precedent for it at the time was the Flaine Ski Resort up in the French Alps that Marcel Breuer did. A lot of that was built. There were people who were sort of into that. So anyway, we had to do that same kind of thing, but with landscape architects as a collaborative project—it was Harvard, right, so you collaborate. The first thing that you realize is that you don’t always necessarily get along with people when you collaborate. And secondly, you find out that there is a very different feeling from landscape architects about architects and about who should do what. We distinctly felt that the landscape architects thought that they should do the planning and we should just do the buildings. We didn’t feel that way, so there was controversy. I felt that I should get to know as much about landscape architecture as they did in order to battle it out. But it was a good time because we also had fun. What we did was we found out from them what was interesting and when the good exhibits were up and what to see, so that was the marvelous part. I think that’s sadly lacking in schools now. Schools don’t fund that kind of thing anymore. Most planning departments are dropping out all together. They don’t fund planning. Yale
21 dropped their planning program. I think Harvard finally has the planning department back under the Graduate School of Design. I’m on the board of overseers over at IIT and I was talking with Donna Robertson about how planning had been so strong there, what with Hilberseimer and all those guys. Well, it’s not there so much anymore and we need to start talking about how to get it back. All those things that architects used to be—graphic designers, landscape architects, interior designers, planners, and on and on—a lot of that was lost when people tended to specialize. Anyway, the landscape part of it was important to me because I really enjoyed it and I think that it’s helped a lot. I try to help people in the office all the time but usually what happens is that they come over to me and they say, “Here, Jim, why don’t you figure out how to really put the landscape together?” vanR: So you do most of your landscape planning in-house?
Nagle: No, I work with Joe Karr and other people. I just know enough to be dangerous and to make those guys really nervous. But I do have opinions about it, there’s no question. vanR: We haven’t spoken about why you chose Harvard after you received your bachelor’s from MIT. What made you decide to move down the road to get your master’s from Harvard?
Nagle: It’s interesting because I finished at MIT and I thought I was good. I felt like that time went so quickly; it was only a year and a half and I had finished my thesis. But then there was all this other interesting work at Harvard and frankly it was more—how can I put it?—intriguing, I guess, and more formalist, more compositional. Corbusier was dominant, certainly, in that school. It had to do with the urbanism of the early 1960s; that school was really geared up for it, they were really doing it. So I decided that I wanted to do that. The first semester Ben Thompson took the school of architecture, which I think he wanted to design, and he gave that as a problem to do. Well, first I think he gave the sketch problem and we did a little pavilion church or something like that—I remember I did something out in San
22 Francisco. But then we focused on the question, What is architectural education? It was a really interesting course. What we did was—in those days there was the bubble-diagram theory where you programmed a lot of things and you got a lot of bubble-diagrams and you found out how much a classroom is used so you can decide if you really needed a classroom and how people sat and functioned—then we picked one of two or three sites and we proceeded to design a building on that site. I designed a building on the site where Gund Hall was built, where Memorial Hall was. So what did I do? I did a courtyard building, of course, with a landscape all figured out. I wrapped it around so you turned in on yourself when you came in and there was a studio bridge crossing it and that’s where the exhibits were. And especially with Ben it was important that all the students intermingled. vanR: You wanted architecture students to run into landscape students?
Nagle: Yes, absolutely. So when I started working with him on the project for Williams College we went out to Williamstown and we started doing the bubble-diagrams. We ended up doing the science building. So we did for these clients exactly what we were doing in school. vanR: Was this a commission that you worked on at The Architects Collaborative?
Nagle: Well, I just worked there part-time while I was a student. So, anyway, that was really good to get experience in that. Then everybody ended up doing their own projects. The reason I chose Harvard was that I really felt that I wanted to learn that aspect of it. I wanted to learn more. I felt like I was just getting going and where else should I go? Well, I lived in Boston and there was Harvard and it was the best. I did go down and look at some other schools; I thought about the University of Minnesota with Ralph Rapson, for instance, but then I thought that that all just came out of MIT. There was a network that came out of MIT at that time and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted something that was more formalist.
23 vanR: You seem to be speaking of an interest in ideas and theories and planning rather than of an interest in the work of specific architects. Did you consider other schools with brand-name architects at the helm, like Louis Kahn at Penn or Paul Rudolph at Yale?
Nagle: Oh sure. Rudolph was teaching at Yale. I wouldn’t have wanted to study under him; I didn’t want to do that. I appreciated his buildings and the things that he had done, but I think that was too picturesque for my taste, it really was. I loved Lou Kahn’s work. I’ve been influenced by it. In Chicago I look around at all of this brick and think about the way that Kahn made it architecture. It was really rational and interesting. You’re influenced by a whole bunch of different people, you just can’t help that. Le Corbusier was influential, Aalto was influential, and there were just a whole lot of them. It’s baggage and you just assimilate what feels good, I guess. You take some things on and others you don’t. I think I’m probably more of a humanist than a rationalist, by a long shot. In our attitude here at the office I think we try that. We kid about it in the office and sometimes we say, “Remember now, we’re rationalists today.” I think that you make connections with what it is that you want to do. They should be intelligent but you’re always influenced by something. Now the other half of Harvard was also interesting because Sert taught and he was smart and a really good teacher. Ben was the kind of guy who never really drew anything—I’d draw something and he’d kind of grunt and when he stopped grunting then I knew I had it right. vanR: Would he stand behind you and look over your shoulder?
Nagle: Yeah, and he’d do that in the office, too. He drifted a lot. But he was a wonderful guy and he had very good taste and he was probably the best of the TAC people at that time. Gropius was still around and still practicing. He was doing things like a highrise building that wasn’t very good, but he really liked it and it was his project. Gropius was another guy who couldn’t draw, he couldn’t draw a line. Dean Currie told me one time—he had worked in the office when Gropius decided to build his house—he said Gropius fiddled with it and punched it and was trying to figure it all out.
24 Currie told me that Marcel Breuer was the one who really designed that house in Lincoln for Gropius. Breuer sat down, spent a couple of days, showed him things, resolved the entry. vanR: Were they working with models or drawings?
Nagle: He did it in drawings. And the way that materials are used in that house, that’s really Breuer. Breuer was another guy who was tremendously influential to us both at MIT and at Harvard. He was doing those wonderful houses at the time. He never quite made the scale change; he always had sort of an awkwardness about it. I guess it was the brutal concrete that Breuer couldn’t quite do. I’ve never been to his St. John’s Abbey up in Minnesota, but his houses were really marvelous. It was the idea of the International Style coming together with more organic architecture and vernacular architecture. The way Breuer did it it came out one way and the way Aalto did it it came out another. When I went to Finland, one of the first things that I had to be sure I saw was Aalto’s workers’ housing that stepped down the hill in Sunila. He used the logs for the trellises—on a functionalist building—it just blows you away to see that. It’s like night and day these things that were happening. I was always really intrigued by that and in the use of materials. I just finished a cottage up in Door County—being a lumberman’s son, I guess it’s part of that—I used clear cedar siding outside and mahogany doors, polished cedar on the ceilings, clear fir on the floors, stone, birch doors, and maple furniture and cabinetry. I really had a ball doing that. It’s the sensual part of it. There was a lot of that going on on the East Coast at that time. Mies is sensual in a different way—he’s sort of more polished, right? vanR: When you talk about sensual architecture, it seems to relate more to small- scale buildings than highrise projects. Were you ever interested in highrise architecture?
Nagle: Yeah, sure. We looked at that too. It’s too bad, isn’t it, that the trouble with big buildings is that they tend to be so terribly monolithic. Aalto didn’t do
25 that. I’ve designed a highrise for Kinzie Park for the Habitat Company just this last fall and winter with Dirk Danker and other people in the office. We ended up being site-specific and flaring the building differently than Aalto but similar in some aspects. We tried to mix the materials and do different things in the lobbies and as it goes through the building—so there is some sensual aspect to that. But it’s different; I‘d have to think about it, now that I’ve answered that. But anyway, I had a good time at Harvard and MIT and I enjoyed it. I met a lot of interesting people. And, of course, the history was so much there. In New York City the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center had just been finished and all that. We went to visit Philip Johnson… vanR: You went on your own or with your class?
Nagle: With the class. We also went to see Rudolph and we had an exchange with Yale. We met all these different people and it was really exciting. One of the things that happened while I was at Harvard was that John F. Kennedy was killed and they decided by the following spring that they were going to build the Kennedy Center. They had to pick the architect. That was intriguing because I had worked with Ben Thompson and he said, “We’re going to have this great party in Robinson Hall and we’re going to have all the architects that are being considered for the job come and we’re going to have the Kennedy family come. We’re going to all get together.” Of course, he catered it all. All the women were in Marimekko dresses because that was what was going on at the time. They brought all these people together and there was Lou Kahn standing and talking to a bunch of students and there was Robert Kennedy talking to a bunch of students. Ted Kennedy was making moves on the pretty secretaries—seriously!—and having a great time at that. And Mies was there in his wheelchair. It was the real thing. My wife and I got to go to the party, along with a few other students, because I had worked in the office. You realize that architecture can be really interesting; it was really important and a big deal. It was also a time—this wasn’t because I was young–when people were trying to come to grips with how to deal with the big things, like urban renewal. The whole process in this country has been a disaster, of course. When you think about it, just imagine if we passed
26 the tax-incentive act that was passed in the 1980s in the early 1960s, instead of the urban renewal act. If you had gotten all those tax write-offs for fixing up your building and putting the infrastructure back, with Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts and that sort of thing, just imagine how different this country would be. But back then most of the precedents were European and how do you deal with that in the United States? The Europeans understood it. There were some dull projects built—when I went to Holland I was amazed by the polder projects that weren’t really very good or very interesting. But the Dutch have learned a lot. The last time I was there, which was a year and a half ago, I realized that they had learned it all and they weren’t doing that any more. They do some overly rigorous things, perhaps. We are trying to figure out how to adapt that to the United States and do some bigger projects. vanR: That brings up an interesting point that I want to ask you about. In terms of urban renewal, was there any interest in contextual design? The preservation movement hadn’t really introduced that term in the early 1960s yet.
Nagle: Oh yeah. If you think about Ben Thompson’s work on the Harvard campus, he used Harvard antique brick usually but that’s what they had used before. He picked up on the scale and we talked a lot about scale and detailing. There was another guy, Lawrence Anderson, who was really smart too. He ran the school and I had him as a thesis advisor. He was a sweetie. He really had a good sense about how things should go together. We talked about contextualism, very much so. What I think is sad, and we caused it I suppose, as much as anyone, is that we as architects have influenced our clients to the extent that they come in and say, they want history, you know? I can say, “Well, this is an historical extension,” or make up some words to make myself feel better, but the reality of it is that it’s really tough to do things in a more simple, direct way and still make it interesting. I’ve got a little book that I’ve put together (that my daughter wrote) that I’d like to get published. It’s about some houses that we’ve done and how modern architecture can be more interesting and, in a way, sensual—maybe I’m using that word too much and tactile is a better word. They can be contextual
27 without copying and all that sort of business. I think it was more inventive than things are now. I mean, the postmodern movement changed a whole lot of things. It made us really look hard at history and buildings. We learned a lot from that—how to renovate and all that. At the time I was there Ben Thompson was taking over one of the halls at Harvard and he did it over. During the postmodern period we looked it over and thought that was not the way to do it. What he did was he took these wonderful big buildings and he just butt-glazed right into it these big arches and all this sort of stuff. Now I look it over and I say, “That’s the way to do it.” The best example of this probably is the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, or even the one in Paris, where they take an old building and they put all the new things in it. Europeans feel secure about their history, compared to Americans. They can live with Euroflash right next to old buildings and get along perfectly well with it. They can make that wonderful transition of putting together all these materials and people like it, at least most of the people I talk to like it. We talk about it a lot; you’ve got to preserve the old buildings but you don’t have to be so literal about it. I think that Europeans are much more secure about their history, while we don’t have one that is quite as strong or as long. vanR: Since you’ve mentioned some of your conversations with European friends, would you speak about how you won the Fulbright scholarship after you got your degree from Harvard?
Nagle: One of the reasons I chose to go on a Fulbright went along with this idea of finishing my education and feeling good about design and wanting to concentrate and focus on design. I was able to do that at Harvard because I didn’t have to take a lot of extraneous courses. I audited those landscape courses and Sekler’s courses in the history of architecture, which were really interesting. We even went to music appreciation courses and it was a marvelous opportunity to do things that you wanted. I think that one of the real reasons I went to Harvard was that it had a real interest at that time in housing. They were very good at it—it had to do with Europe and postwar America and all that. There were many new possibilities in housing. The
28 CIAM was going on at that time and Corbusier was doing the Marseilles blocks and he was getting everybody interested. vanR: Are you speaking of urban housing as well as suburban housing?
Nagle: Yes. Sert was really into it too. He was doing the married student housing at Harvard while I was there and just afterwards and doing a bunch of other projects like that. I was fascinated by that and the possibilities of making spaces that really had to do with urbanism. So that’s why I went to Harvard. There was that emphasis and we got to do the project with Sert that I’ve already talked about, which was a lot of fun. The other one, of course, was the architecture building. The studios were all doing things and we got to see it all. It was a funny time, though, because there were almost no books on housing, there weren’t a lot of books about really any kind of architecture, like there are today. Now if you want something you just go over to Marilyn Hasbrouck’s place [Prairie Avenue Bookshop] and there’s always something there. So anyway, there just wasn’t anything then. Joe Zalewski, who was really interested in housing, was one of Sert’s strong designers and he gave the course in housing at Harvard. He put together what we called the Harvard Graduate School of Design housing studies. It was all the different housing prototypes and they’d gone around and done the research and you could actually get the book. When I went to Holland I studied housing and when I came back to Chicago my first projects were housing projects where we did roof terraces and things like that. I often thought that a book on housing ought to be put together, and so I got to know John Macsai and, of course, he did it—he wrote the book on housing and prototypes. I think that it would be a wonderful thing, though, to go further with that. Peter Rowe’s book, Modernity and Housing, is really quite interesting and good but he dates it back to things that were going on in the past. It would be interesting to do one in a Case Study House way and really pick out the best projects that are going on now and look at all these changes in attitudes and codes. vanR: Are you proposing to do this with contemporary homes?
29 Nagle: Yes, I’m just interested in what’s going to be built next. It’s nice to look back to understand it. But one of the things that I’m distressed about now is this mediocre, terribly mediocre, housing that’s being built both in the city and the suburbs, and in the rural areas, too, for that matter. It’s this historical stuff that people are just laying up and it’s the same old thing. It’s like a Brooks Brothers suit where you can’t tell one from another. It’s just dreadfully boring. What we’re trying to do is not do that sort of thing. I mean, we’ve all done it, and we have to do what we do and build historically in context and that sort of thing. I’ve just gotten off the phone with a client who hired us to do some new housing in the south Kenwood neighborhood. I’m trying to talk him out of doing what everyone else is doing. I said to him, “You’ve hired us to do something that’s special and nice but now you’re trying to get us to put on all this stuff that everyone else does. You’re in conflict with yourself.” I really care about housing—I’ve spent half my professional life working on housing and I really do care about it. I think that we’ve just got to do a lot better than we are doing now. So that’s one of the reasons I went to Harvard. Then I got really excited about it and that’s when I put in for the Fulbright to go to the Netherlands. vanR: You said earlier that you hadn’t originally wanted to go to the Netherlands.
Nagle: Yes. I would have loved to go to Finland. Of course, they were doing great housing at that time in Finland. They were doing the forest cities and Tapiola had been started in the 1960s and it had been built. But I didn’t get there until about 1990. It was kind of like visiting an old friend, because I knew it so well, even though I’d never been there. So because I couldn’t get to Finland, that’s why I put in for the architecture Fulbright to the Netherlands. We proceeded to travel there and we set up in The Hague and the school was in Delft. Through the school at Delft, I did get around and see a lot. vanR: Were you studying at the Technical University in Delft?
Nagle: Yes. I’ll get back to that in a minute. Thirty-two years after having lived there and studied in Delft when I traveled around and saw architecture, I talked to
30 my son-in-law, Ralph Johnson, a year and a half ago, because I wanted to go back to see a Dudok show that was there. We both wanted to see that show and I said that I really wanted to see Holland again. So we went on a six- or seven-day trip—he’s younger than I am and he wore me out—and we really did travel around and see it all. He knew all the new stuff and he got it all together. We went back and we looked at housing that was being built when I was living there, like the polder housing. The wonderful thing about the Dutch is that they don’t throw anything away, like so many Americans. They took the J.J.P. Oud buildings that were built in the 1920s and 1930s and these teeny little townhouses that were built and they put two of them together and made one. They put them all back together and they were historically correct and they just looked marvelous. They were so careful with everything they did. vanR: Well, Oud is certainly one of their master architects, so they should be proud of it.
Nagle: We also went out and saw the Amsterdam School work that was done in the 1910s and even work prior to that. There was just a freshness and a neatness about it all that was really quite good. There are what we would call subsidized or affordable housing and the work that they were doing always has this fresh approach. Obviously there were exceptions and dull work too. It’s a different attitude over there and one that I keep trying to peddle here to get people to do things that are more interesting and generous about the way buildings are put together. I did learn that while I was in Holland being there really did affect me. I lived next to the Gemeentemuseum, so I went over and saw all the Mondrians and van Doesbergs and I got interested in constructivism and the whole constructivist movement. vanR: Were you aware of what was going on in Dutch art and architecture before you moved there? Or did you discover it once you were in the midst of it all?
Nagle: I had seen it in magazines and I was aware of it, but I didn’t understand it completely, of course. I knew about the history and about Oud and the
31 Amsterdam School and all that. It’s funny because you go back thirty-some years later and you realize how much you have learned and how naïve you were when you were over there seeing some of these things for the first time. But their gestures, of course, are much more monumental. It’s interesting because my son-in-law really likes big things and he gets all excited about a street in Amsterdam that has five blocks that’s all a rationalist way of looking at things. And I get excited about small things, like detailing and the way things go together. It sort of points out the difference in our personalities. I did learn from the Dutch about the care that they have. It’s a very interesting society because it’s much more collective than ours and at the same time it’s much more personal and private. It’s like courtyard houses can be anonymous but they can be very personal. Housing was really very important. I meant to get up and see Utzon’s work, but I didn’t get around to that until the 1990s, the courtyard housing and all that. I think that I have a project where we’re finally going to do something like that. We’re doing some one- and two-story housing on the South Side, with zero lot lines and that kind of stuff.
[Tape 2: Side 1] vanR: As a Fulbright scholar were you working on a specific project?
Nagle: Housing. What you have to do is put in for a particular field or tell what it is that you want to work at when you go to that particular country. My study piece was housing. They were the biggest country at the time in terms of density of population. It was something that we were concerned about. We really got concerned about it during the zero population growth times. We ought to be concerned about it now. I don’t understand why we’re not. I don’t understand why it isn’t in the papers all the time. Do you realize how the population has grown? I was born when the population of this country was less than half of what it is now. And then think of all the other countries. I wanted to see how a country like Holland rebuilt after the war. They made a lot of mistakes—the Polder projects and all that—but they didn’t throw it away; they fixed a lot of it.
32 vanR: What kind of mistakes did they make?
Nagle: Well, they lined them all up and they did these boring projects in the 1950s and 1960s. I was there in the early 1960s. The polder projects weren’t very good; they’d fill in the land and line up the projects. That didn’t have the intimacy and all that. It’s a little stiff by comparison to what we see here. The French are really terrible at it, out in the country. But I wanted to see the housing and study and see what was going on. Prefabrication was in at that time and I wanted to study the construction process. vanR: Were you writing a paper about all this?
Nagle: Yeah, I put together a computation of all the things that they were doing. Unfortunately I had to leave when I was part way through it. I left in November, around Thanksgiving, and to come back to the United States. I had mononucleosis and I was really wiped out. I got well just in time to go work for Stanley. I’m surprised I didn’t get mono all over again, work there was so busy. We were really pushed. But it was a good time in Holland because we got to see the lowlands of Europe and I got to see the Amsterdam School. I never did get to meet Rietveld but at least I got to see all his buildings. vanR: Did you visit practicing architects during this time?
Nagle: Oh yeah. I went to Aldo van Eyck’s office and he was in between projects and if I hadn’t been sick I was going to work with him on another project that he had just started. He had kind of knocked off after he did the Orphanage and the “Wheels of Heaven” [Protestant Church, Driebergen] and a few of those projects and he was getting set up to start another one and I wanted to work for him. vanR: Then you would have stayed on after your time as a scholar was over?
33 Nagle: Yeah. The Dutch structuralist idea has influenced me all along. vanR: Were there other architects whose work you were studying?
Nagle: Oh yeah. Van den Broek and Bakema, they were hot at the time—their work wasn’t always really good, although Bakema was the good architect in the group. Hertzberger was young then and he was working. There were older guys; Van Eesteren was still alive and was very proud of his planning projects and his polder projects, which were not so wonderful. He talked about how he’d taken a block and pulled it apart so that the buildings opened up and light and air got in and he got rid of the dank courtyard buildings—the wonderful courtyard buildings… vanR: That you admired?
Nagle: Right. Well, now everybody’s building them again. They’re going back and building these safe havens. The zeitgeist was a little misdirected at that time. I subscribe to a couple of the European magazines and I saw some projects over there that are just now getting published. The thing that’s wonderful with the Europeans—I think that the Dutch are the best at it—is that they can take a really junky, crappy-looking property and turn it into something great. vanR: Do you mean by rehabbing it?
Nagle: Well, doing new buildings and rehabbing old buildings, both. But they really change the environment. I mean the dock area around Rotterdam is a rough, tough neighborhood and really kind of grungy railroad track area and they’ve turned it into something quite nice. Near the Lijnbaan they built the Cinema building, which is quite wonderful. We’re doing those kinds of things now in our country; we’re taking some pretty rough areas and remaking them into areas that are much better. The Danish architects—I was amazed when I went to Copenhagen and saw how much urban renewal they did up there. It was fun and I traveled around a little bit.
34 vanR: Did you see similar things going on in Holland as in the United States?
Nagle: Yeah. Urban renewal was going on in the United States and we were going to make it all better. vanR: According to your curriculum vitae, you started working with Stanley in 1965.
Nagle: Yes, I had interviewed right around Christmas time of 1964. But first I went to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and I interviewed with Bob Diamant—everyone always remembers who they interviewed with. Then I interviewed at Harry Weese’s office because I had always kind of liked Harry’s work and I’d seen it in the magazines. I interviewed with Jack Hartray because he was a partner there. He maintains he offered me a job, I maintain he never did. Knowing Jack, he probably forgot that he offered me a job. But that’s when I first met Jack. They were very busy at the time doing a lot of university work and also a lot of housing. I also went to Hammond and Roesch and I interviewed with Peter Roesch—he’s a close friend of mine and my neighbor—he lives two doors away. Peter and I sat and talked for about half an hour all about Europe and all that, but then Jim came in and said, ‘We’ve got to get to work!” and he sort of tossed me out of the office. So I ended up being a really close friend of Jim Hammond's and Peter Roesch's. Then Hammond and Beeby got together and all that happened. Then there was Stanley Tigerman’s office. vanR: Before we get to your interview with Stanley, I wonder if you would have worked for Skidmore if they had offered you a job?
Nagle: No. I didn’t really follow up with Skidmore. I really didn’t ever want to work for a big office if I could get a job in a smaller office. vanR: Was that in part because Skidmore wasn’t doing housing?
35 Nagle: Yeah, and I just felt like there was a sea of people there and I wanted to do something that was more personal. I always had it in my mind to set up my own office as soon as I could. I figured that I was not really corporate. Hammond and Roesch weren’t really that interesting because I’ve never really been all that attracted to the Miesian way of doing things—I love the buildings and all that but there was a kind of boring rigor there—so I didn’t really want to do that. Harry Weese was interesting but Tigerman was the most interesting and Larry was there. vanR: Did you go to Tigerman primarily because you knew Larry was there?
Nagle: No… vanR: Were you already pretty familiar with Stanley’s work?
Nagle: I did know it, I had seen it published. In one of his many phases, he did De Stijl work that came though his understanding at Yale with Paul Rudolph. He did some townhouses on Mohawk Street in Chicago that were published all over. They were very Dutch looking and very De Stijl. I was attracted to that because I had seen similar things in Holland. So I went over to Stanley. I walked into the office—Larry will probably tell the same story—and they had this room above Peck and Peck. There were only three desks in the whole office and they had three side chairs and a little side table. Then they had all the publications in one place and the Sweet’s catalogs in another and one little conference table. But there was room for me and so I said, “I’d like to take the job.” Stanley offered me three dollars and ten cents an hour or something like that. Larry said, “Sure, come on and let’s have fun.” I started looking around Chicago for a place to live after that—it was around Christmas. I joined them in February. Stanley called me once or twice and said, “You’ve got to hurry up and get here because we’ve really got a lot of work.” I had to move, of course, and we did. vanR: You were moving back from the Netherlands?
36 Nagle: Well, I had actually moved in with my folks in Iowa for a little bit. We got the family and ended up living in Oak Park for a little over a year and then we moved to the city. We moved to Lincoln Park and that’s where I built all those buildings over the years. So we started work: Stanley, Larry, and I. vanR: Do you recall what projects you were working on?
Nagle: We did a lot of things for the Chicago Dwellings Association (CDA). They’re still around. Ira Bach was the head of it at the time—Stanley and Ira were good friends—and he was going around finding sites where they were building projects. What we did was the conceptual design on these various sites. Some of them were built, some Stanley built. vanR: These were vacant sites?
Nagle: Most of them were vacant. Some were in Uptown and Lincoln Park, neighborhoods which were very different then. I did a lot of that. I was only with Stanley for about a year and a month. We did a remodeling for a house and we did a house. We did a lot of those projects and we did everything in the office. Stanley was doing paintings at the time for a hospital and the three of us would put on those white jackets that the psychiatrists who were upstairs from us wore. Every week we’d get a new, fresh, clean white jacket. Of course, I looked like a beef salesman in mine because I was so big. It was really a fun time, we had a good time. vanR: How did you and Larry conspire to open your own firm together? Were you unhappy working for Stanley?
Nagle: No, we just figured that if Stanley could do it, then so could we. Stanley was in Pakistan a lot at that time doing a project over there that he had done with one of his classmates at Yale. That was when Lou Kahn was over there and I think he even met Lou Kahn while he was there. So Stanley was gone and Larry and I were running the office and we started to think. I said, “Larry, you know, I think we can get some work here. We might as well be running
37 our own offices.” We had a nice parting in that we set it up way ahead of time. One of the people who did come back to us was Jerry Shlaes, who was our first client—we did the Hudson Street townhouses for him. We had worked on a competition for Jerry while we were in Stanley’s office that didn’t win—it was an urban renewal thing. This is a divergence, but I really wish they’d do more of that. In those days they had a lot of urban renewal competitions. One of the things that Chicago doesn’t have—for all the work that the American Institute of Architects (AIA) does—they don’t connect with the city the way they should. We tried the design review thing two years ago at Chicago chapter of the AIA but it never really happened. For years I was on the AIA Chicago committee to review the housing projects for the urban renewal sites when they were give out. When the sites were given out, they’d come in and you’d look at them. They had independent architects come in and we’d grade them. It was never anything that was long lasting or consistent or anything like that. Actually, it seems to work much better in Europe than it does here. Maybe the city or the AIA wasn’t paying attention, but it really should have happened that way. But anyway, we did this one competition that we didn’t get but we did meet Jerry and he came to us about six or eight months after we set up. I called Stanley and he said it was fine. So we did these little townhouses for Jerry. That was the first real urban project that we did. They were six little townhouses over on Hudson. I still think that’s one of the best projects we ever did. vanR: Those houses won a number of awards at the time.
Nagle: It was a split-level scheme with roof terraces and it enters where you drop down. Looking at the brick and the way it all works together with masonry- bearing walls and the framing of it—people probably wouldn’t let you do that now. Jerry was very open to these things and he was a great client. We did the Webster Street houses not long after that. There was a little recession in there, so I’m not sure of the date. vanR: The Webster townhouses were done around 1970.
38 Nagle: There should have been cut stone where the black trim is. Whenever you build something you always know what didn’t get quite done the way it should have been. Again, we did that with Jerry. They were called city houses. It was really a nice alternative. There were certainly other projects like that going on at that time. For us, this started out from the beginning as an opportunity to do something contextual and all that. Now people would argue if you put brick walls in the front of houses to get the privacy because they were front-and-back townhouses, they’d say that’s not the way the street ought to work and it ought to be more open. I’m not so sure, I still think that it’s kind of neat to have the walls and the openings for the doors. You don’t have to be quite so rigorous about history. This whole business of new urbanism, where they just line up everything all the time, that’s old urbanism to me. New urbanism might be something where you deal with the relationship to the street. You’d need eyes on the street and all that sort of stuff. We actually thought about all that a lot and we talked about it as we were doing this work. vanR: This makes me think of Jane Jacobs’s famous arguments in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Was that a book that you had read?
Nagle: Oh, yeah. We knew it from cover to cover. vanR: She was always very concerned about eyes on the street and how the people living in urban houses related to the streetscape.
Nagle: Yeah. And then there was the other guy, Oscar Newman, who wrote Defensible Space. vanR: I think that Jane Jacobs’s book was published in 1961. Were you assigned to read it in school? Or did you find it on your own?
Nagle: I read it right away. I can’t remember how I found it. I think that Millon might have had us read it, but as I said, I read it right away. As I said, there were a lot of ideas around then but there weren’t many publications.
39 vanR: When you and Larry opened your own office, were there many other small firms doing small residential projects?
Nagle: There are many more small offices now. The difference, as I said to people at the time, was that Chicago was a town of large architectural offices in the early- and mid-1960s because of the tradition of big building. Then there were a bunch of one-man offices around out in the suburbs and in other places, like there are in most major cities. The real difference between Chicago and, say, places like Boston or San Francisco, which I knew, was that there weren’t that many people commissioning architects to do houses or townhouses or things like that. Chicago was doing builder and contractor stuff. Part of it might have been the fee structures but the other part was that there was a kind of pragmatic approach—the good part of Chicago is that it’s pragmatic and the bad part is that it’s pragmatic. The bad part was that people were building houses that were builder houses or they’d get plans and sort of have somebody just put them together. In San Francisco there was a long tradition of really interesting houses and different living styles. There are some wonderful books just coming out now about that. I’ve followed California housing for a long time now—written by guys like Joe Esherick and that whole genre out there. In Boston it was the same thing because there were a lot of schools around and a lot of young people and an intellectual community. Every professor would have an architect design his house. There wasn’t that climate so much in Chicago. We were one of the few practices that set out and got somewhere doing that sort of thing. Now it’s changed because you see a lot more small offices. There’re more people and more building. By the way, you’ve got to remember that by 1965 I think the city population had gone considerably under four million people. Actually it was only slightly more than three million then while the whole metropolitan area was more than six. Now we’re under three million aren’t we? The greater area is something like eight million. It’s very different now because of the flight to the suburbs.
40 vanR: If there was a lack of awareness among Chicagoans about hiring architects to design homes, how did you find your clients?
Nagle: Larry and I figured that we could set up our office because we knew a few people and we might as well try it. So we just did it. Larry started a kitchen remodeling for a woman named Garner. My brother George also wanted me to do a house for him in Iowa, so I did that, and I also did my parents’ place. So I picked up some odds and ends and did some kitchen remodelings and did a little teaching. We had some pretty lean years and there were times when we didn’t do so well. The thing is that we just started to do it. vanR: Can you describe how you and Larry divided responsibilities for the firm?
Nagle: Yeah, we always did it so that one or the other was in charge of the project. Usually if you brought the job in, you got it. Later on, when there were more projects, we’d argue a little bit about who ought to do it, of course. Usually we’d help one another—in the early years, of course, we had to. In the later years if one guy wasn’t so busy he’d work on other projects. Usually we kept our clients separate. I think that’s a healthy way to do it. In this office, we do it a little bit differently because it isn’t always so clear how the work comes in any more. In those days if you had a friend who wanted to build a house—like Brad Cook in Minnesota, whose house I built—you’d get the job. Now clients come in and they say that they’ve seen our work or they know a previous client, so it isn’t quite as clear. What we do now when we divvy up the work is to see who’s busy and who isn’t. I don’t work on everything in this office, but I work on most things, in terms of design and all. Dirk [Danker] and Don [McKay] work on their own projects and I think that’s the healthy way to do it. I think it’s good to have a studio approach. vanR: So then with your work with Larry, would you say there’s a definite sense of authorship to each project?
Nagle: Well, certainly in the houses, there’s no question because it’s personal. But you take a job like the museum we’re doing now down at the University of
41 Illinois—I worked on the conceptual part and I went down with Don McKay and we did the charette and figured it out. As it got into the design, I gradually pulled out and he ran the whole project. We did the Lincolnshire Town Hall the same way. Dirk and I have been working together for twenty years and we pick up on things and we can trade off in the middle of things. The difference also is that I’m older than they are and we get along just fine. Larry and I would argue about who did it because we had different ideas many times. But I thought it was interesting that in our early work—Jack Hartray told me this once and I think he was right—you couldn’t tell the difference. vanR: Then you think there was a similar stylistic approach between Larry and you in the early days?
Nagle: We were both interested in a lot of the same things. When we were in Stanley’s office we talked and we decided that we really liked the hard-line architecture and not soft architecture that was so common. vanR: Can you give an example of what you mean?
Nagle: Well, hard-line would be Mies, I suppose. But if you think of it in the constructivist sort of way, it’s like Mondrian. Soft is like Jackson Pollock. The sort of mushy architecture that was going on at the time, we weren’t interested in that. We had a kind of a style. When Larry did the Barglow house, I worked on that too. It was wonderful and we had a great time—we drew every brick in that house. We were so naïve that we even had strings hanging down from the wall because we wanted all the vertical joints in the bricks to line up. Try to get a contractor to do that sometime! The Hudson houses were very much like that. It was a clear way of doing things. It came out of a kind of modernism that you didn’t see that much of in Chicago because most of the small offices, like David Haid and Jim Speyer and all those guys, came out of Mies. And we didn’t.
42 vanR: Did you find yourself running into people who expected you to be able to do Miesian kind of architecture?
Nagle: They didn’t expect us to do Miesian work, because they knew we were different and they knew we were modern. Tom Beeby, for instance, came to Stanley’s office looking for a job and the three of us were there sitting in that little office, but Stanley couldn’t hire him because he didn’t have room. There were only three desks. We got to know Tom then and he ended up over at Murphy’s office and we kept in touch. We used to have lunch with him over at the Art Institute and find out what was going on and talk about things. Tom started working in a very Miesian way when Gene Summers was running Murphy. We were doing other things and we used to get together and talk about things. vanR: So you were able to begin developing a small group of peers who weren’t part of the main group?
Nagle: Yes. Although, we did know a bunch of people at Skidmore and Mies’s office and they weren’t all that strict. Somebody like Dan Brenner, for instance, who used to teach at IIT and had his firm Brenner Danforth and Rockwell, I got to know all three of them—they were older guys. I liked Dan a lot and we became good friends. He built a house up in Door County, where I have a house, and he built a stone circular tower. So he didn’t just do Miesian things; there was a dialogue and he could do other things. It wasn’t so cut-and-dried. vanR: You mentioned the Cook house in Brainard [Minnesota] a while back. That was an important project in your early years. Would you discuss that further?
Nagle: Well, that and the Brown house, which I did simultaneously in Des Moines in 1969 and 1970. I went to school with Brad Cook and I knew Bill Brown because he was a Phi Psi at Iowa and I got to know him. Bill wanted to build a house in Des Moines and Brad wanted to build a big summer house in
43 Minnesota. It was amazing how nobody really questioned what we were going to do. We all just assumed they would be modern houses. So we did it. I was always interested in the restructuring of the Bauhaus. I even quoted the Bauhaus in the Brown house. In Philip Johnson’s and Hitchcock’s book on the MoMA exhibit in 1932, they talked about what functionalism was and how there was no ornament and so on. The point was to challenge that at the same time as I made architecture that wasn’t picturesque but it also was—the way it was sited and the way the thing was juxtaposed on the landscape. vanR: The Brown house was a cube that was turned at an angle so that it took full advantage of the view.
Nagle: The angle was twenty-two degrees. The space went through it and the idea was to form a space down below that flowed up into the space up above. That space really did work and I’m amazed that they let me do that. vanR: Do you mean the clients?
Nagle: Yeah. Actually, I just finished doing a kind of vernacular piece for them—they sold that early house and they have a little apartment in Des Moines that they moved into. Then they built this house down at the end of the state and it’s a winery. It’s interesting that we’ve continued to work for them. When I started working on the Brown house I said, “Gee, this is the suburbs in Iowa and you’ve got to make it part of the landscape.” The other houses were out behind it and this house was out on a hillside. So we made that gesture. At the same time I was working on the Cook house and I was looking at that house in the same way. You’ve got to understand that at the time the zoot forms, the diagonal forms, were what people were really interested in and not just the grid. They wanted to try other things and there was a great deal of that going on. I’d come out of this strict MIT grid and it was really kind of fun to begin to maneuver those forms around. Then I went back and I looked at Wright’s work and the way those plans worked with the spaces. With the Cook house I did a diagonal piece. Actually we built on to that house later when we did a guest house and some other things.
44 vanR: You did the additions in 1977.
Nagle: The attitude there was that we were working within a form and the box. It actually does make some structural sense—we did the two- by six-foot framing and we got the laminated beams and steel columns coming down in a sixteen-foot module and then you subtract that from it. As for the difference in materials, I did the little book on six houses that we had done in 1994 and 1995 and when you look at it in black-and-white you think that they all look very similar. But then you see the houses as built and you see that one is in shingles and one is in stucco and they are different materials. And the textures are very different. It depends on where it’s located. That was great fun and it was a good time, because the economy in the 1960s was upbeat and, of course, it didn’t cost much. My God, Larry and I bought a house together in Lincoln Park for $30,000 each, it was amazing. It was going to cost $15,000 to remodel, so we did most of the work ourselves. I remember one time when he was wrecking and I heard him. I think he had had too much wine after dinner and he sort of cut into a drainpipe. So he was figuring out how he was going to rearrange his house and I was whacking away at my place. We had a plumber working for us who had been thrown off the job. I don’t even think we had a permit—Larry was supposed to get one, something he eventually got around to. We were a little loose about it but we were having a good time. vanR: You spoke about your amazement that the Browns let you do what you did with your design for their house. What level of input did your clients have in the design process?
Nagle: Well, the Browns were young, too, see. I listen to clients, of course. With the Brown house, we looked at it and it seemed to make sense to put the bedrooms upstairs and the living areas downstairs and the other parts in the basement. It was the fourth level that was kind of crazy. I said, “Well, the kids are probably going to be upstairs and then you can take this level and it gives you a sitting room and all this.” Then they got really excited about the
45 space. Bill says he really misses it. While we’ve done a new nice, simple little place for them—the winery part is the best—he says he really misses the old house because it was like living in sculpture for all those years. That still makes me feel good and it was fun to do. When Brad [Cook] did his house, the plan was to do it around a big room because it’s a house where you have fun—it’s not a permanent year-round house, although it’s big. Then the idea of using materials that were on the site was something that I had always wanted to do. The site was an old scout camp and the walls there were beautiful granite boulders. I think that Cold Spring quarry is close by to Brainerd and so we got a mason and a carpenter who knew what they were doing. The mason said, “Oh, yeah, I can do this wall and a fireplace and this and that.” I asked the carpenter if he could work with clear cedar because I wanted this natural look, which I’m still doing. He called me up one time—it was really funny because you’ve got to understand that as an older architect you usually get a little bit of respect, although not much, but when you’re young and you’ve drawn something and they want to know how to build it they ask you. So Arnie called me up and said, “All right, Nagle, why don’t you fly up here and show me how this house is going to lay out. How am I ever going to get all these diagonals and angles on a hillside? You come and help me do it.” So I did, I flew up and helped him. I stayed in Brainerd and Brad and I went out and we staked out the whole thing. We used the old- fashioned way of doing it where you take the line and the pin and you do a three-four-five triangle and you figure out all the things until you get it right. Then he put in the foundations and he made me fly up again and lay out all the other stuff. It was interesting. vanR: It sounds like you were a really pragmatic architect.
Nagle: That was another nice thing about a small office, unlike a large office. What we try to do here in our office is that the people who work on the design and do the working drawings also go out in the field. It’s their project all the way through. We don’t have designers here and working drawing people there and somebody else on the job site, like a lot of big offices do. I think you lose sight of what it is that you’re doing because you’re just doing projects.
46 [Tape 2: Side 2] vanR: The Brown house received a Record house award in 1974 and a distinguished building award from the AIA. One of the things that was noted in the citation for that house was that it was an east coast house done by Midwesterners. Would you like to comment on that?
Nagle: Gee, I’d forgotten that, I guess. Well, it was, sort of. If you think about Gropius and Breuer and all that, I guess it was more like that. vanR: The writer noted that, “The white house has become an east coast genre. Here these two ex-easterners try their hand.”
Nagle: That’s probably a fair statement. We were influenced, certainly, by what we had seen. The other thing is, of course, Charlie Gwathmey, Richard Meier, and all those guys were doing white architecture at the time. vanR: Did you see any similarity between your work and theirs?
Nagle: Oh yeah. I mean, Gwathmey’s really good at making spaces in houses and all that. I saw that. And there was Meier’s Smith house, the one that was so important for his work. Sure, I was aware of all that work. I’m not sure it was all going on quite at that time, but we were doing it kind of simultaneously, I think. It really grew out of the Bauhaus. I suppose it is East Coast—that probably is a fair statement. But there’s a lot of architecture that was done like that. One of the great houses that was done in Iowa was done by a firm in Des Moines that did Depression-Modern and functionalist Bauhaus designs. So people have always been influenced by that sort of thing. You think of George Fred Keck, for heaven’s sake, and his work was very much based on European ideas. Andy Rebori’s work was the same way. That’s why I was interested in that because that lineage that has jumped around a little bit and come out different in different places. The regionalist part of it was what I thought was really interesting. I did the
47 house up in Minnesota and I used natural materials because you see the trees are right there and so you adapt your design to match that. The spatial part of it was very different from my other houses. But it was all “hard-line” architecture. There were certainly fewer of us in the Midwest doing this kind of thing than there were on the East Coast, there’s no question. But the better way of putting it was that it was more the translation of European influences over a long period of time. Actually, if you think about it, it’s sort of interesting that with the exception of people like Neutra and Schindler and a few others and of course Wright had his own way of doing things, there were very few people until well into the 1930s who did really European modern houses. Those new-wave houses were not done in America, although they were all over the place in Europe. Part of that had to do with the depression and part of it had to do with the fact that nobody here wanted them. Wright influenced some of this, but it was primarily a European product. So when it did kick in again it was well after the Second World War and, again, there wasn’t that much of it done, even into the 1950s. By the time we got around to doing it in the late 1960s it was a little bit au courant. What I thought was interesting was that I had seen Corbusier’s early work and I thought it was so wonderful but by then he was doing the brut concrete work in the 1950s and 1960s because he had seen his early work come apart. Villa Savoye stucco fell off and all that, so he said, “By God, I’m going to build in concrete because that will last forever.” So I went around and I saw all that stuff. Of course, Villa Savoye looks wonderful because it’s been fixed up. vanR: Did you see these projects while you were living in the Netherlands?
Nagle: No, I saw them later. Then when I went back to Paris about ten years ago, I went to the Cité Universitaire and saw the Swiss Pavilion that Corbusier had done. It was absolutely fixed up and, typical of the Swiss, the mural was perfect and the stucco was just right and the furniture was right in place, it was just glorious and really beautiful. Then you walk down the way and you see the Brazilian Pavilion that he did late in the 1950s. It’s made out of brut concrete and the colors have faded and the concrete is dirty and there’s no way to clean it, short of sandblasting the whole thing and starting over. It
48 was sort of interesting to me that he had gone to this method and now they are truly in ruins, whereas the early, light buildings could be fixed up. They do have to maintain those sorts of buildings and all that, but generally what they have to do is try to build them right. It’s like Luis Barragán, right? You have to engage with your building every spring and freshen it up a bit. I think that’s interesting. Of course, when I was describing the Brown house, I just always said it was in the International Style. vanR: Well, the banded windows and the white box certainly suggest those origins.
Nagle That’s why I think it’s less East Coast than European. vanR: Another thing that was a parallel interest of yours in the early 1970s and that is your interest in preservation in Chicago. In the 1960s and 1970s the movement was just beginning to find its feet in Chicago. There were a number of significant battles, of which some were won and some were lost. You became involved with a group of people who were trying to save parts of Chicago’s architectural history. Some of the early people in that group were Ben Weese, Tom Stauffer, Leon Despres, and Bill Hasbrouck. Can you speak about how you became involved in that?
Nagle: Well, we all loved Sullivan and when the Chicago Stock Exchange was torn down and a bunch of other buildings… vanR: Like the Garrick Theatre?
Nagle: Yes. It was infuriating because these were great buildings and a part of architectural history that was very important. If you read Giedion, why he draws a direct bloodline right through these buildings to modernism through Sullivan and Wright. But the big thing was the threat to Glessner house in the 1960s I love Richardson’s work and, of course, I knew it from Boston where I saw it all and really appreciated it. I loved the monolithic quality of it, with the red brick and the red stone and the red tile and the strength of these buildings.
49 vanR: He had done Sever Hall at Harvard that you probably saw constantly.
Nagle: Sure. It was a great building. I photographed it and drew it. There’s the idea of the masonry things and the tactile quality of understanding buildings, where some are light and some are heavy. Harry Weese had a wonderful way of doing both light and heavy and putting them together—he always did very thin things and very heavy things. vanR: Can you give an example of a building where he did that? vanR: Well, there’s the Arena theater that he did in Washington D.C. in the early 1960s. It’s all solid masonry and concrete and then he has put light stairs on it. When you come inside it’s all light detailing and there’s a kind of a contrast between the heavy and the light parts of it. So anyway in 1966, here was the work of this main man, H. H. Richardson, and they were going to tear down this house. So we really were upset about that. Ben, who has always been an evangelist, really went after that. He probably told you the stories about getting the money. vanR: Yes, he talked about getting it from Philip Johnson.
Nagle: Yes. Of course, he was in a good position there with Harry and his office, so people knew him and all that. We knew Ben because he lived in the neighborhood not that far away and we were friends with him and Jack Hartray, too. He started to tell me about all this and he said I ought to get in on it, so I did. We all got excited about it. When we did the Glessner house renovations I got stuck working on the house and getting people to come in and work and raise money for seven years. vanR: You were on the board of trustees from 1970 to 1977, so that was quite a commitment from you.
50 Nagle: Yes. I was vice-president from 1970 until 1974 and president during the recession of 1974-75. So we got people to come in and work on saving the building and then we realized that there were all these other things that needed saving. There was real resistance from the city. Now, of course, the pendulum has swung totally the other way. My God, now everything has to look historical. It’s really crazy. I remember Lew Hill, the planning commissioner at the time, sitting down with us when we were in the Rookery celebrating that that building was saved. He looked at me and said, “Well Nagle, have you saved any buildings lately?” just sort of snarling at me. We were standing in the way of progress, that was their attitude. Actually, the pendulum truly has gone too far in the other direction now. There are a lot of things that people have gotten very fussy about and there’s a lot of bureaucracy in that particular business. The part I liked about all of it was that we were figuring it out as we went along. We made a lot of mistakes. I was mentioning the other day to Tom Beeby that along with raising the money while I was down there with Bill Hasbrouck and everybody else Marian Despres came in with the idea of having docents. I said, “What’s a docent?” I had no idea what it was. She said, “You know, it’s like at Greene and Greene’s Gamble house.” That was where she had seen docents giving house tours, at the Gamble house out in Pasadena. I said, “Oh, I know what a docent is.” So we started the program. I was also running around getting architects to do work on the house for free. I got Tom Beeby to work on what was originally the conservatory on the second floor and we ended up with a little conference room out of it. He did a beautiful job on it. But you’d never do it that way any more. What had happened was that it had started out as a conservatory and then Mrs. Glessner figured out that she didn’t have enough room for all of her clothes and she made a closet out of it, so it never really got completely finished. The glass never ran down and it was always a sort of funny and in-between space. It made a wonderful gesture to the courtyard. So we made it into this little auditorium space. Tom, I think, won an AIA award for it and so it was a really good thing to do. But we figured that was a place where we could do pretty much what we wanted. We took districts of the building and set them aside. Dan Brenner, who had done the modeling of the Madlener house for the Graham Foundation and was the
51 guru at the time about how to put old houses back together because he had done such nice work. So he was kind of the house architect. As we did these projects, Dan would watch and approve. Then he also did a lot of work himself. I just did odds and ends. We weren’t very disciplined about it, although we tried to write guidelines. That didn’t quite work in that particular building. We did write some very good guidelines for Lincoln Park and some other places that Ben and I did with Bill Spooner and some other people. vanR: Were these the guidelines that were to be used by the city?
Nagle: Yeah. They still use them, which is kind of neat. vanR: What did these guidelines cover?
Nagle: Well, for instance, if you restore buildings, you don’t put paned windows in Victorian houses because they generally have double-hung windows. So we would say don’t put in paned windows and don’t put in dumb porches on buildings that weren’t ever meant to have porches. They were fairly simple guidelines but they allowed you to make a lot of interesting moves. I took my house before I built my new one and we put fixed glass in the front of it. I probably couldn’t do that any more, but it looks great. These rules allowed you to do things that were correct while at the same time you could be more inventive if you wanted to be. I guess that was what we were trying to do. As we were doing this Marian Despres would say, “Let’s take the library and make it into what it used to be.” I’d say, “That’s wonderful, let’s take that district and do with it what we’re supposed to do.” The bedrooms upstairs were chaos. We had to get some money and get the AIA interested in preservation. So we got them to move their headquarters down there. They actually moved the AIA headquarters from downtown to the Glessner house, which was truly an inconvenience because everybody had to take a cab down there. vanR: That wasn’t such a safe neighborhood for a while.
52 Nagle: Right, but during the day it wasn’t so bad. So we did the house over, and I think that Dan Brenner and Ray Ovresat worked on it. We made judgements about how you did things: we did the furniture so that it was sympathetic but modern. You used to see that attitude all the time. I sort of miss that now because people are getting too literal about it; there isn’t that kind of translation that you find in Europe. So for the preservation part of it, we felt strongly about keeping the good things but we were far from historically precise. Once Paul Sprague came in and gave us a crit about how Richardson’s spaces move differently. Ben was going to cut a slice from the entry hall through the front parlor through the back parlor, which is the dining room, through the kitchen and make an axial piece there. vanR: He was going to remove part of the building?
Nagle: Yeah, he was going to cut into the paneling and then serve that way rather than coming around the way the servants used to; you could get people through the building that way. We were going to remodel and do all that stuff. Then Sprague, who is an historian, came in and he was really incensed and he said, “In Richardson’s space you walk up the front and then you turn and then you come in and you turn and it’s never axial.” It was this wonderful dissertation about his understanding of Richardson’s use of space. He was right and so we went back and did it the right way. We were learning. vanR: So you were trying to bring the Glessner house into the twentieth century and reinterpret parts of the interior?
Nagle: We were doing some of that. vanR: In retrospect how do you feel about that approach?
Nagle: Well, I think that it’s fine to have it just the way it was when it was built, that’s the way everybody wants it. But we saw it as a working building, not
53 a museum. It was a different attitude. It isn’t that the way it is now is wrong, not at all, it’s perfectly right because it’s an historical building. That’s what people are interested in and that’s what the times are about. What we were trying to do is make it viable, to get offices in there. For a while we almost got the Society of Architectural Historians there. We had Inland Architect in there. vanR: Was that because Harry Weese was running the magazine then?
Nagle: Yeah, and he was interested in preservation. What we were trying to do was make it work in today’s world. vanR: So how did you balance the adaptive reuse and the preservation?
Nagle: Well, it was both. We certainly preserved the outside. I had one guy come over and I said that we had to see what this building was going to look like if we cleaned it. This guy from Central Building and Cleaning, Chuck Rivkin, came over and I asked him to go around the back and I gave him three formulas to wash the stone with. These guys went out there and they did it right on the corner. So here was this corner at Prairie Avenue and Eighteenth Street and there were three different stones washed. But you could never put the soot back on them so they sat there for years and looked funny. I should have gotten them to wash stones on the backside of the house. So we made a lot of mistakes. But eventually the building got cleaned up and we got the ivy off it… vanR: You say that you made mistakes, but were there really a lot of examples for you to study in the United States at that time? Historic preservation here was in its infancy.
Nagle: There weren’t many precedents here. But the Europeans were doing it. The Dutch, for instance, had booklets all put together when I was living over there. But there wasn’t much here. At Glessner house, there wasn’t even a clear idea that it was supposed to be an historical building. There was the
54 frame house that we moved down there, the Widow Clarke house, and we knew that was a museum house. So we got the house moved and we set up the district to show what had been there and it became an historic district—that was a clear idea. The Glessner house was not a clear idea until much later on. Then that sort of preservation led to other things; it made us work hard at trying to get a whole bunch of things put back together. Of course, we continue to do this kind of work, we do it all the time. We do universities and churches and all sorts of things. We really learned a lot from that; it was a good time. vanR: You’ve spoken about how you, personally, developed your interest in preservation. What was your impression of the larger community or the general public’s growing interest in that area?
Nagle: Well, I wasn’t here before the Chicago Stock Exchange and the Garrick and all those buildings got torn down. The general public took a while to come around. I think there were three things that did it—I wrote a little paper about this when I was president of Glessner house; I think there is a time when people begin to understand that they have to deal with their past. When 1776 got to be 1976, everybody looked around and they wanted to celebrate two hundred years of history and they saw that they’d torn down more than they’d saved by a great margin. Throughout the whole country, they realized that they had really done a job on things. But also, we had come out of a pretty tough recession at that time, there was no building going on and it made people look back. I had put together a show on Chicago architecture during the depression years, the 1930s and 1940s, that was shown at Glessner house, but I’ll speak more about that later. That was what got me thinking about it so I put this paper together. The fact was that people weren’t that busy so they were looking at things and wondering, for instance if Water Tower Place, which was going up at that time, was really all that good on Michigan Avenue. They were asking things like, Shouldn’t we be building in a more contextual way? I’ve always been conservative anyway in terms of being a good neighbor and all that. It seemed to me that you could just feel it. That was when everybody started to dust off their tuxedos and
55 began to go to preservation balls. Before that we were doing it with paper plates on card tables. So all of that was new at that time. It was for all of those reasons I think that it came together. I had written that piece for Inland Architect, I think. Nory Miller understood all of that and she was there in the house at that time. The other thing that I could never understand—it’s like church, you go there and you always get egos mixed up with mission—all these people who have their own flag to wave and they get mixed up with what we’re trying to do. I think there was a lot of misunderstanding of what should be preserved and how it should be preserved and all that. I always felt it should be more inventive, with the European precedents that I’d seen and in the work of some of the good architects working in Boston and New York, like Hardy, Holzman and Pfeiffer, and Ben Thompson and a bunch of other people. Harry Weese wasn’t strict about the way he redid the Auditorium and Orchestra Hall, but he did a marvelous job. vanR: So when you say there was a misunderstanding, do you mean that some people were trying to be too literal?
Nagle: Yeah. I think that they were being perhaps too fussy and some of the things got lost in terms of the possibility of invention. They could have been better. We did a lot of mediocre things. vanR: By “we” do you mean Chicago architects in general?
Nagle: Yes. I think that a lot of architects did that. How many times have you seen paneled doors where the panels are nailed on to the door? It’s that kind of architecture, it’s awful. It’s better not to do it at all. There has been some awful preservation done. It’s still going on. The part that is really awful now is that new buildings are starting to look like bad preservation jobs. That’s what I really don’t like, the slap-on ornament and all that stuff that’s not authentic. vanR: We’ve talked about the changing attitudes in Chicago about architecture. You mentioned the recession and there was the Vietnam War and Watergate
56 and the oil crisis too. There was a lot going on in Americans’ minds in the early 1970s.
Nagle: There wasn’t quite as much turmoil in the 1970s as in the 1960s, but it was still going on. vanR: Perhaps it’s fairer to say that people had gotten used to the idea of rethinking the status quo. Architecture and planning were in a state of ferment as well. We’ve talked briefly about Jane Jacobs’s seminal book, Death and Life in Great American Cities, but we haven’t mentioned one of the other important books of this period, which is Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. It was published in 1961
Nagle: Yes, that book was one of the very first Graham Foundation grants. vanR: What was your reaction to Venturi’s premise?
Nagle: The minute it came out, we all read it. It was very interesting. The part I liked the best was his analogies with Aalto’s work. Frankly, I don’t like his architecture as much as his ideas, but I sure like Aalto’s ideas and architecture. He was referring to that as a possible way of doing things. He had a lot to do with the overscaling of things that came out of the postmodern movement. The postmodern movement wouldn’t have been so bad—it started then, coming out of that turmoil that you talked about, for instance, when they blew up Pruitt-Igoe—I think that a lot of that became mannerisms that weren’t authentic. I use that word carefully because I’ve thought about it for a while. I’ve talked to Peter Bohlin, a good friend of mine—serving on the AIA national Committee for Design was something that I did during this time. Stanley got me on that and it was an important time for me because I began to connect nationally with people. But we all were struggling with the question of how to begin to deal with all this history. The preservation part of it was clearer to me than how you deal with the new building part. I think that some of the misrepresentations of it we’ve grown tired of, whereas the things that are still looking good to us are those
57 with an authentic understanding of scale, materials, and other things that make buildings sensitive and interpret the architecture that they’re trying to emulate. That’s the trick. It’s hard to do. There’s a real thin line there. I like what we’ve done most recently at the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. I just presented that to the board of trustees last Friday and I assured them that the new Kovler gym that we’re adding to the old Sunny gym would be like the middle school. I told them it’s going to be like the middle school, but it’s going to be somewhat simplified because we don’t want to take away from the wonderful ornateness of the tower and entry in the old building. Part of it has to do with saving money, but the other part of it is to do it in a real simple way and to blend the old and new together. You get enough detail in the new but you are able to look at the building and tell the old building. The new building is really complementary to it but, at the same time, it isn’t just a knee-jerk copy of it. There was another interesting book, Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. In that book he tells about how dumb the Bauhaus was because it was workers’ housing and it never should have come over here. Well, the guy was just selling books, although his stuff from the 1960s was great. But that was a really silly book because he was writing about things that he didn’t know much about. When he said things couldn’t be done anymore because there were crafts that had been lost altogether, well, I wanted him to come to Chicago. The neat thing about Chicago is that you can come here any time and find someone to do anything. If you want terra cotta or stone carving or leaded glass, you’ve got to pay for it, but you can find someone to do it. The skills are here. What we try to do is use the skills effectively, because they are expensive, and at the same time, you’ve got to make it real. So the next step is to think about how to take old buildings and add to them. I’m working in Hull House right now, which is interesting. It’s the third time around on it, but it has to do with money and administration and not so much the architecture. How do you do something that addresses Jane Addams’s house, which is Italianate, and the Arts and Crafts part, which is from Pond and Pond? How do you make the link in between the two that says that it’s new but old? So we were looking at it in a conservative way and you’ve got to think about it and try some different things. It’s an eyeball thing, and a gut thing, too. Like Pietro
58 Belluschi said, you’ve got to have a good eye. You have to look at things and get the proportions right. The other thing is that we architects have failed in that we get egos mixed up with mission. There are things that I call low-ego buildings, that you don’t know have even been done by an architect. vanR: Can you give an example of that?
Nagle: Well, I think that the dormitories that I did at Northwestern are like that. Some of them, like the mid-quadrangle dormitories, you would never know that they were new buildings. But at the same time, they work and the windows are different and there is a bunch of stuff that is in there to see. They were published. That was sort of novel in 1981 or whenever it was done. We did it straight away, but there were ideas about making it symmetrical where it came in the center of the block, where the other buildings were not like that. That was truly the kind of building that no one will ever know we did, and I think that’s wonderful. I think that more architects should do that. Sure, you’ve got to make your moves when it’s right, but then there are times when you should do these kinds of buildings. That’s what bothered me a little bit about what Venturi said and what other people said and then what we all did. I made mistakes, there’s no question about it, and I still do. If you look at it from the idea of doing the right thing and using your eye, then you can do something that nobody knows you did and that’s good at the same time. The innovation part of it is what I like. I have really never liked mannered architecture very much. That isn’t what we do. I find it kind of difficult. The good example is Michael Graves, let’s say, and all that work that he did. It was his own vocabulary and it was all big, bombastic stuff that he laid on everybody and all the kids picked it up in school. He was the most influential architect since Richardson for a period of about five—thank God it wasn’t more—years. He really laid it on everybody. It was a very, very silly kind of mannered architecture that really doesn’t look good any more. It’s terribly dated. There are things that don’t need to look that way.
59 vanR: You’ve spoken about the early and mid-1970s. May we move on to the years that the Chicago Seven began to take shape? In 1976 an exhibition and catalog titled, “One Hundred Years of Chicago Architecture” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art. That show had opened previously in Munich and had been organized by Peter Pran, Oswald Grube and Franz Schulze. That show laid out a history of Chicago architecture from the first Chicago School to the second Chicago School, which included Mies and SOM and other international-style architects. As an alternative to that show, Stanley Tigerman, Stuart Cohen, Ben Weese, and Larry Booth organized an exhibition and catalog titled “Chicago Architects” to open at the same time.
Nagle: That show was non-Miesian, although we were in both shows. vanR: How did you first become aware of the MCA exhibition?
Nagle: Well, actually, I think what predated this in my mind was before that when I was president at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, we did a show on 1930s and 1940s Chicago architecture. We had time to do it because of the recession that we were all in and I had some thoughts about it. It’s like reading Giedion and you begin to think that it didn’t really happen quite that way, where he jumps from building to building. He just sort of left out the things he wasn’t interested in. So I felt that there was a lot of really interesting architecture that didn’t really follow his line from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies. Even though there was not much building going on in the 1930s and 1940s and after that. But there were interesting architects. So we decided to put on a little show at the Glessner house. I want to talk about that before I talk about the “Chicago Architects” show because I think one led to another. What happened was that I thought it would be a nice thing to do and I had some time so I started to put this show together. I got together with my friend, Jack Hedrich, who has documented all that stuff. Hedrich- Blessing started their business in the 1920s and has photographed all these buildings. Jack had these wonderful big boards that he showed me up in his old studio. On these boards he had the work of famous architects and he asked them if they would sign his photographs of their work and send them
60 back. So he had this archive that he was very proud of. I started to go through his archive and find all these things with him. I’ve forgotten exactly how we did it, but I think I basically said, Let’s take a look at what was going on at that time. By the way, Jack should tell you the funny story about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—he had photographed it and that was the photograph that really made Hedrich-Blessing. Bill had done that standing in the middle of the stream and he had gotten up on a ladder. It was published all over the place and finally they blew it up on this board and sent it to Frank Lloyd Wright and asked him to sign it and send it back. But they never heard from him, so after a while they called up there and Jack got a hold of Wright’s secretary and they said, “Yes, Mr. Wright really enjoyed the photograph. He signed it and hung it on the wall behind his desk. If you’d like to send another one, he’ll sign it and send it back to you.” So that’s what Jack did. It’s a typical Wright story. Anyway, Jack had photos of great things like the A. O. Smith building in Milwaukee by Holabird and Root and Mies’s buildings and all this sort of stuff. So I said, “You know, this would be wonderful if we could get these big pictures together to make a show about what happened in the 1930s and 1940s in Chicago.” Then I figured that I’d better not try to write this myself and I’d better get someone who’s a better writer, so Susan Benjamin helped me put it all together and she really wrote the thing. For whatever good it was, we hung the show at Glessner house because we were trying to make it a working place, not a restoration, and we wanted to get people to come and learn about the district and preservation. A lot of people came: Stanley was one of them, of course. That sort of engaged everybody in the alternative. That alternative was guys like the young Harry Weese and George Fred Keck, Andy Rebori, Paul Schweikher, Larry Perkins and a bunch of other people. I think that we had something like twenty or twenty-five images. The Illinois Arts Council took it and sent it around. It went to the Bergman Gallery at the University of Chicago and maybe other venues. I never did find out all of where it really went. vanR: Susan told me that it was shown at the Renaissance Society and that it did travel to other venues in the state.
61 Nagle: But where did it end up, who got the boards? vanR: She didn’t remember.
Nagle: It was sort of sad because there was a lot of money in those boards. Hedrich did it for nothing and we never documented the show. At the Graham Foundation, when I was on the board, whenever we are asked to fund a show, we always insist on a catalog because you’ve got to keep the documentation. Anyway, I was really interested in all that architecture and they were alternatives, just coming after Mies. They were buildings that were not only out of the mainstream but they were kind of odd buildings. Harry Weese was always trying to build thinner than everybody else and Andy Rebori always had all this ornament that he really liked to include on Bauhaus buildings. These buildings weren’t really strict anything, it was this sort of conglomeration of things. I’ll never forget that Schweikher did a house from which I actually used the detail on a house that I did in Wisconsin because I thought it was so neat. He took the decking and ran it down on the floor and in the space between the decking where it came into the house he put walnut strips so that the outside and the inside flooring lined up. The flooring inside went right outside. It was just beautiful and he was really into that sort of detailing. vanR: Well, as a wood man, I’m sure you appreciated that attention to detail.
Nagle: As a wood man, I did. Anyway, that show I think got us all to thinking about the subject. It was like throwing a football into the air and Tigerman, of course, took it, and like Stanley does, he ran with it. He was our den mother and so he put together the “Chicago Architects” show. He got four guys to do it. I didn’t get involved in it because I wasn’t asked, other than that Larry worked on it and Stanley worked on it, and we all talked about it. It was kind of a marvelous time because somebody had to put it all down. Stuart is a very good writer and Ben knows everything about the background and all that stuff. I think that they did a neat job of putting it all together. What
62 happened then—I can’t remember which projects from Larry’s and my office were in which show…
[Tape 3: Side 1] vanR: We were just talking about which projects of yours Peter Pran and Franz Schulze included in their show. They used the Hart house in California that you had done for your sister Sue.
Nagle: Right. vanR: They also used the Lurie house in Evanston, which they compared to Mies’s court house of 1934. Then they also included Larry’s Arco Station. The Hart and Lurie houses were shown next to work by Mies as well as that of Jacques Brownson and David Haid and James Speyer—all students of Mies. What was your reaction to being included in this group?
Nagle: Well, I think it was all right. I was the one who said that the inspiration for the Lurie house was Mies’s court house with garage—the one where he took a car and drove it right in and it had the curved wall. I did that parti—as a lot of architects do all the time—where you set up the strict grid and break it with the moves that generate the energy. So I thought that that was fine. I did it in steel and aluminum front with flush glass; we do that a lot in our work. The Hart house—I guess it came out of structuralist, constructivist attitudes that I’ve had all along. Again, I used post-and-beam in that case because it was an earthquake zone. That house has never had a crack in it. vanR: It was built in San Juan Capistrano?
Nagle: Yes. There have been mudslides and all kinds of things and Sue’s house is still there. We did it with steel columns and we painted them all white and then we put wood panels around them. The house doesn’t look as good as the photos in One Hundred Years… any more, it’s gotten a little cluttered, as so many do. It’s got the idea of the frame inside, with wood. Again, we were
63 using regional materials. I thought it was fine to be included in the show. It didn’t bother me a bit. I’ve never had a camp. We move around a little too much for that. We’re not like Mies whose palette was minimal, we do lots of different things and it seems perfectly reasonable to do that. We do different things depending on the client and the site and all those other variables—you know like classics, pop, and jazz. vanR: You were somewhat outside the core group of four: Stanley, Stuart, Larry, and Tom. Why was that?
Nagle: Larry was part of it and we were partners, so he did it and I didn’t. vanR: Did you feel left out?
Nagle: Oh, no. We talked about what was going on all the time. Stanley and I played tennis during that period, so anything that was on the mind of either one of us, why we’d go down and sit in the sauna afterwards and talk. We talked about a whole bunch of things but I’m not a particularly good writer so… That was fine. I think the input of that show was kind of interesting. We ended up going to New York with that show. vanR: Yes, it opened in New York at the Cooper-Union before it was shown in Chicago. Then it went to Harvard.
Nagle: That’s right. I remember that. It was because Hejduk wanted it. vanR: The Chicago opening was delayed because Stanley wanted to have it open in conjunction with the MCA show.
Nagle: I remember that. Our show was in the Time-Life building and the other was at the MCA. I remember that Hejduk was in town and he came to the opening. Hejduk and Stanley and I were in the lobby talking about the different factions and that people were at odds with one another. But I was sort of laughing about it and arguing about it and I remember Hejduk saying,
64 “I don’t think that this man has any problem with this—he has no enemies.” And I didn’t. vanR: Did Stanley have enemies?
Nagle: Stanley’s always picking a fight. It varies from day to day. And I’m the first one to tell him that—I don’t just tell other people. He loves the controversy and all that. That’s just not my style. I thought that being inclusive was wonderful. vanR: It seems the fire was partly fed through all the articles that were published at the time. The shows got a lot of press attention. Nory Miller wrote an article in Inland Architect called, “War of Ideas.” She really situated these two shows as rivals or opponents.
Nagle: Well, they were. The thing that we were all sort of sick of, frankly… We love Mies and we go back now and say, “God, he’s wonderful,” and all that, but there’s been a little hiatus here and a little bit of time to get away from him. There was just so much bad imitation of Mies, terrible curtain-wall buildings and on and on and everything got very dry and very minimalist and we all just got sick of it. vanR: Was that work being done by lesser architects or by architects who should have known better?
Nagle: Well, there are a lot of lesser architects, just like there are lesser lawyers and everything else. The point was that the minimalist period got to be very dry and we all got tired of it. Everybody was doing the same buildings so you’d get off an airplane and see yet another glass building out in the suburbs and you didn’t know where you were. It really got to be quite boring. My interest in regionalism had always led me to other pursuits and working within what I call the “hard-line” discipline, which Larry and Stanley all agreed on long ago. But Ben Weese and Stuart Cohen don’t agree with it. So there were quite different attitudes among us. But the idea of being inclusive
65 and having a dialogue—I didn’t see it as a fight, I saw it as a dialogue. I thought that it was nice to break away. Somebody like Jerry Horn, who joined us later when the Seven became the eleven—Bruce Graham used to always call us the 7-11 because he liked to tweak us there—Jerry’s work was always very consistent. He’s the skin man, right? He always does these beautiful objects, things that he’s done all his life, and he’s very consistent about it and he’s a very good architect. There’s a kind of excitement there that, frankly, the Miesian things didn’t have. Some of Mies’s own work, his office’s work, was also really pretty boring. There was a “you’ve got to do it my way” attitude that came from a lot of people. David Haid was that way—he was a nice guy, a good friend of mine, we used to go hunting together—but he was ornery. He really, really, felt that everybody ought to be doing things just this way. He mellowed a little bit as he got older. I thought that the inclusiveness and the cross-pollination of it all was a healthy thing, so I didn’t think of the whole thing as very controversial. Writers tend to write controversially because it makes good reading and it sells magazines, we all know that. Nory did that. I think that was fine. Stanley loves to do that, too. I’m not that way, which was why I didn’t get in on doing some of the things earlier on. The other attitude was that if you’re not included, well, then, fine, you go on to do other things. Sometimes I think that you shouldn’t do a lot of things. Recently, for instance, there have been occasions when we’ve been invited to submit our work for this and that, but you look closely and you say, “Gee, do I really want to be represented as doing just this one thing?” or “Do I really want to be with these people?” vanR: Are you speaking of being asked to accept a certain label?
Nagle: Yes. For instance, the Chicago Athenaeum has had some shows where I’ve sent in a few things and other shows of theirs where I haven’t because I’m not interested in them. There have been some magazines like that as well. So I think that you want to represent yourself the way you see yourself. One of the things I think that architects loose their bead on things is that we tend to confuse the public a lot of times. We confuse people. Tom Beeby and I laughed about that one time. We were in Washington, D.C. and
66 Pennsylvania Avenue has been redone three times by landscape architects and designers. The first guy around said, well, you’ve got to plant a triple row of trees and have square grates. Then Sasaki comes by a few years later and says, No, you’ve got to take down the triple trees and make it double trees and round grates—I can’t remember exactly what he did—then the next guy comes along and changes it all again. So nobody knows what’s really going on. The public really gets confused by all of this. Then there’s the controversy about whether things should be historical or not and when it is appropriate and when isn’t it. By posturing and taking positions a lot of times we do more damage than good to the built environment. Sometimes it’s good not only to have restraint but also to be more thoughtful. I think that the controversy was wonderful. You know, Chicago is not very interesting right now, compared to then. I think that part of it is because people didn’t want to speak out too much in the recent past because it was a little tough to get jobs until just recently. Now things are really kicking in. I’m sort of disappointed because when we were that age we were doing things—to be sure we had Stanley as our den mother and he really was the guy who got it all going, but we really did cause controversy and people were talking to one another. I went to the Chicago Architectural Club recently—I hadn’t been there in years—and I told them about the IIT competition because I was a competition advisor. It was good to see people and talk about things and controversy and all that, but I shouldn’t get involved in that so much any more, it’s the young people’s turn to get involved. Where are the people in their thirties and forties? Why aren’t they putting on the shows and getting the controversy going? Maybe there’s not the forum there used to be. I had somebody get mad at me not too long ago because they didn’t get a Graham Foundation grant to do whatever it was they wanted to do—well, we never got any grants to do things, we just did it. It’s too bad that there isn’t more of that going on because, frankly, it’s a kind of an intellectually boring time now in Chicago. vanR: Do you think it’s time for another generation to offer an alternative to the kind of architecture you promoted when you were young, such as you offered an alternative to the Miesians?
67 Nagle: Sure, that’s what I’m saying. Ralph Johnson, my son-in-law, and Rick Phillips and Chris Rudolph, put together a little group of eight people or so and they put together a show or two of kind of nice work, but it never really caught hold. Probably if Stanley had been their den mother it would have. At least they were trying. There should be more of that, I think. You’ve got to remember that we don’t have a magazine in Chicago any more and that’s really a sad thing. The architectural press has shrunk a lot and the reporting is very different from what it was back in the 1970s. You don’t find just simple projects any more; that’s why we all take European magazines because the architecture is more interesting and also the presentation of it is better to really understand the buildings and documentation. Progressive Architecture started to do that funny thing where it all became dialogue and pretty soon you weren’t quite sure what the product was. The most exciting thing to me is the product—how can you get your hands around the building? It’s gotten all confused and people aren’t as clear about it now as they were then. vanR: You’ve made several references to how great Stanley was as a den mother and what a great promoter he was. That brings to my mind one of the controversies about these two shows: some people accused the organizers of a certain amount of self-interest. That it was more than an altruistic attempt to present historic architects who deserved more attention but that it was also an effort to promote their own architecture as well. Is that fair to say?
Nagle: Sure. Any time you take projects and put them up in front of other architects, you’re promoting yourself, there’s no other way to describe it. But you’re also promoting how you think things ought to be and how things ought to work. That’s what your work is all about. You’re saying, This is what I believe and this is how I work it out. The trouble is that too many times, the zeitgeist sort of takes over and the positioning of people detracts. We could get a better built environment if we weren’t always jockeying for position ourselves and were able to work together. But it is self-promotion, of course, and what’s wrong with that? You asked where I fit in to all of this—I think
68 I’ve said before that I’m sort of the tackle on the football team, I was the guy who did the blocking, I wasn’t the quarterback like Stanley. You make your own moves and you do your work the way you want to do it. I’ve always felt that that was probably okay. I think that if you enter into controversy and you get involved in these things, it makes you think and it pushes you to do better work. It may be self-promoting to show all this stuff but it’s also saying, What have you done for me lately? It makes you think about things and it challenges you. It can be a little bit scary sometimes when someone says, Oh, we’re going to have an exhibit and you think, Gee, do I want to get involved in that? Well, of course you do. Are you going to have a good idea? Not necessarily. vanR: Do you think it’s putting yourself on the line?
Nagle: Exactly. I think that’s really important to do. You put yourself on the line about what it is you really care about. Of course you’re influenced by fashion and what’s going on and all that sort of stuff, but as you get older, you realize that there are certain things that recur in your ideas and work and you try to broaden them and make them better and just be yourself. That’s what makes you good in your own mind and, ultimately, it makes a better environment because you do better buildings because you’re secure. It’s hard to be secure as an architect; it’s just like being a writer or an actor because you get all done with the project and you think, Oh God, how did I do? That makes you feel very insecure. vanR: And an architect’s work usually lasts for a while after it’s finished.
Nagle: Yeah, you can’t file it away in a drawer somewhere. vanR: One of the other events that happened while the two shows were up was a symposium at the MCA called “The Past, Present, and Future of Architecture.” You were on one of the panels. Do you recall that event and what the discussion was like among the participants?
69 Nagle: Yeah, I remember that. I think I was on the panel with Carter Manny, Tom Beeby, and I can’t remember who else. Actually, what I did—I remember it well—was I talked about how I became interested in coming to Chicago and finding all the original things and then finding that the past, present, and future of this city was really exciting. It’s a big city and there’s an incredible variety of built work. Any time I drive I try to take another street because every time I do I find something else that’s really interesting. There are all these wonderful things going on. Then I related how I got interested in Chicago architecture of the 1930s and 1940s and doing that show and how we all decided to get together and do the Chicago Seven show. vanR: Do you recall if that symposium attracted the general public or only the architecture community?
Nagle: The MCA is for the general public. There were a lot of architects in the audience, but there were other people there as well. That’s the other thing—you see at the Graham Foundation lectures that there are architectural buffs and they show up to everything even though they’re not architects necessarily. They were all there but because this was something different and new there was more interest from other people. There was a time in the early 1970s when architecture really did get boring. We’ve talked about it in terms of Mies and all that, but there were all kinds of interesting things going on in art and dance and music, so something had to happen in architecture. People were ready for it. I think that the leap from what we were doing then to the postmodern movement is something that’s very unclear. We all worked very differently but we were all sort of labeled. Blair Kamin, now categorizes things and journalists sometimes have to do. Unfortunately in America I think that we have a tendency to speak in generalizations much more than people in other cultures do. The way people say that this led to that and that led to this, is sometimes unclear. There were people who were much more interested in history and ornament—Tom Beeby and Stanley probably the most—than Jerry Horn or Ben or people like that. You can’t say that this happened because that happened and then that happened. That would be making Giedion’s mistake all over again.
70 vanR: This brings up an interesting point. Do you think that the attitude would have changed on its own because change was inevitable? How much influence do you think that the Seven of you had?
Nagle: Well, we had a hand in it, sure. But we didn’t invent the idea of coming together. There was the New York Five before us. I think that Stanley and I figured this out—the show we did at the Richard Gray Gallery was the first and then there were a million architect shows. Now there are not so many and it’s sort of fallen out of favor. What was the gallery in New York? vanR: Max Protech?
Nagle: Yes, he’s still there. But nobody pays much attention to him. At least I know about him, do you? vanR: The Art Institute does some business with him from time to time.
Nagle: Anyway, I’m not sure if I answered your question. vanR: I was just asking if you thought the changes in the 1970s were somehow inevitable.
Nagle: Yes, it was on its way. There was the California group, too. vanR: The Los Angeles Twelve?
Nagle: Yes. They came after us. It was sort of funny, you know. Yes, we pushed some of it along. We pushed change, but I’m not sure we pushed it in quite the way it ended up, when you think in generalizations on a national level. I think we pushed it in a different way. vanR: You’ve alluded to the next major event in the life of the Chicago Seven and that is the show at the Richard Gray Gallery. That show, “Seven Chicago
71 Architects,” opened in 1976 and it was the first time when the group of you were self-identified as the Chicago Seven.
Nagle: Yes, that was the first time any of us called ourselves the Chicago Seven. We just formed it then. Jim Freed was in town and Stanley knew him. Actually, Jim had a lot to do with it; he made you think a little more since he was coming at it from a different town and a different energy. Jim was here for three years and he was a marvelous guy—it was fun to have him on the IIT jury recently, even though he’s so sick—but he was really antsy when he hit Chicago. The pace in Chicago was way too slow for that guy because, of course, he was from New York. We were a little slow compared to what he was used to. But the idea of putting the Gray gallery show together was, I’m sure, Stanley’s idea. We talked about it and I can’t remember who came up with the idea of having us all do a residential piece. vanR: Each one of you designed a conceptual country house for the exhibition.
Nagle: Jim Freed’s was the one with the grid and the different things. I did the Sun Dial House. vanR: Before we talk about your house in detail, I wanted to ask about the seven of you as a group. You’ve already suggested that there wasn’t an aesthetic commonality among the seven of you.
Nagle: That’s for sure. vanR: So what do you think brought you all together?
Nagle: Well, we never talked about that; that’s interesting. We did a lot of other things together also that weren’t published. We used to get together at the Como Inn and have dinners and crit each other’s work. Helmut was, of course, the eighth member—he was the Baron von High-Tech and his career was really taking off at that point and he was showing projects—I remember all that.
72 vanR: But he wasn’t in the group at the very beginning. Didn’t he come in later in the 1970s?
Nagle: Yes, he wasn’t involved until after we did the Chicago Seven exhibition. We were saying, Gee, Helmut’s work is pretty interesting, let’s get him on board. Well, the part that was interesting about putting this show together was that at Richard Gray’s gallery—he has a great eye—we all expected that work for each architect would be separate, but Richard mixed them all together. It’s an art gallery for heaven’s sake. When I first walked into the gallery with Stanley we both said, yes, this is the right way to do it because this is an art gallery. He just laid it out so that it looked beautiful. I had done transparent drawings that were white on black and he hung them in the window so that light came though them. It was really nice. The model was in another part of the gallery but it was next to something else and you went around and you could start to put the project together. It was really interesting to have the show laid out that way; it was not what we expected. But, hell, it was his gallery and he gets to do what he wants. He did a very nice job. Richard’s a really smart guy. It was neat that he did that. I think it was a really great show. Those projects didn’t have a whole lot to do with one another but there was one thing, there was a discipline to them. None of it is corny; a lot of it has to do with the clear ideas of form and structure that come out of an understanding of Chicago. In Jim Freed’s case, he had studied here with Mies. Stuart’s had to do with his intellectual understandings of things. There is a kind of a discipline. The other thing is just talent and having a good eye and respecting one another’s opinions. It was very diverse work. vanR: This was a conceptual show, which is to say that none of these houses was necessarily intended to be built... Can you describe how you approached designing a conceptual house?
Nagle: Actually, I have a piece of property in Door County and I am just finishing a summer house on the dune. I looked over there and I said, What am I going to do? I saw the dune there and I thought that it would really be good to lift
73 the house up into the trees and we’d adapt the idea of the sundial—the idea of energy at the time was very important. It probably comes out of constructivist art and my interest in those kinds of things. I did a lot of painting and sculptures, too. The idea of doing a pure form that isn’t really pure and is subdivided, not in a radial way but in an orthogonal way, comes from structuralist art and Corbu, too. Then there was the idea of pieces and forms. The trouble with the world now, I think, is that too many of the pieces and forms are folded into the buildings or into the cars. Cars don’t have pieces anymore, they’re made out of plastic and there’s no chrome left and there’re no head ornaments any more, except for Mercedes. There isn’t a language of the way an automobile is put together anymore, like there should be, I think. I think that each piece should be a discrete piece that you’d like to have as sculpture on your dresser or bureau to look at when you wake up in the morning. vanR: So you’d like to deconstruct your house and find a discrete beauty in each individual object?
Nagle: Yeah. Then there’s the idea of circulation—you come in to the Sun Dial House over a drawbridge so you get away from the world and you slide in to the place and your alternative is to go down. The idea of engaging with the skyline and letting light in was just fun. I’ve still got the model in my office here, although I’ve got to clean it up a bit. It still looks pretty good. I still get people who come in and want to recreate it. The thing that I liked about it was that it was just what I was about at the time. I remember Tom Beeby telling me, “Gee, you’re not doing something that’s different. You’re doing what you’re about.” Well, yeah, he was right. Tom did something very different; he did that farm with the barns and the buildings. It was very complex and vernacular. He did those incredible drawings—he’s so talented. When I put this together Chris Rudolph was in the office at the time and he drew every one of the leaves on the trees in my drawings. vanR: Your drawings seem rather Miesian in a way. The leaves remind me a bit of those infamous bricks that students had to draw in Caldwell’s classes.
74 Nagle: Oh sure. Well, I started to do the leaves, but Chris, who’s nuts about those things, said I had to do every leaf. So I did some of the drawings and he did some, we worked together on that. Somebody else built the model, Bruce Shmeidl I think. We did it as an office thing. Larry did his Family Tower with some people in the office, too, I think. When we finally built my summer cottage, my son-in-law Ralph said, “Oh, you’ve got to build the Sun Dial House, it’s sensational.” I said, “Well, it’s twenty years later and I’ve moved on. Besides, my knees aren’t good enough to go up and down all those stairs any more.” But it would have been pretty neat and it would have worked right off the top of the dune. vanR: In the text introducing this project you mentioned your Dutch roots in the De Stijl movement and included a quote by Oud. You also wrote “the subjective is the arbitrary, the unconscious, the relatively indeterminate, which can be sublimated through the conscious mind to relative determinateness. To this end the subjective must be ordered by the conscious mind so that, in its relative determinations, style is achieved.” What does that mean to you?
Nagle: Well, I think that is what abstraction is all about. The idea of representation and abstraction is something that people have discussed for a long time. I saw something described once in one of the British architectural magazines as abstract representationalism. Again, my attitude about this is that you can take abstract or modern architecture, which are forms that I like, and they can become very subjective and you deal with them. I guess what that quote is probably saying is that things aren’t so personal and all that. That you can begin to abstract them to get ideas across and make forms and all that stuff. People can then appreciate them and interpret them on their own level. That seems like a very reasonable thing to do. There are a lot of things that I like, but they’re abstracted; it’s not quite as literal as some other work. vanR: You’ve talked about the possibility of building the Sun Dial House. In fact, the last sentence of your text description is, “I would intend to build the Sun Dial House.” Did you see yourself as the specific client for this project?
75 Nagle: Yeah, sure. Well, I actually had a couple of people who wanted to build it, but they never quite got up the guts to do it. vanR: You mean private clients?
Nagle: Yes. Ann and I were the original clients. I did intend to build it and I’d still like to, but I’m running out of time. I’ve got to find somebody else who wants to do it. And, of course, it would change if it was built. vanR: Did the seven of you talk about what your designs were going to be before the show opened? Or were you all surprised when you saw everything displayed in the gallery?
Nagle: One of the neat things about this was that we’d get together—Stanley and I in the sauna or wherever—and we’d talk about architecture or we’d have lunch together and Saturday mornings we used to go around to each office to find out what was happening. We were friends. So there was a lot of exchange. You get to a point where you’d say, I wonder how I should do this. So you’d get together—we do this in the office all the time now since there are a whole bunch of us and I have great respect for Dirk Danker and Don McKay and the other people I work with—but then we had fairly small offices and we got together a lot to crit each other’s work and to think about different ways of doing things. It’s too bad we don’t do more of that now. We formalized it when we’d go out to dinner and show slides and all of that. Now what was your question again? vanR: I was just wondering if you were surprised by the presentations of any of the work shown in “Seven Chicago Architects” show.
Nagle: Yes, for a few of them. I didn’t quite know what Jim Freed was up to. Ben had told me about his hof—he did that kind of Polish hof and it was wonderful and so much like Ben. Tom came over and made that statement to
76 me; he thought that both Larry and I were still kind of doing what we had been doing while he was breaking away from what he had been doing. vanR: Had he expected you to do something different from your previous work?
Nagle: Something new and different. Well, my project was new enough. It was what we cared about—what I cared about and I think Larry did too. I knew what Larry was doing and Tom’s and Stanley’s weren’t surprises. vanR: What did you think of Stanley’s project?
Nagle: I liked it. It was very Stanley. One thing about Stanley is that he is really consistent—he’s one of the best cartoonists and draftsmen that I know. He’s wonderful to see. He’s always got some surprise. He’s very good at that sort of thing. vanR: It was said that each project in the show was an aesthetic position paper. Did you see it that way?
Nagle: Yeah. I did it that way; I was dead serious about my entry. I bought into that idea. It’s interesting because Tom did go on to do that work and Stanley’s work was like that after. Jim Freed, if you think about the buildings that he’s gone on to do, are very much in that attitude. And Stuart has spent his life doing those kinds of houses. Ben believes in what he believes—I mean, God, talk about somebody who’s serious about things. vanR: You’ve talked about Tom’s intricate renderings and your own detailed drawings, so did you, as a group, talk about displaying your work in an art gallery as way of saying that your work was serious fine art?
Nagle: Sure, oh yeah. vanR: Had this approach been taken publicly in Chicago in your generation?
77 Nagle: Well, I think that the MCA had done some of that. vanR: On the East Coast there had been some temporary shows on architecture presented as fine art in the early 1970s—such as MoMA’s show on the work of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There was also the “200 Years of American Architectural Drawing” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1976.
Nagle: Yeah, that was mostly on the East Coast. At MoMA you’d walk in and see all those renderings by Mies. That was art. vanR: Were you trying to make a similar argument here?
Nagle: Absolutely. vanR: Were the drawings at the Richard Gray Gallery for sale?
Nagle: I don’t remember. I don’t think so. Stanley would remember. I don’t think that we intended to sell them. vanR: So what was Richard Gray getting out of all of this?
Nagle: I guess he was just getting a lot of public relations. I don’t really remember. Stanley can tell you, you’d have to ask him. The show packed them in, I’ll tell you that. There were a lot of folks there. There was a lot of publicity. Of course, Richard has now become a different kind of gallery. The whole art gallery scene is completely different from what it was then. vanR: Can you describe how it’s changed?
Nagle: Well, there are auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s that recycle art. My daughter-in-law works at Christie’s and they’re very successful, but there aren’t the traditional galleries that used to be around there. It’s very hard to run a gallery and make it work well enough to stay in business. All sorts of people have gone out of business and then come back. People buy art
78 differently than they used to; they don’t go to the traditional small galleries. It’s just a different kind of world now. vanR: One of the things that came out of the work the Chicago Seven was doing at this time was a revisiting of the “Forty Under Forty”. There had been an exhibition “Forty Under Forty” in 1966 that Stanley and Ben had been part of and they were now the senior members of the Chicago Seven.
Nagle: Didn’t Bob Stern that put that together? vanR: Yes, it was mostly East Coast architects and Ben and Stanley were the only two from Chicago. In 1977 there was a new list of “Forty Under Forty” published in Architecture and Urbanism and you and Larry were included, along with Stuart Cohen and Tom Beeby and other architects from around the country.
Nagle: Well, thirty-six others for sure… vanR: Can you talk about what it meant to you to be included in that group? Did it have any effect on your career?
Nagle: Well, I was flattered. I had met Stern and he did that first show when he was still at Yale, I think. That’s when Stanley first got to know him and we got to know him, too, through Stanley. I’m trying to remember that time… I guess we were sort of purifying things; we had gone through some phases. In 1977 I guess I was working on the Cook house. I can’t remember what project I sent in. vanR: In the catalog they listed the Park Forest Community Center and the Arco Station.
Nagle: Well, those were both Larry’s projects. I guess I can’t remember what they used for me. Although at that time I was working on Dan Cook’s house in Dallas. I was really going back to the purifying things. That was very
79 structured and very simple. Actually, it’s like my cottage. You do that every now and then; I guess it’s a kind of purging. It’s good for you to go back and do the very minimalist thing. I like doing that. It can be very exciting sometimes. I was flattered to be in the show. Did it help? I suppose so. The more you get exposed, the more jobs you get. We were on a roll after that. By the end of the 1970s there was a lot of work. Our office got really big—too big—and it got so we didn’t know everybody’s name and that was too bad. Of course, Larry and I always ran separate studios and then we really had to get separate because we had these different jobs. Then Jack joined us. vanR: Yes, Jack Hartray joined your office in 1977. Why did he come to join you?
Nagle: Well, he had been a partner at Harry Weese’s office and Harry and Jack had decided that it would be better if Jack weren’t there. Larry and I knew Jack from our babysitting pool—the same as we knew Ben—and we’d been friends, so we talked to him about it. We needed a good technical person because we were starting to get bigger buildings all the time. We needed somebody with that kind of experience. And Jack was an interesting guy. We even talked to Hammond, Beeby, Babka at one point about throwing in together—it was Hammond and Beeby at the time. vanR: You wanted to merge the two firms?
Nagle: No, we just talked about working together. Jack would maybe be the catalyst to pull the firms together. We actually interviewed together for the State of Illinois building. Three of us were going to design it [Tom, Larry and me] and Jim Hammond was going to hold the hand of the government while Jack did the technical parts. We probably would have made a very good team. Lord only knows what would have turned out. All that was right at the time when all that was going on. I think that Jack brought tremendous knowledge and all his experience at Holabird and Root and SOM and at Harry’s office. So we set up a system for working drawings and all the things that really helped us to be a much better technical firm than we ever were before.
80 vanR: Did Jack join you and Larry in designing?
Nagle: Oh no. Jack is a humanist with a large H and a small h. He has a critical eye—don’t tell him this, but sometimes you have to ask him about a project to find out if it’s okay because he really does have a good eye. But he’s not a designer and he doesn’t pretend to be. He says he’s only licensed to do the technical things, he’s not licensed to design. He has some very good insights into things and how to present and proceed with things. He’s very good at that. vanR: You say that you were beginning to do larger and larger projects. Did you actively seek out these larger projects and was that an additional incentive for having him join your firm?
Nagle: Yes. We were already doing them, but he helped us get even more large projects. vanR: Up until this time, you had been primarily known as residential architects. Why did you want to move into larger commercial and institutional commissions?
Nagle: Well, it’s interesting to do a lot of different things. I had done the dormitories at Northwestern and that was a whole bunch of work all at once. You had to organize and get your big office together. It was fun to do planning and bigger projects just like it’s fun to do little projects. I’m doing a couple of highrises now that I’m all cracked up about while, at the same time, I’m doing a couple of houses that I find very engaging. So I like to do different things. I think that you burn out if you just knock out houses all the time. Think of all the firms that only do hospitals or only do laboratories—that’s just deadly. Architecture is a creative business. I think that by repetition you probably don't get better, unlike a corporate lawyer or brain surgeon. You know what’s interesting? I’ll bet you that every architect who’s moved around and tried a number of different typologies will tell you that usually the first one you do is the best one. When somebody said to me, “Do housing
81 for the elderly,” I really started to think about how the elderly live and how should a building that houses the elderly look? The one that I did in Highland Park is still the best one, I think. That was the first one that I did. The base and the middle and the top were different and that’s the way they were in history so why not do it again and do it in a contemporary way and make it like row houses? It won an AIA award and it went downstate and I remember that Charles Gwathmey was on the jury when I showed slides of it. He came up and he said, “Gee, that’s a nice building but we can’t give it an award because all the units are the same on the inside but it’s different on the outside.” I got a kick out of that because this was the attitude that you are supposed to express what’s going on inside in the structure. vanR: That the exterior should tell you how the interior is planned?
Nagle: Yes. So if you start thinking that way, you end up with this kind of functionalist architecture that is quite different. That’s not to say that Charlie did that; he’s quite a talented architect. But that attitude was around at the time. So it was a real change to do that. We had a group symposium at the Graham Foundation where a group of guys came to town and met with the Chicago guys. I sat next to Richard Meier because he was t who was on the other side of me but they were passing notes back and forth about how Chicago was boring. I remember presenting that Highland Park building because I was trying to do something different than functionalist housing or something historical.
[Tape 3: Side 2] vanR: We were just beginning to speak about the symposium that was held in the fall of 1977 at the Graham Foundation. It was called, “The State of the Art of Architecture,” and it was co-organized by the Graham Foundation. You’ve already mentioned that there were quite a few out-of-town architects that took part in it. In fact, Eisenman, Hejduk, Meier, Stern, Graves, Gehry, Richard Turnbull, Charles Jencks, and the Chicago Seven all faced off. The
82 idea was for each architect to present one project. You were beginning to talk about the project you presented, which was 400 Central in Highland Park.
Nagle: It was housing for the elderly and I was trying to show why I was doing what I was doing. Charles Jencks thought it was interesting. As a matter of fact, he stayed at my house and he told me, “You know, that’s starting to look like something.” He was obviously pushing the historical aspect of postmodernism. He liked that the base and the middle and the top were different. It was hardly revolutionary, but it sort of added to how things were coming together and changing. But, I was doing the same sort of thing way back in the early 1970s when I was doing Portals at Grant Place. I did a building that was almost like that, with the idea of growing into a bigger scale and doing things that are of a slightly larger scale than the typical things. So I was abstracting a little bit. That’s a dangerous line you’ve got to tread carefully because it can become scaleless. Larry presented a house that he built in Lake Forest for a man named Gordon Adams. That house started out as a project we were going to work on together in the old office early on. Larry started working on it. Then Gordon Adams came back and decided to do it and Larry changed it. What Larry did was very symmetrical and it was really quite different. I remember the reaction to that project was, Wow, these guys are changing; they’re doing things that are different from what they did before; there’s a new movement afoot. So we all got excited about moving on to something that was different. A lot of it really had to do with history. That’s what the postmodernist movement was all about. The part that good architects realized right away was that slap-on ornament and that sort of mannerism was not only not tasteful and didn’t look very good but that it wouldn’t last. The appreciation of history made us all much better architects. One of the things that I find from 1930s and 1940s architecture is that the people who have gone through the Beaux-Arts understand the history of architecture and for the good architects, such as Alvar Aalto and Corbusier, it probably made them better modernists because they didn’t learn through abstraction. Gropius was wrong. You should know your history and understand and be able to operate on those levels and then go on to do your own thing and presumably do something that’s original. I think
83 that we were going back with the hope that we would turn around and go forward again. Actually, modernism now—although there isn’t very much of it going on, certainly not in housing—I think is more interesting and better than it was then because we’ve gone through this change. I find that projects now are more carefully scaled and thoughtfully put together. They rely on nice things in terms of context and they aren’t just dropped in from outer space. There’s a lot more sensitivity from architects and from the public, too. The over-reaction is what has been too bad. Peter Bohlin told me something one time when we were talking about this. We hadn’t seen one another for a long time and we were in Washington and he said to me, “What are you doing? I’m doing this and you’re doing that,”—I had Peter come to the Graham Foundation to talk about his work—“we’re all trying to wash away the taint of postmodernism. We’re all trying to get away from that.” I said, “Well, Peter, you were really good at it.” He said, “Well, there were some of them that weren’t so good.” You know, it’s a process and you learn from it. He said, “So how do you do it now?” I’ve forgotten exactly what I said to him, but then he said, “No, the word is ‘authentic’. You have to be authentic.” That’s probably what we’re doing now. We’re working in places where we do the low-ego job authentically. vanR: You mean a job that doesn’t have to scream “an architect designed me?”
Nagle: Exactly. It talks about context. But you still try to be original within it. I operate a little differently, maybe, than Stanley and some others, but I think that’s a fair way of doing things. vanR: You spoke about how people began to notice that your work was changing. Whom are you speaking of?
Nagle: Well, everybody. My wife, for one. That house that I did for the Fitzgeralds, the lighthouse, I think I designed that in 1979. I remember Larry laughing at it; he didn’t like it. He thought that it looked kind of funny. vanR: Well, perhaps it was more overtly vernacular than your earlier projects.
84 Nagle: Oh, of course; it was straightaway. Actually, I had an onion dome on it very briefly; it just looked dumb. But I did this thing very quickly and just had a lot of fun. It was beautifully built and we’re still good friends with the clients. It was interesting because it wasn’t more than five or six years ago that Larry did a little golf pavilion—it was very nice—down in Michigan that reminded me a little of the Fitzgerald house. Then again, bantering back and forth and arguing a little bit about all that is probably very healthy. There were also things that I was doing that he was absolutely right about—they were dumb—and vice-versa. vanR: Such as…?
Nagle: Well, I started out on a project that I didn’t quite know how to handle down in Springfield. It ended up coming out pretty well, but there was a time there when I was struggling with the idea of how to do bigger projects. vanR: Which project are you speaking about?
Nagle: I did some housing for Near North Village in Springfield. We didn’t quite know what we were doing. Of course, we had to do really inexpensive things because it was subsidized housing. So we struggled with that and I was taking a wrong attitude. So we changed and that’s what we had to do. I went through five different schemes. You do that a lot because you don’t always know where you’re going with a project. The point was that we weren’t doing it the way we had been doing things, we had to change and move on. I think that the difference in scale had a lot to do with it, too. Obviously, I’m not talking about the lighthouse because that was the same small scale, but when you start to do bigger projects it becomes more compromised; you’ve got tougher budgets and more people to deal with and on and on. It doesn’t get any simpler, let me tell you. vanR: It seems that was the case for almost all of your peers in the Chicago Seven because most of you had made a name doing primarily residential work.
85 Nagle: Well, Ben hadn’t. Ben had done a lot of big work with Harry. vanR: Yes, he’s the one exception. He was also the only one who had an older brother who had a thriving architectural practice. He had a slightly earlier start with clients who wanted big projects.
Nagle: He’s only done a few houses in his career. It’s interesting… vanR: It seems that as all of you got more work and more recognition, the scale of your projects increased. It may have been a challenge that you all needed to move on. To go back to the conference at the Graham Foundation, do you recall who chose the outside architects and why?
Nagle: Stanley did it. We all agreed. vanR: Did you think there was anyone that should have been invited but wasn’t?
Nagle: Well, some didn’t come because they were busy. We asked the New York Five and the L. A. Twelve. We just decided to do that. Carter was involved too, I almost forgot to mention that. vanR: Did you all have a sense by this time that the Miesians had more or less capitulated their position and that you had become the establishment in Chicago?
Nagle: I never thought of it that way. Stanley said one time and I think he was right, he said, “You know Jim, it’s our time! Those guys had their time, other guys will have their time, but now it’s our time.” That was okay. The thing that’s going on now as a result of those years is that there’s no real consensus. It was sort of funny to think about the arguments between organic architecture and the International Style, as compared to now, which is all over the place. It’s truly an eclectic time and all sorts of people are dealing in all sorts of different things. And I’m one of them. I do very different things from one
86 project to another. I feel very good about it. I think that when you take on a project you look at it and it becomes a challenge. You try to go as far in the direction as you think you can to get as good a building built as you can. But a lot of times, it isn’t like doing that first Brown house or the first Cook house where they didn’t really ask you or didn’t tell you what to do. I’ve done four houses now for Dan Cook and I’m doing a log house for them out in Wyoming. I designed a vernacular log house and it is the same family that I did that long, simple house for. It’s taken him forever to get this log house built and it’s all very mannered and they’re all involved in it. He’s retired and he made a lot of money, so he’s having a good time. It’s very different from what we did early on. The guy will turn around and do another project, like his apartment in New York, and it will be really crisp and perfectly done and all that. People change. He represents one person, a very good, tasteful client, and so on, but people change; there isn’t that kind of bonding together. I know people who’ve lived in Eichler houses all their lives and they say this is the way it should be and that that’s what modern architecture was. It was the way to be; they’d never dream of doing a Swiss chalet or something different. It’s just a very different time now. There’s too much choice! I sort of liked it before; it was simpler. I sort of liked that part of it. That’s why I like to edit and do minimal things now and again. vanR: Do you recall any of the other presentations that were made at the Graham conference?
Nagle: Beeby’s work was interesting. He was showing a project that was clearly historical. Was it the Conrad Sulzer library, or was that later? vanR: That was in 1985.
Nagle: Hejduk, who was close to Tom, kind of got mad and he said, “Some people shouldn’t do so much work,” or something like that. Hejduk, of course, goes to symposiums every week. But there was a lot of bristling going on there because he saw Tom coming in as a younger man and getting involved and capitulating to this kind of historical movement. Richard Meier presented his
87 project that’s out on the highway in New York, that incredible white hospital and rehab complex. He had never done any really big jobs, other than the Westbeth Artists’ Housing, that affordable housing project in New York City. He hadn’t yet done his thing with the metal skin and all that. That was quite incredible to see his scale change, you know. For whatever you think of the Getty Center, there are some times where he’s made the scale change so beautifully, there isn’t anyone who does it better. That was the first time where we saw that you could do that sort of thing. Gwathmey wasn’t at the conference, but he had these scale changes where he’s done it differently. His is just very different critically, you can see that. Stanley showed a building where he was really talking about the symbolic content of the building. vanR: Well, he did that a lot.
Nagle: Yes, but he didn’t do that right away, that came out around that time. That’s all we talked about for ten years. Now what you talk about when you go back to schools is structure and the way things come together and detailing and all that sort of modernist stuff again. vanR: There was a time when architecture became very academic and drew from literary and psychological theory.
Nagle: The best people at that were Tom and Stanley and Stuart. The worst at it were Ben and me, probably. vanR: Perhaps this is a good time for us to look at the next major exhibit that the Chicago Seven mounted, which was the “Exquisite Corpse” show. It was held at the Walter Kelly Gallery in Chicago. It was the early version of the later townhouse competition at the Graham Foundation.
Nagle: I got the knees on that invitation, I remember. It wasn’t anything very exciting.
88 vanR: And to explain your remark—in the traditional Exquisite Corpse game a folded paper is passed around in a group and each person draws a segment of a body, without seeing what others have done. At the end the paper is unfolded to reveal a very peculiar looking person. This was intended to be the metaphor for your townhouses.
Nagle: Again, Stanley was the one who put that show together. vanR: Do you recall any of the planning meetings?
Nagle: Well, we met at the Walter Kelly Gallery. We talked about each of us doing a townhouse and then you push them all together but you don’t know beforehand what the other guy has done. That actually happened, the buildings were built up on Sedgwick, I think. vanR: Are you talking about the Logan Square competition later on?
Nagle: No, I don’t think so. But Stanley and Larry did a couple of houses as an urban renewal project on Sedgwick Street. It’s in our neighborhood. They actually didn’t talk to one another or see what each other was doing. I said to them, “Look, that’s fine for a show, fellas, but for God’s sake, let’s get together and figure out what you’re going to do.” All the houses are there and they are sort of a hodge-podge. There were other architects involved, too. But for the show, it was fun. vanR: After doing rural and country houses in your first exhibition, how did the idea of doing townhouses come about?
Nagle: I think it was the idea of being cheek-by-jowl. vanR: Some critics have suggested that this second show was a response to the critique that the projects in the previous exhibition didn’t have much in common. Was that a fair view of it?
89 Nagle: Oh, I don’t think so, no. We never tried to do that, I don’t think. Well, we did set the heights of the townhouses. What I thought was kind of interesting about it was that given the same width and height to work with and we all ended up with things that were so different. I thought that was okay. What I was interested in was the idea of the plainer aspects of the way buildings can be constructed and the layering of those things. I had about seventeen colors that I put together on the project. A lot of people felt that the show wasn’t as exciting as it could have been because there wasn’t that much that was new. I think that actually one of the most popular houses, as I remember from the criticisms, was Tom’s house. His house was very historical. You know, when the model was built, it was very historical and people really liked that. Stanley’s was the most abstract. I remember he showed up in a tux with Margaret in black and white; that guy thinks about things I would never think up. vanR: You wrote that your townhouse was “a study in classical proportion and structure, space and color, open and closed, volume and plane.” Were you returning to your De Stijl roots a bit?
Nagle: Oh yeah. Except I was changing them. It’s like the red, yellow, and blue colors that are in the entrance to my office, except that they’re not red, yellow, and blue. Or at least they’re not the primary De Stijl red, yellow, and blue colors. vanR: Were you using this house as a sort of laboratory for new ideas?
Nagle: Yeah, I was actually working on the idea that townhouses are generally boxes and you punch holes in them. It seemed to me that it would be interesting to pick up the scale of what you’re trying to build in the street, but not build it as a skin building but rather build it volumetrically. I think it does that. The Dutch do that all the time. You can’t get people to do it a lot; you try it but they don’t usually go for it. That was the idea. Actually, there are things in this house that I’d forgotten about; the ceiling was gridded and that is like Giuseppe Terragni’s buildings and the fascist palace Casa del Fascio in
90 Como—when I saw that building it really blew me away. That was an amazing building, I guess I’d seen pictures of it. So, yeah, there were influences there. Actually, I did a little Sukkot thing after I came back from that Lake Como trip and I had seen Terragni’s things that he’d do in a sort of planar way and that influenced me. I did the Sukkot in bamboo that was sort of slotted. Sometimes you’re influenced by what you see and you can’t help yourself. Hartray always kids me by saying that every time I get back from a trip I’ve found some other way to move on. That isn’t quite true but we’re all influenced that way, I’m sure. vanR: Did you have a client in the back of your mind when you designed the townhouse? Perhaps an imaginary one?
Nagle: No. Well, probably the house that I did for the Hunzikers was the closest to this—that was where we took the shape and did a stucco building, so to that extent it was the closest to a skin kind of building. But I’ve always done these kinds of things. I doodle all the time and I’m always working on different things. When I get confused, what I do is draw a house. vanR: Just to free your mind?
Nagle: Yeah. I do it in the car all the time when we're driving. I’ll just design a house. I’ll drive down the highway and think, Now, I’ve got a great site, how would I do a really good thing, a courtyard house, or something like that? So I do it in my mind and then sometimes I’ll draw it out and keep it. But it’s a way of connecting things and thinking things through. It purifies me, I think. vanR: Were these conceptual exhibitions that you were doing a bit like doing student projects? Did you see yourself becoming a kind of student all over again so that you could experiment on a grand scale?
Nagle: Oh, sure. That’s the other nice thing about teaching, see. People who really love to teach, like Tom, are wonderful teachers because they believe in the things that they’re doing on the board and they can get others to do that too.
91 That’s what I try to do, too. Usually when I teach, I try not to influence the students too much; I try to find out what they’re interested in and what they’re about and show them how to do it to reinforce what they’re up to, if I agree with it. This was an opportunity to do that. And the dialogue that you have with people forces you into other things, too. Actually, we ought to do more of that. I just did a competition against Ralph Johnson and Helmut Jahn for a highrise building here in Chicago, a paid competition. We knocked it out in three weeks. Ralph got the job, but not because he was on budget, I’ll tell you. But anyway, it was really a good charrette to do. It forced me into doing something and to go in a different direction than I had been while still solving the problem. Ralph abstracted it the most. It gets your juices flowing, and it’s good. Actually, we should have a lot more competitions in this country. If you think about Europe, the best buildings are competition buildings. Think of all of Alvar Aalto’s best buildings; they were competition buildings. He kept winning all those competitions. vanR: But for every winner there are losers. I think that’s one of the arguments against having so many people involved in competitions. Some architects seem to think it’s not cost-effective to enter competitions any more.
Nagle: Well, unless you’re paid for it. Competitions are exciting. I mean, the recent IIT competition was really exciting. The whole challenge of a guy reinterpreting Mies and doing it under the elevated tracks while he’s very Miesian in a whole lot of ways and yet it isn’t. The thing is that we were challenging ourselves, although the townhouse that I did for the exhibition wasn’t particularly exciting. vanR: You did part of the Exquisite Corpse drawing on the cover of the invitation to the Kelly gallery show—you said earlier that you drew the knees. Did you see this exhibition as somehow less serious than other competitions? Was there some element of fun or amusement in doing this show?
Nagle: I think so. We were trying to have a good time. What else would we be doing?
92 vanR: Well, for a long time, competitions were considered very serious affairs, and postwar architecture in general, especially with the Miesians, seemed to lack a certain spontaneity or sense of humor. Were you trying to approach architecture from a different angle?
Nagle: Right. Well, I think that each one of us had a different way of doing things and approaching things. We just did it that way. We did it very quickly because those were busy, busy times. Mine wasn’t nearly as much fun as the Sun Dial House; I really wanted to do the Sun Dial House. Sometimes you get a good idea and sometimes you get one that’s not as exciting. But I did want to investigate what I talked about and that was good. Actually, it’s good for you to think abstractly. In addition to one-to-one contact on the phone, we now have fax machines and email and everything else. Pretty soon you won’t ever have time to think, certainly not abstractly, unless you’re driving in a car and trying to design a house. But there’s so much information, so many meetings, so many different things, that thinking abstractly is good. So having competitions and that sort of stuff is a good idea. Teaching is very good to do, too. In the teaching part of it, I wonder if older teachers are really better teachers; I think it depends on how much energy they have and how much they care. What you have to be, I guess, is a counselor as well as a leader when you’re doing that sort of thing. What always fascinates me is what I learn and what people will do that you don’t expect them to do. So who becomes the most creative? Today I was working on something that didn’t really work, so I tried to do it a different way and that forced me to do something different and pretty soon I realized that I was doing something different. I’ve always been good at working my way out of a box. We were talking about the Exquisite Corpse game and when I was a kid I used to go to camp and they would have entertainment shows. A guy would come out and give a magic show and then another guy would come out and play the harmonica or something, and then I’d have to come out and I would have somebody come up and draw a doodle or something on a chalkboard and then I would talk and connect the lines and make something out of it—it would be a groundhog or somebody’s face or something like that. I’ve
93 always said to people in the office that the best projects are not when you have a blank sheet of paper but when you have somebody put something out there that you’ve got to solve and make those connections. vanR: Well, that sounds a lot like the townhouse competition, where somebody gives you the box that you have to fill.
Nagle: Sure. vanR: The Walter Kelly Gallery show opened in December of 1977. In the following spring, in May of 1978, the Chicago Seven revisited the “Exquisite Corpse” show as a larger event at the Graham Foundation. It later traveled to the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis and several other venues. This second show was comprised of the Walter Kelly Gallery townhouses and also included other architects. Helmut Jahn had joined the Seven in the Walter Kelly show and in the 1978 Graham show you also brought in Jerry Horn, Ken Schroeder, and Cindy Weese. How did those architects come to join you?
Nagle: Well, we talked about it and Cindy was back in practice after her kids were pretty much raised and she was doing some really nice houses that were sort of in the Stuart Cohen-Ben Weese vernacular attitude. Ken is a talented guy who comes out of the Charles Moore approach and that attitude and he was doing some interesting and good work. Jerry Horn was the main man when it comes to doing Mies and skins and all that sort of stuff. We were intrigued by their work and they were interested and wanted to join us. So we got together. I don’t recall the details but it was a fun thing, too. vanR: Did you have a goal or a purpose in doing this larger exhibit at the Graham?
Nagle: Well, I think that everybody had a little different idea about it. It was self- promoting, that was part of it. It was controversial and it was about shaking things up; I think that’s important. But my own reason why I wanted to do it was because I think that most architects play it too close to the vest in most
94 places. You go out to Des Moines or Indianapolis or someplace like that and the architects there are all playing close to the vest; they don’t want anybody else to know what they’re doing because they’re all trying to get jobs and they’re in competition. We’re in competition—I go up against my friends all the time. Everybody does that. But the idea of coming together and challenging each other and having a dialogue and doing a show and putting a club together, there just aren’t a whole lot of things like that happening very often. And certainly not instigated by architects who are in competition with one another for jobs. Maybe there is academically, but not professionally. So that was what I thought was intriguing. If every town had a club and put on exhibits… You can do it through the AIA, but that’s kind of dry because you’re submitting just for awards. The idea of actually going one-on-one is really interesting. vanR: Maybe it’s also more helpful for everybody to be working on the same design problem.
Nagle: Yes, it’s about being competitive and having fun at the same time. vanR: Were you doing this for a larger community as well? Who was supposed to be included in your dialogue?
Nagle: Oh, the public, for sure. And other architects and young people. But we really wanted to promote changes in architecture and differences in attitude and all that. vanR: At this time in the late 1970s, did you find it more or less difficult than your first show?
Nagle: Everybody was very open. We had the Graham Foundation to put it on for us, and that was pretty neat. We had a forum there and it was a time when people were interested in architecture. Like I said before, in the early 1970s, they weren’t. Frankly, through the early part of the postmodern period, I think that everybody was very interested in all these crazy things that were
95 going on. But, that was a dry period for me in terms of getting published because I really wasn’t very comfortable with the historicism and all the stuff that came after that. You can be accused of finding the bed you made not very comfortable. The other thing you can say is that that wasn’t the bed you intended. That’s my point. vanR: One of the other aspects of this show was that it was a true competition: you had an open invitation to other young architects to submit their townhouse designs.
Nagle: That was to promote younger people. vanR: The winners of that part of the competition were Deborah Doyle, Robert Fugman, James Goettsch, Steven Gross, Anders Nereim, Joseph Poli, Peter Pran, and Frederick Read. Do you recall why any of those particular entries won?
Nagle: We had a little judging thing where we picked the projects. I don’t think that we really knew the people. I don’t remember how many total submittals there were—Stanley would know. vanR: There were quite a few, I think. There was a first round of people picked on the basis of their design drawings and then that group was invited to actually build models.
Nagle: Right, Steve Gross ended up working in our office—he was quite talented. Peter Pran went on to do all kinds of shows—he was always sort of abrasive, however, and difficult. He moved out of Chicago. And Goettsch was a talented architect. It showed in their work. vanR: Were there aspects of design that you were looking for in the submissions?
Nagle: I think with me it’s an intuitive thing. It’s eyeball. There wasn’t anything I was looking for particularly. For me it had to do with composition and ideas.
96 At any time in any of this, I don’t think that there was anything dogmatic. There was pressure put on, though. I can remember when we did go to the Walker that Stanley would say, “Come on Nagle, get with it!” Larry would say, “Well, he’s doing some arches in some buildings now.” He’d get after me about these things and he’d try to move me in a more historical way. So we’d go out and we’d see things that Stanley was talking about, like the pochéeing of buildings. So when I got the job to do the Bateman School, formerly the McCormick mansion, we did the spaces and we put it all together. It was really interesting because we did the coach houses and the whole building over. Then I worked on the apartments and I really pochéed the space, and I mean really pochéed the whole thing. But it was in a building where it was the intention to do that. So it was going with the flow, a natural outgrowth of that sort of thing. I found myself really having a lot of problems doing the sort of things that other people were doing at that time, because I didn’t really believe in it. vanR: Did that make you start to pull away from the Chicago Seven a bit?
Nagle: Yes. vanR: Did they react in response?
Nagle: Oh, I didn’t pull away from Ben or people like that. I mean, Larry’s and my work got very different. But I guess it wasn’t quite a pulling away. It’s like anything, you can only go so far along. It was the same with the idea of the Chicago Architectural Club and getting more people involved. Stanley was very generous about that, to take the thing and bring more people in and get the club going. Then there’s the time when you have to kill it, that’s according to Stanley, anyway. I think I was president of the Chicago Architectural Club in about 1984 and it was an interesting time because we were having people come in to lecture and I really worked hard to promote it. We had good shows and we put things together. Then after a while, I had to quit. It’s like at the Glessner House, you burn out and you should get out and let other people do it.
97 vanR: It sounds like you were ready for the next generation to take over the establishment just as you had as part of the Chicago Seven.
Nagle: Right. It’s the Hegelian theory. vanR: Yes, Larry used that term, too.
[Tape 4: Side 1] vanR: May we move on to 1979 when there was quite a bit written about the AIA awards? The Chicago Seven had been together for a while and by that time had really dominated the awards. In fact, that year Booth and Nagle, or Booth, Nagle, Hartray won five awards, Stanley won some, and Tom Beeby won as well, so it was almost a clean sweep for the group. Can you speak about how the Chicago Seven had come to be recognized by Chicago? What did those AIA awards mean to you?
Nagle: Well, it’s always flattering. I think that in 1979 the AIA asked me and a group of other people to put a jury together. I’ve been on any number of those things, before and since, but what we did was we picked people from California. That year we picked Craig Hodgetts, Tim Vreeland, and Frank Gehry. Frank probably wouldn’t have time to do that sort of stuff now. We sent the awards with one of the fellows who went out there—Leon Fry went out. I think at that time they were a little more generous. There are generally about one hundred entries and nowadays they give out ten or twelve awards, I think. I think back then they gave about twenty. I know that I had done three of the projects, because Larry and I did different jobs. Our projects were very different, one from another. vanR: The projects that Booth, Nagle, Hartray and Booth and Nagle won awards for were the Lake Forest Home...
Nagle: That was Larry’s.
98 vanR: The Riverwoods house...
Nagle: That was mine. vanR: David’s Plaza, which was yours, and House on the Lake in Glencoe…
Nagle: That was Larry’s. vanR: And the Barr-Saunders trucking plant.
Nagle: That was Larry’s, too. See, most of those were very modern in attitude, and clear too, except for the house in Lake Forest, which was when Larry was beginning to change and look more at history and all that. The Riverwoods house I have since added to and remodeled. It was a post-and-beam piece that we had done in the past. I think that if the question is, Why did all this happen? I guess I would say that I think a lot of it is the jury. They get some very strange juries sometimes in these things. I’ve even been on some strange juries in other states. I think that this group had a lot of fun and put it all together and they were very inclusive—you can imagine, with Frank Gehry on the jury. I was on the national AIA awards jury in 1982 or 1983 and we gave Frank Gehry’s house an award. I promoted that because I thought it was interesting and the award was important in his career, as he told me later, because it brought him stability and recognition by the profession. vanR: It is a form of peer approval.
Nagle: Yeah. So anyway, the juries are all very different, one from another, and I think that jury was inclusive, that was a part of it. There was a kind of spontaneity that I think was good and they picked up on that. We’ve had some awards in years since that I know that the juries have only given out a small number of awards, so you never know what the chemistry is in the jury. I wouldn’t put too much stock in them. We always send in a few projects for awards. This year we just sent in two houses that we did—there
99 are a lot of projects that we have in process and we don’t want to send in things that have already been around. I think they even have a limit—it used to be like that in earlier years when the big firms, like Skidmore and the rest, won all the awards. Then we started to win some, as a smaller office, as did others. So that began to change and then people began to focus on that. This year I sent in a house that was only 1500 square feet that I crafted—I actually helped the guy frame the house. So the importance is not the size, it’s the idea and the craftsmanship. vanR: You mentioned in previous years that the big firms had always won all the awards. By 1979 the awards were overwhelmingly dominated by residences and other small-scale projects. How did you see the tide changing in the 1970s?
Nagle: Well, I think that people were getting very tired of the corporate buildings that they were seeing. I mentioned before that when you got off an airplane in the 1970s you didn’t know where you were because there were all these minimalist buildings with gold glass and all that, it was pretty deadly. I think that most everyone started to go back and look at smaller projects and things that had to do with context. Plus, you’ve got to remember that these three guys were not corporate architects who were judging this. It probably would have been very different if we had picked a New York group and more corporate architects. From year to year, with the AIA awards they pick out the really dynamite projects but we’ve also seen over the years some pretty bad projects picked. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in the awards thing. It’s interesting though, because I’ve been practicing in Chicago for years and then being on juries in other states, you go to other places and you just have an awful time getting five or six good projects together. Whereas in Chicago, of the hundred or more that are sent in, you can pick twenty five that would win like crazy in other states but you must be much more selective here, and that’s true for New York and Philadelphia, too. But particularly in Chicago it seems like there are both large and small firms vying for recognition. For instance, I’ve been on the Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania juries and Peter Bohlin always wins and he does these nice
100 vernacular things. Then you see the corporate work and all that, but I don’t think it’s a real gauge… It may be a measure of where architects are at the time, but it isn’t necessarily what’s the best and most inventive and what’s pushing the limit to get to something that’s going to be better. I think that some of the best projects we’ve sent in for awards haven’t won. I submitted the Hunziker house for a national award and it didn’t win. But the jury visited the house and the comment was that it had marble floors and not wood floors, therefore it was too fancy and they tossed it out. But that was one of the great things about the house, as far as I was concerned. So it’s people judging other peoples’ work and it’s nice to win, but it isn’t necessarily the best work. I can think of work that probably isn’t recognized as very strong compared to things that aren’t very strong that are recognized. There was a lot of frivolous and funny stuff starting to go on then that really went through the early 1980s and well into that decade. vanR: Can you describe what you mean?
Nagle: Well, Helmut, for instance, did a post office that looks like a mailbox. That’s pretty silly. vanR: Doesn’t that go back to Venturi’s duck and decorated shed categories?
Nagle: But, about a year or two after you’ve done it, why it doesn’t look so good any more. It’s a frivolous sort of thing. That’s why I say that Venturi’s writing is better than his buildings. Some of it has to be edited, but that’s my attitude. I always get a kick out of students who say that they want to have fun with this. Sometimes you need the seriousness to have the fun. You have to push things to have fun with it—if you treat it too lightly, it’s like a one-liner joke. vanR: We’ll return to that thought when we talk about the “Late Entries to the Tribune Tower Competition.” But before we move on, I’d like you to speak about some of the projects that did win the 1979 AIA awards. David’s Plaza was a mixed-use project in Chicago. Would you explain your approach to the design?
101 Nagle: It won a Progressive Architecture award early on and the reason it did was that it was a little bit different. It really isn’t that much different from the Hudson houses in attitude in terms of the way we did the roof terraces and dealt with different kinds of openings. vanR: The commercial areas were on the ground floor and the residences were on upper levels.
Nagle: Right, I remember that Paul Rudolph was on the jury and he said that he didn’t think that it would get built, but, of course, it did. This is what we do best—this sort of urban infill housing. vanR: Some people really remarked on the unusual garden atrium in the center of the project. Does that reflect your Dutch influences?
Nagle: Oh sure, absolutely. And in all the other housing that we’ve done. I’m just now working on a house where we’re doing a very De Stijl attitude. But that changes, you move on and you learn. I feel fine about David’s Plaza. We’d like to have used a bit better materials and have it built better, but otherwise this is the kind of thing that I always feel that we do the best in terms of the urban infill. vanR: What did you think of your house in Riverwoods?
Nagle: It was one that I still feel good about. It’s sort of an interesting, involved space, but it had a straightforward, structural attitude. You start to get designs that are different and it’s especially difficult to build that in the suburbs—it’s just deadly in terms of trying to do new buildings that are modern. vanR: Why is that?
102 Nagle: Well, people are terribly conservative. I don’t think that a lot of it, considering an appearance review of things, we would ever get built now. Back in the 1970s we could pull off some of this, but now they’re too organized. They give you the roof pitches that you must have and the roof materials that you have to use. People have really started to legislate appearance and they’re not necessarily people who should be legislating appearance, we all know that. vanR: But there had been some examples of avant-garde architecture in the Chicago suburbs, it’s just few and far between, I suppose.
Nagle: Right, but I’m sure that there are many more regulations than there used to be. Highland Park is a good example where we’ve pulled off a lot of interesting modern houses and nobody’s bothered us. But you don’t get to do that in Lake Forest. Lake Forest legislates aesthetics. We’ve done good projects there, but they’re hardly cutting-edge. We had to build into the town and you have to build a house that fits with other houses and that’s interesting to a certain extent. A lot of times we’ve turned down work that we’re not interested in pursuing; it’s too conservative and we really don’t want to do that stuff. You want to do things that are interesting and new. We talked about that fine line between historical extensions—you’ve got to bring innovation to it, and if you can’t do that, then I’d rather not do it. That is unless you’ve don’t have any work and you have a whole bunch of people that you’ve got to keep busy. But we were all trying to avoid those times. You try not to compromise and you care about what it is that you’re known for. I guess in the 1970s we pulled off a lot of projects. In the 1950s, before I was practicing, people in the suburbs did a whole lot of things that were far more interesting and contemporary, in my view now. vanR: Also in 1979 the Chicago Seven began to pave the way for a revival of the Chicago Architectural Club. You, Tom, Stanley, Larry, Ben, and Stuart were on the executive committee that helped bring this about. Do you recall the early conversations that initiated all of this?
103 Nagle: Well, we wanted to be inclusive because we had expanded the group. How do you go from seven to eight to eleven? You don’t go to twenty, what you do is you say, Let’s get a club together. At the outset, we invited people to join the club and therefore you can say, well, it’s exclusive and it’s not politically correct. But we weren’t particularly interested in that. What we wanted was to get a lot of good people together who were practicing architects and educators and historians that could bring something so that when we all got together we could learn something. We felt good about each other’s work and all that. Then we had visiting lecturers, which was wonderful. vanR: Did you meet monthly?
Nagle: Yes, but not in the summer. We had some great lectures, though. I remember Alfred Caldwell coming one night to the Graham Foundation, which was where we had our meetings. It was a miserable, rainy night and he got up there and started to really rant and rave as he used to be able to do, and the thunder and the lightening was going on at the same time. He was ranting and raving about the state of architecture and his feelings about how he wanted things to be. vanR: He was interested in architecture and planning and landscape architecture, was he ranting about all these issues?
Nagle: Well, I think it was planning and the way people operated and on and on. He was very much of a modernist and he had very strong opinions about landscaping and planning and all. He was very vocal. But then we’d have people like Allan Greenburg, the guy from the East Coast who really does those historical things, like George Washington’s house. It was interesting to listen to him because he was an absolute purist. vanR: Did the executive committee decide who to invite as guests?
104 Nagle: Yes. We all put up some money, we had a membership—it’s still going on that way. We also started the Rome prize and that’s still going on. Allan came and he sort of explained what historical buildings were about and how you did them and all of that, so that was really the beginning of what became much more diverse and eclectic than what it had been before. It had really been pretty narrow before but then it broadened. vanR: What do you mean by “narrow”?
Nagle: Well, modernist and Miesian and Chicago tradition, that’s what I mean. Looking back on it, it was pretty wonderful, but on the other hand, it became a little boring. The range was widened a lot, which was fine because it made us look at old buildings. What I think that really helped with was when it came to restorations and building in context and learning about scale. vanR: How do you think it helped?
Nagle: What we did before was that we tended to abstract things. If you look at the picture of David’s Plaza, that’s really abstracted. What I’d do was I’d put in the brickwork and the soldier course and all that. What we found was that as we started to look at buildings we found that there was a lot more interest in details than had gone on in the past. Architects were really quite good at that. We still have this terrible problem in America, particularly, when people try to do things that are historic but they don’t get the scale right and they’re too big; you see them all the time. vanR: Can you give an example?
Nagle: Well, in modern architecture, Helmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK) did these bombastic, concrete, monolithic buildings and campuses all over America. Now what is happening is that we’re getting monumental, bombastic historical buildings, sort of a red brick “let’s make it look Georgian because the campus is Georgian” style, but the bays are too big and the roofs are too high and the detail isn’t there. Of course, the buildings are generally
105 bigger, too, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have a more sympathetic scale. It’s like inflating things. I call them houses on steroids; they’re pumped up. It’s the same thing with the college campuses. There’s a lot of product out there that’s the wrong scale. It’s like they drew it but they didn’t draw the person that’s in it. You don’t get the scale right. I think that by studying the history of buildings—if Gropius didn’t help us to do it, we should have done it ourselves—it would help us be better architects, I think. That’s what I talked about earlier, about the business of doing the houses on Schiller Street, for instance. Well, we did the banding on the brick and we did some of the detailing, but probably I wouldn’t have done that in 1979 because I hadn’t really focused on that so much. But I think that we learned a lot from history and by really looking hard at buildings and what made them good. A lot of that was about scale and interest and detail and all that. It still could be very whippy and innovative and modern and forward looking and be better. It’s the minimalist attitude that’s kind of destroyed modern architecture. If you read Peter Blake and his books, a lot of what he says is just about that. I think that it was good that we were doing that sort of thing and we were trying to learn from all that and get better at it. I also think that it’s probably good to be able to do things well, and if you get the assignment, to be able to adjust to things by having a wider range than Mies did. vanR: You’re speaking of having a larger vocabulary of styles?
Nagle: Yes, and to be able to do it sensitively and to have a good eye and do different things well. That way you’re going to build better buildings and create a better environment. That’s what I’m interested in. A lot of people are really interested in—Richard Meier is probably the best example because what he means in terms of his history and you see that his buildings are so much the same and at the same time they are as elegant as can be, just wonderfully done. But there are only a few people who can practice that way. I think that we’ve got to find a way to widen our palette and really stand for something that we care about.
106 vanR: Well, with the recent opening of the Getty Center, Meier has been criticized for not being as innovative as he once was.
Nagle: Oh yeah. That’s probably a fair criticism. You’ve got to experiment. Although the church he’s doing in Italy looks dynamite, it looks like it’s really going to be good. I’ve been to his office a number of times and I know people who work there and I know him. He probably represents the purest style of anybody since Mies. vanR: In terms of developing one major aesthetic approach?
Nagle: Yes. vanR: To get back the Chicago Architectural Club, do you recall how people were selected to join?
Nagle: Well, we were looking for people who were interesting and whose work we admired, or we liked their ideas, if they were historians. We were selective that way. People also made recommendations and we’d say, “Oh, sure, let’s invite them.” Then after a while it opened up. Again, Stanley always had a lot to do with this. He was always the leader in this, and Carter Manny, too. vanR: Did you avoid inviting architects from more established firms, like SOM or C.F. Murphy?
Nagle: No, it had nothing to do with politics. It was meant to recognize good work. Helmut was doing great work, so he came on as one of the Chicago Seven. The fact that he had a big firm didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s one of the things that I feel fairly good about. I wasn’t very good at being political. We were trying to be inclusive and open to ideas, that’s why the club was set up. That’s why young people were included. We were trying to push architecture ahead. vanR: Did you have a sense that by this time you were now the in-crowd?
107 Nagle: Yeah. I think it was all right, like Stanley said, to have our time. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. What I was chagrined about, from time to time, was because our work was known and published, then they’d take shots at us. I don’t mind that because I think that’s all part of the game, but sometimes it seemed like it wasn’t so fair—it was like we were so much of a clique. That wasn’t our intent, I don’t think. Maybe I’m looking at it too far removed in time. But there was criticism, that it was more than just self- promotion and that it was a sort of a political thing, but it was never intended to be that way. That’s always a little upsetting because what you’re doing is something different from what you’re being criticized for. vanR: Do you think that there was any remnant of the Miesian school left by the late 1970s and how did they react to the Chicago Seven?
Nagle: Well sure, look at Jerry Horn. Look at his entry to the townhouse competition, that’s just beautiful. He is the skin man and he’s very consistent with his work. vanR: And he felt comfortable in your company?
Nagle: Yeah. We all did. I was doing that sort of work, too; we were doing very slick, modern things. The lumber company that I did was called “Cornbelt McCormick Place” by one critic. I drew it with a one-point perspective and it was a discipline that you go through. It’s assimilation but it’s your own ideas and really your own taste and a curatorial aspect of architecture, I guess. Helmut was “Baron von High Tech” and he was the best—he really did it quite well—and now he’s back and doing it even better with all the new materials and all the other things. Even people like David Haid, who had never gone off dead center and he was very consistent, his work was good. It was an inclusive time, I think. That was what was wrong with the time before that, it wasn’t inclusive in the Miesian days, and they got really dry. There were these guys who were just putting curtain walls on everything and that wasn’t very interesting. One of the things that you do if you
108 demonstrate real elegance, like Mies did, you didn’t take a lot of chances. The people who take a lot of chances sometimes don’t do so well. vanR: Do you mean taking chances with the aesthetic look or with building materials or technology?
Nagle: Chances with aesthetics and making new moves on things. Corbusier certainly had a manner of working that was consistent as he moved along, but he took far more chances and changed stylistically and adapted. Where did Ronchamp come from all of a sudden? What did that have to do with functionalist architecture? Aalto, as we talked about earlier, was doing all sorts of things. Mies didn’t do that. That’s kind of what was happening in Chicago, we were marching along, like Mies. So you need those people to say, “Look, no hands, Ma!” And then you do it. But sometime you make mistakes and you spill your soup on yourself and then it looks funny to people. vanR: And all this happens in a very public forum.
Nagle: Oh yeah. You take chances. The lighthouse that I did, for instance, is hardly—people have done vernacular buildings before—but that lighthouse was something that I really liked and I really had a good time with it. The thing that I find most interesting about it are the posts that hold the thing up in the center and how it was framed—it’s not a straight octagon, it’s actually rectilinear framing that came together. I consider it to be a very modern house even though it has a vernacular look. So that was the sort of thing that I thought was interesting; people were coming up with different ideas and saying what it was they cared about was different. vanR: You were also showing your projects, so was there comment or criticism of other peoples’ projects among yourselves?
Nagle: Oh yeah, we’d go to the Como Inn and we’d go down into the basement and show slides. But that led to bringing the club together where we’d show our
109 projects. Stanley, being the interesting guy he is, would always pit one guy against another. There was one time, for instance, when Tom Beeby and Jerry Horn debated what they were working on—Jerry and his more Miesian, direct, manner and Tom with what he was changing to. Then afterwards they’d have a vote and see who won and who lost. vanR: Was the vote on the quality of the debate or the quality of the work?
Nagle: Probably both. But the point was that Stanley would pit one against the other. Tom lost and Jerry won. Tom framed his project and put it up in the office. But they were friends. vanR: Do you recall which projects they were presenting?
Nagle: I was interested in Jerry’s because he showed work that he had done with Craig Ellwood, early on. They were these little one-point perspectives that he had drawn—this was when thin was in and really thin was really in—the 1950s sort of residential work that they had done. Then he showed whatever his most recent work was. Tom was showing libraries and more historical things that he had gotten into at that time, I don’t remember specifically. They were showing their work and how they were approaching things. I did the same thing. I think that once we had five guys show their work and they were ranked. vanR: For a club that was about inclusiveness and openness, it sounds like there was an undercurrent of competition.
Nagle: It was very competitive. It was competition. vanR: Were people really so anxious to show their work if there was the danger of real criticism from your peers?
Nagle: Because it’s good for you and it’s character building. It’s a challenge and it’s a good thing to do. If you care about your work and what you're trying to
110 do… What’s your best project? people always ask you that. The answer is always the one that you’re working on or the next one you’re going to do. So you show what your latest work is. I remember that we were showing a bunch of houses—I think there were five of us—and I showed a house that in retrospect really wasn’t very good. But I was very excited about it at the time. vanR: Which house was it?
Nagle: Oh, it was the one up in Door Country, the Schrieber house. It was sort of stepped up and probably the most postmodern thing I did. But the framing and the way it went together I was all excited about. Well, I wasn’t ranked last, but I was close. I laughed about it, you sort of say, Whew, at least I wasn’t last, that’d be terrible. But somebody else was and had done something that wasn’t as good. But I don’t remember who won, that doesn’t matter, the point is that you come on and spill it out. At least you’re doing it with a bunch of professionals. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of architects; they play it too close to the chest. It’s good to go out. That’s what we do here in my office. When we get to be thirty people and we’ve got a bunch of people working on design, we pin things up and we have crits and we go over things and all that. We did that on a nice basis at the club. I think that they still do that, but I don’t know to what extent, because I hadn’t been over there until just recently. You’ve got to be able to accept criticism. That was probably the most helpful, in terms of getting good projects, which is what we were up to early on, when we’d get together informally. Stanley would come over to our office and Larry and I would show him our work—I was working on the Epstein house in Hyde Park and I turned the corner but was having a problem resolving how I was going put the old and the new part together. Stanley said, “Why don’t you do the ribbon window right here, like a reveal.” I said, “That’s a great idea.” So we did the ribbon window. It was positive criticism: “it’s a good idea, Jim, but you haven’t figured out how to knit them together.” So that led to a better product. I can give all kinds of examples of what good architects with a good eye can see. I remember going to Stanley’s office one time and I said, “Well, if you’re going to pochée, let’s
111 do..." We started talking about how that worked in terms of history and we had fun and we made a better project out of it. But it was serious fun, it was never a flip kind of thing. We were really trying to produce a better product. vanR: Were these real world projects with real clients, not just student exercises?
Nagle: Right, and you’re always under the gun. Architects who fail—there are so many bright architects who can’t practice in America because they can’t think fast enough and they can’t work fast enough. Especially now, in this kind of economy, we have this incredible shortness of time to think about things. I think that’s one of the reasons why the modern movement was so interesting; certain people really developed because they didn’t have a lot of work during the depression and the Second World War and a lot of time to think. If you think about Oud, Corbusier, Mies, all these guys just sitting about, they had a lot of time to think. On the other hand, a good recession comes along and kind of cleans out the bad offices. I’ve found that some of the very best things I’ve done are things when I haven’t had a lot of work and I had the time to really sit and concentrate. I probably had more fun with that because I like to do projects not the administrative work. But the great help of having your peers criticize your work is really important. I wish we were doing more of it. It’s probably my failure for not getting over to the club more. But I try to make up for it in other ways because we have other people and we get together and do other things. I think that Chicago is a good environment that way, I‘ve mentioned that before. If you go out to Indianapolis and Des Moines, they don’t talk to each other. They’re in competition and that’s that. We have a big community here. vanR: Another of the Chicago Seven’s effort to invite architects to show their work was in your next major exhibition, “Late Entries to the Tribune Tower Competition,” which was opened in May of 1980 at the MCA. In the exhibition, you invited architects from Chicago and around the world to rethink the famous 1922 Tribune tower competition. Would you talk about how that came about?
112 Nagle: Well, I’ve already mentioned that we were up in Tom Beeby’s old office, Hammond, Beeby. vanR: You mean the entire Chicago Seven was there?
Nagle: Yes, we were all there and talking about what we wanted to do next. Tom had a great office—it was on top of a building that was torn down on Michigan Avenue, 720 or something—and it was this wonderful big space with a balcony and we were all sitting out there and Ben Weese said, “Let’s do the Tribune tower competition over.” Again, it was like throwing the football in the air, and Stanley caught it and ran with it. The idea was of making it international, because it had been an international competition… In about five minutes we had figured out what we wanted to do. Stanley knows every architect in the world and we put the list together and we proceeded to invite people. He was really the instigator in terms of making it work as an international thing. vanR: How did you all feel about having this exhibition in an art museum? Did you want architects to submit a work of art as well as architecture?
Nagle: Well, Larry designed the new addition to the MCA and I had worked on it some and Jack did, too. But the neat thing about it, especially more at that time than now, was that they were really trying a lot of different things. I’ll never forget when they were building the new building, they had this sound sculpture in the stairway and it made noise. Norm Migdal, our mechanical engineer was really upset because he thought that it was the mechanical system. They were willing to try different things and this was an adventure. The Art Institute wouldn’t have done it at that time, I don’t think. They have done shows since, but not at that time. There wasn’t a strong architecture department there. So this was an opportunity. Yeah, we saw it as art, but we also saw it as conceptual, think of Helmut’s entry, it’s not necessarily buildable, it’s conceptual, right? He built it on top of the old building. Mine was more romantic. What I was thinking about was something that had to do with concept and not necessarily art so much.
113 vanR: Did you and the other planners expect that architects would submit fairly serious entries? Or were you expecting some playfulness?
Nagle: We expected the playfulness. vanR: Were you pleased about that, or did you want people to take this seriously?
Nagle: I think that you take it seriously in that you describe what you’re interested in and what you like. That’s being serious enough. We work all the time having to build buildings and it’s kind of fun to do things that you don’t really have to build. You know, I’ve forgotten what Stanley’s entry was and what other people have done. I remember Larry’s being sort of Viennese. vanR: He did a crystalline glass tower. Tom Beeby did a tower draped in an American flag.
Nagle: Now I remember all that. The point was that it was what you’re interested in and a lot if it was meant to be kind of conceptual. Like Adolph Loos’ entry was in the 1922 competition, that couldn’t have been too serious.
[Tape 4: Side 2] vanR: I’d like to have you speak about the selection of architects that were invited to contribute. It was a handpicked list and you’ve spoken about how the Chicago Seven made the selection. There were a number of fairly well known architects who were not part of the show, like Bud Goldberg, Harry Weese, Myron Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi, and Peter Eisenman. Do you recall if you invited any of them and they declined, or if they were not invited at all?
Nagle: Certainly we would have asked people like Philip Johnson. Eisenman, and Venturi we would have asked, sure. I think we probably asked them and they wouldn’t or couldn’t do it because they were busy, or something like
114 that. I’m sure we were inclusive to that extent. They were all people that we admired and that we would want to participate. vanR: Well, there was one architect who did refuse, and that was Rob Krier. He said that he didn’t want to submit an entry because he thought that the skyscraper had fallen from grace.
Nagle: Well, he doesn’t want to build anything more than five stories tall and he’s kept that position for more than twenty years. It’s probably not a bad position because it keeps you out of trouble. vanR: Why did you ask him if you knew that he felt that way?
Nagle: I think that was about the time that he formulated that position, so… vanR: Well, other than Ben Weese and Jim Freed, probably, the rest of the Chicago Seven had really made their names doing small buildings; you hadn’t really done any skyscrapers. Was there a sense among you that this offered a chance to do something that you hadn’t had the chance to do up until that point in your careers?
Nagle: Well, Helmut had done tall buildings and Jerry had, but I didn’t think of it that way. Others can speak for themselves. What was really wonderful was to go back and get the 1922 catalog of entries in the Tribune tower competition and look at it. I bought a copy and it’s wonderful to have and to see what they all were doing in 1922. But we didn’t think of it that way. With the exception of Helmut’s and probably a few others, it wasn’t particularly a big building—it’s not fifty stories—so it wasn’t thought of that way. vanR: In the caption that accompanied your own entry, you wrote that, “the back of the structure is pragmatic recalling midwest silos. The sign above calls out the product. The structure is additive. The entry facade is flat, decorated, and contains special spaces. The asymmetrical stepping accommodates
115 modern planning and is picturesque. The facade is Chicago School, the arch and detail Sullivanesque, perhaps recycled. The penthouse mechanical emphasizes the thin facade, the timeless clock tower with the WGN antennae.” You called the building style Midwest romanticism. How did you approach this design?
Nagle: Whimsically. One of the things that I realized when I looked through the old entries is that it was only 1922 and Sullivan was still alive and nobody did Chicago School style entries any more. They were tired of it, right? How many entries were there? Hundreds. This was a movement that died, dead as a doornail, in terms of attitude and everything else. I’m sure that’s why Sullivan had trouble in his later years. I thought that was sort of sad and I wanted to kind of think about that because it meant so much to Chicago. And there was the idea of the silos and the Midwest and all that comes out of the idea of vernacular architecture. Corbusier came to American and saw that. And the idea of the front and the back of the building having a face to the street and the other business running back was something that was hardly new but was renewed with the postmodern movement. Before, in modern architecture, you took the whole building and you wrapped the thing and it was all the same. vanR: All the facades looked identical.
Nagle: Right. There were some exceptions and you could emphasize the entry, but the idea of actually doing something that was a frontal piece was kind of crazy in most modernists’ eyes. So I was going back and looking at that. The other thing is that I don’t dislike classical architecture, I just don’t like it particularly. You see good classical buildings and you feel good about them, but most of it is so dry. I’ve always been in favor of asymmetries and things that are less predictable. I think that in almost all of our work, even when we do our historical extensions—when we build in communities like Lake Forest we invariably choose to work with things that are more relaxed and less severe and classical. That was kind of a commentary on that. It’s too bad that WGN [radio station owned by the Tribune] and the Tribune aren’t a little
116 bit more together, that’s the other thing that I was commenting on. Right now they don’t even have the Cubs games on WGN and that’s really terrible. What’s really strange is to have a newspaper and a radio station in the same building and not operate more in sync with one another somehow, but that’s just my commentary. My entry was a romantic piece and it came out of the same attitude as my lighthouse. vanR: Did you do the presentation drawing yourself?
Nagle: Yeah. I laid it out and worked on it with Marc Dilet, who was in our office at the time. I think he may have set up the perspective, but I drew over it. All these projects that we do you have to do with other people because you don’t have time to sit down and draw it out from beginning to end yourself. I did the Sun Dial House with Chris Rudolph and the model was done by Bruce Shmeidl. The idea is that you take it on as a little project in the office and you do it. I just did the John Buck charity thing last year where we designed playhouses and I worked with Julianne Scherer here in the office—I did the design and we’d mock it up here in the office and we’d change it and fiddle with it and it was fun. vanR: Your drawing for “Late Entries” is fairly simple and it’s not fully rendered. Was it your deliberate decision not to do a really complicated drawing.?
Nagle: Yeah, I wanted to make it really simple. It was the idea that it wasn’t a big deal. vanR: Another major event in 1980 was when Larry Booth left your office and you continued on with Jack as Nagle Hartray. Would you talk about how that fit in the scope of your career and how you felt about it?
Nagle: When Larry and I started out we did a lot of very similar projects. One of the problems later on was that the office had gotten so big that we were close to forty people. I think that part of it was that we were kind of frazzled and everybody was working so hard. I think that Larry really wanted to be more
117 independent and develop. So he went on to become involved in Ogden Partners and did developing in the South Loop and those townhouses. Jack and I didn’t want to do that part of it. And we were also starting to disagree about how we should approach things. vanR: In terms of how the office ran or in terms of aesthetic design?
Nagle: Aesthetics, to some extent. vanR: Can you describe what your differences were?
Nagle: Well, it’s a little hard to quantify. I guess maybe part of it was that we were trying different things. Before there was a consensus and then when there wasn’t I was doing some things that he didn’t like and vice-versa. Then you don’t have as much fun. In an office like I have now—I’ve been working with Dirk and Don McKay and Jack for a long time—we don’t always have consensus. But when you’re as close as Larry and I were and then to change, it’s just a matter of growing apart. We just grew differently, that’s really what it amounts to. He wanted to do things that Jack and I didn’t want to do. vanR: Can you think of an example?
Nagle: Well, development, for one. There were some clients that I wouldn’t have wanted to work with, and he probably felt the same about some of mine. And we always wanted to do the same good jobs; we would always say, “Well, it’s my turn now for the good job.” vanR: Was getting harder to divide the clients?
Nagle: Yeah. We started working on a really neat project—I was busy at the time, I think—we got the embassy of Zaire, which used to be the Belgian Congo. We got a call from the U. S. State Department asking if we would do housing for the embassy in Zaire. That was in about 1980, I remember, because Jack and Larry got on a plane and flew to Zaire—God help them if they went
118 there now. In the process of doing that, I really began to feel like I really wanted to work on that too, that it would really be interesting. You wait all your life to get a state department job. But it never got built and the reason was that it was a very frustrating time because Jimmy Carter was president and interest rates got to be twenty percent and things were just nuts. Overseas it was even worse. We started out to do twenty-four townhouses and by the time we had schematic designs done it was down to twelve and design/development went into working drawings and it was down to six and they just gave up on the project. That’s what inflation was like then, see? vanR: They just couldn’t afford to build?
Nagle: Right. At the same time, Larry was working on the Herman Miller project and I was working on another Herman Miller project and we had separate studios and it was really probably better to separate and do it that way. It worked out. vanR: One of the next major milestones in the history of the Chicago Seven was the exhibit, “New Chicago Architecture,” which opened in 1981, the year after the “Late Entries” exhibition. This show opened first in Verona, Italy, and then came to the Art Institute. It was the first contemporary architecture exhibit mounted by the newly-formed Department of Architecture at the Art Institute. Critics have written about this exhibit that it really demonstrated that the Miesian postwar modernism was out and that postmodernism was in. You were included, as were all of the Chicago Seven and many other of your colleagues. In the exhibition, each architect was invited to contribute a statement and a selection of works. Can you recall when you were first asked to participate in this exhibition?
Nagle: Well, I think that Peter Pran was the one who organized all of this. vanR: Well, in Italy it was organized by two Italians, but Peter was the liaison in Chicago.
119 Nagle: So he set it up and was the coordinator. They asked for entries. vanR: As I understand it, you selected the entries yourselves. Did they have any curatorial ideas?
Nagle: If they did, I can’t remember. This was when Larry was working on the fire station that we’d done and the health center at Herman Miller. vanR: This may have been one of the first times when you and Larry were featured as separate architects, with your own specific projects. These projects differed a bit from your previous exhibits in that they were all commissions that had been built or were intended to be built; there were no conceptual projects. Can you describe how you selected your projects?
Nagle: Well, they were all the things I was working on at the time, that I thought were interesting. vanR: According to the catalog, those projects were the Portals at Grant Place in Chicago, Willow Park townhouses in Iowa, Park Glen Elderly housing in Taylorville, the Near West townhouses in Chicago, the World’s Finest Chocolate factory in Chicago, the Lehmann Court townhouses in Chicago, and your well-published Epstein house on Woodlawn Avenue in Hyde Park in Chicago. What did those projects say about your practice at that time?
Nagle: Well, a lot of this has to do with context, especially the Lehmann Court townhouses. I worked on that with Steve Gross. What we were trying to do was use materials like masonry and tile and glass block and steel lintels. The idea was to do something that really had to do with the way the neighborhood worked and the scale of the neighborhood, but do it in a more contemporary way with a more interesting use of materials than what we had done in the past. It was the same way with the inside of the building. Lehmann Court never got built, I remember that. A lot of this stuff, you’ve got to remember, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was right before the recession in 1982. The Lehmann Court project was a real project that had
120 more to do with the neighborhood and the roofs, and all that. But you know, it had to do with Dutch constructivism, too, now that I look back at it. That was what I was interested in and making courtyards and all that sort of stuff. I will never do those diamond-shaped things ever, ever, again, I promise. vanR: You’re referring to the roofs? What don’t you like about them?
Nagle: Yeah, the rooflines. They’re corny now. They’re overdone. I did it on another project that I’d like to change, but…. These projects were about simplicity and putting things together. Actually, it’s very consistent, isn’t it? vanR: Can you describe your approach to another project?
Nagle: The World’s Finest Chocolate factory we ended up building, but what we did was take an old building and rebuild the whole thing and put it back together. Actually, it won a bunch of awards because we really did a neat interior—that was great fun. The idea of the roof was that it was the structural system that ran across and made the long span. Within that we did the offices and then the factory was behind that. It’s like Venturi, where you put the facade in the front and the big boxes behind it. The reason we did that was that this was built in the Bridgeport area and if you go to Bridgeport, along that street, you see those houses—this was 34th Street—and we were making a gesture to that, in a very clean way. The Epstein house was straightaway something that we had thought about. This was a site where there had been a fire and the house had burned down and they bought the lot. You can see that the house is half as deep at the others. What we did was build up the scale of the eave line and carry that across—it’s like ordering a sandwich where you hold the lettuce—we just held the roof line. vanR: That was one thing that struck me about the house, it had the same cornice line as other houses nearby, but no roof.
121 Nagle: Right, where’s the roof? There were other buildings with flat roofs down the street. But the craziness of that environment—if you go down and you see the house that Ralph Rapson did just down the street… vanR: Are you speaking of the Gidwitz house that Rapson did with John van der Meulen?
Nagle: Yeah. I like both those guys and I knew them. It’s a wonderful object and all that, but it’s sort of dated and the colors, people just don’t like it. But at the same time, if you take a design and put some moves on it and it comes together and it fits…. The Epsteins have lived in their house for just about twenty years and since then I’ve done another house for them. vanR: Was that a country house?
Nagle: Yeah, it was in Michigan. It’s called Dunewood Retreat and it won an AIA award last year. But it had a very different attitude and was about another way of living. The idea of the front and the back at the Chicago house—I’d given a little talk about that once and when I started to look, I was amazed when I started to realize that there are a lot of modern architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright, who really thought that way. You always think of these things as being structural but if you look at the Robie house—have you ever seen the back of the Robie House? It’s just a brick wall, with a bunch of little punched openings in it. He set up this back piece and then he has all this stuff going on in the front. I started with this idea of dealing with a client who was sort of schizophrenic and who wanted a modern house. I was talking earlier about the ribbon of glass detail that Stanley wanted me to do. Then Mrs. Epstein wanted to have a porch because she wanted the sun and she was from California. She also wanted the porch so that when it rained, she wouldn’t get wet. So we put a porch on. It was a real response to this. But it was also beginning to take elements that had been more rigid and more modern and make it more sculptural. Actually, this has stood up fairly well. There was also the townhouse complex in Iowa that we built; it was for my brother. They actually had a wonderful scale to them and they’re very
122 Dutch, obviously. But I probably wouldn’t do that again, I’d probably hold off. The Near West townhouses didn’t get built in the form we first designed; we changed it and built another one. The idea of dealing with the arch in the neighborhood and showing the thinness of what is a brick-veneer wall and how that comes together and fits in the neighborhood…. These projects are all contextual in a way. That’s kind of what I was into at the time. vanR: The title of your statement in the New Chicago Architecture catalog is “Architecture as an Art Form: The Front and the Back.” As you explored this duality, you quoted J. M. Richards, “architecture is a social art related to the life of the people it serves, not an academic exercise in applied ornament.” You haven’t ever used a lot of ornament in your work.
Nagle: Right, Adolf Loos told me that it was a crime. I read him, too. It was a crime to use ornament. But, you see, I like simple things. When I went to Venice, I came back and did the Dayton Street townhouses, which have a lot of moves in them and are very Italianate, but they really had to do with that neighborhood and that historic area and what happened behind that. Again, I wouldn’t do it again that way. What I was attracted to was the early Renaissance. I’d go into the Baroque churches just to see the space, which was interesting, but the idea of the ornament supplementing the space and making it more, I’d never bought on to that. I’ve always gone for things that are direct and simple. Mauro Codussi—I couldn’t believe how wonderful his work was when I was in Venice. When I went to Turkey just recently, I discovered Sinan [the Great], for God’s sake—he was the guy who Lou Kahn understood, and Kahn did what he did because he saw Sinon’s work. So when you see that sort of thing, the enthusiasm of going out and really understanding it and seeing the spaces has always been attractive to me. I’ve always liked Romanesque churches the best. When push comes to shove and you have to do a Gothic revival thing, then we always streamline the thing and do it in a simpler way, like we did with our addition at the University of Chicago Lab school gymnasium.
123 vanR: When you say that you have to, is it because the context demands it, not the client?
Nagle: No, the client wants it; people really want it that way. You’re doing the right thing, there’s nothing wrong with that. I think if more architects did that, we’d have a better environment and we wouldn’t have to go through these things. It’s really odd what we did in the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, where they really did a job on a lot of really good architecture by making terrible additions and remodelings and new buildings next to old buildings. I think that we’ve learned from that, we’re getting better at it. If we could just get the scale right… vanR: Was that something that you talked about in the Chicago Architecture Club? Was there any discussion of how modernist architects had approached older buildings?
Nagle: Yeah, I criticized it, sure. vanR: Did other people as well?
Nagle: Yeah. Most architects aren’t very good, right?, just like most lawyers. So what you do is you get a lot of ordinary work and sometimes it’s better to be ordinary than extremely bad. It was good for us to look back at history and really try to understand it better. It really helped to sensitize us to how to do things in a more gentle way and a better way. It’s interesting, who are some of the best architects right now? Today? You think about Rafael Moneo—he’s just an amazingly great architect. Given all the different contexts he builds in, it’s very difficult to put your finger on him. But look at how wonderful his work is and how sensitive he is to context. I’d like to think of myself and our firm and guys like Jack and Dirk, and people who are going to take over and do things in the future, as being that way. It’s a good way to be. It’s being the tackle on the football team; it’s doing the good work and every now and then you get to throw a pass. You try every time to do your absolute best, but sometimes you can’t. As I get older, I notice that
124 people pay more attention to me, that’s one good thing—I’m serious!—you can first say to someone, “Yeah, I’ll look at it that way.” And you learn not to argue with people when you’re trying to get them to do what you want. So then you come back and you say, “Well, you came to me because you wanted something that’s different and now you’re telling me to do something that’s ordinary. There’s something wrong here. Let’s see if we can’t come to grips with this.” So we struggle with that all the time and we try to push the envelope to do what we can to make things interesting. Some of the most innovative stuff, to date, has been for people who come in and want something special; they want a house. That’s personal and they want something that’s really innovative. I still have the best time doing those sorts of things because they’re really personal. They’ve got to be the right kind of client, though. We get a lot of confused clients who come in and the husband wants one thing and the wife wants something else. Sometimes you have to make the mold really interesting. vanR: We spoke a little bit about the recession in 1982. In that year you did the atrium facade for the office building at Ohio Street and Lake Shore Drive. Would you speak about that project?
Nagle: Yes, those drawings are in the collection at the Art Institute. Because there was a recession, there was a developer client of ours who had us looking at that land to build, first, an office and then an office with apartments. We started looking at that in terms of how that might fit in history. The interesting thing was that by 1984 or 1985, they finally got the site at Ontario just west of Lake Shore Drive where we built 401 East Ontario—that’s the client, M. Myers Company, and the tower that we did there we designed for that company. So in that little job we looked at how they might do a speculative building and then they chose to do an apartment building, which was better for them because they knew how to do that better. vanR: Do you find it more difficult to do highrise projects?
Nagle: Well, I’m having a great time doing two or three of them.
125 vanR: But back then you hadn’t had a lot of experience in that. Was that a challenge that you actively sought?
Nagle: Sure. This was coming out of the recession and you always need good work. We had done some medium-size buildings: we had done Near North Village down in Springfield, we’d done elderly housing for New Frontier in Taylorville. So we had sort of toyed around with this, and then we got to build a really big building because the FAR, the floor-area ratio, on that site allowed it and the client wanted to do it. The neat thing is that I have Jack Hartray as my technical partner and he’s really good because he gives us the back up and the confidence to do those sorts of things. He continues to problem solve and he’s inventive about how to look at things and he’s a very good critic. I’m working on three highrise buildings right now and I find that the trick is the scale and the skin. Are you asking me if the scale change was difficult? You remember that I mentioned that Breuer had that problem? He did these beautiful houses and then the scale change was sort of difficult. Now we look back on some of those brut concrete things—some of them, like the Whitney Museum of American Art, look pretty good still. Yet, there was this difficult change. I guess we all suffer from that to a certain extent. I find that every project we do is challenging, so you get involved, whether it’s the little house or the big highrise; you care about it. One of the things that we’re finding is that we’re in a very competitive time now, as it was in that part of 1980s. The part that’s neat about this time in the late 1990s is that I really think what we’re building now is interesting and useful. vanR: What you as a firm are building, or in general?
Nagle: In general. With all the available money and the market up, architects are not building a bunch of spec office buildings that look pretty silly and pretty thin, like they did ten years ago. We’re presently working on four or five different schools, and a convent, and we’ve got a couple of churches that we’re looking at. Look at the city and all the planning and infrastructure that’s going on here. There’s some very good housing and it’s getting more
126 competitive. So you have to build better housing, you’ve got to build a better highrise. That fan-shaped thing that I’ve just done for Habitat is selling because it’s different and Habitat feels good about it. And I had a chance to be innovative. I couldn’t have done this probably five years ago because if we just got it up, we’d have been lucky to meet the price. But there’s money out there now, so you’re allowed to do things that are better. It’s the same way with the subsidized housing—Homan Square had to happen after things got going a little bit in terms of affordable housing. I think we’re getting a lot better product out there for all different people. vanR: You mentioned that people are learning. Do you find that the clients are better educated? Does that have its roots in your efforts in the 1970s to make architecture a topic of conversation among many different people?
Nagle: I’d like to think that. I’d like to think that we had a lot to do with the way people thought. One interesting fact is that fifty percent—this may be an old statistic—of architects that take a traditional architectural degree do not stay in architecture; they start working for building departments or developers or they go into other fields. We just got a neat project in St. Louis and I got into an argument the other day with the young architect we’re associated with down there; he knows our work and he knows how we feel and he says, “You know, you’re right, we’ve got to make this contextual.” That wouldn’t have happened that long ago if we hadn’t carried the flag about this issue for all those years. The fact is that the context for this project is early modern, which I really enjoy. I think we’re going to get a good project out of this. vanR: Can you reveal what this project will be?
Nagle: Oh, I can’t yet. But we’re influencing people. I think that we’re much more educated about everything. Just like with the press and the magazines, there’s so much more exposure than there was twenty years ago. We can confuse the public, but the reality is that people are more aware. And there are people who are well meaning, but who still have terribly conservative taste. What I’m amazed by is that people your age are so conservative.
127 Wasn’t it Winston Churchill who said, “if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain?” So I always think of the young people as being more liberal. But I find that it’s like putting on a Brooks Brothers suit and saying, “Let’s go buy a loft building that has to have red brick and the balcony hung on it that has to have those little railings”—that’s too bad. I’d like to push more. I think that’s what we’re trying to do in our office. vanR: One of the next things that we should speak about is the “Tops” competition in 1983 that was organized by the Chicago Architectural Club. It was on view at the Art Institute in November of 1983. It was a competition to which architects were invited to submit drawings for buildings that they wanted to create new roofs for. Were you in on the development of this competition?
Nagle: No, I don’t think that I was. I saw it as kind of stupid, frankly. I thought that the problem was like in San Francisco where everyone was doing these new tops and all these funny designs, and so people finally recognized that it was getting kind of silly. That’s about the time that they decided to have this competition and try all these different tops. The reality is that a building that has a top that’s different than other tops is quite humorous, if you think about the language of the building and the way you ought to go about designing it. Everybody was going around plunking ornament on things and putting tops on them. I literally took one day when I had a bunch of phone calls to make and I sat down and did that drawing. vanR: You drew a view of the skyline of Chicago.
Nagle: I drew the thing because I think it was the flyer that went out to everybody and so I just drew it. I had noticed that Milwaukee had a lot of flags and so I thought that the best thing about cities if people want to express themselves is that they can fly flags and have a good time. John Macsai said to me, “Yours is very good, but what you should have done is where you have all the flags going the same way, you should have had one flag going the other way.” I literally took that as an idea of what the city could be like if
128 everybody got out their flags and put them all together. I think I did it in color, but I didn’t take it seriously. vanR: Do you recall your reaction to the other entries?
Nagle: Actually, Hartray’s was really good. We’ve also done a lot of things that we’ve made fun of. I did a drawing recently that sold at the Arts Club. We were asked to make a statement about Chicago—that was when they were going to put the bustle on the Hancock building, and it was so terrible—so I did a little model of the Hancock and I took the top of Bloomingdale’s—you know, the four little lanterns, which everybody loves—and I put four little lanterns on the top of the model and four down on the little bustle as well. I sent it out to show how silly architecture has become. vanR: One of the notable things about this exhibition was that most entries were tops to Miesian buildings; the Standard Oil building (now B.P. Amoco), the Hancock, and Sears tower were the most popular. Was that indicative of peoples’ attitudes toward modern skyscrapers?
Nagle: Yes. They got tired of them and they were trying to decorate these buildings. That was the fashion at the time, but it was really kind of dumb. When we designed the 401 East Ontario building, which was about at this time, I had a model built. The original design was a better building, functionally, than the way it was actually built because it was taller and it stepped more and it was more like the Carbide and Carbon building. We were going to have penthouse apartments but it got whittled out of the project by the development company, so we decided not to have that. So we ended up with a stepping that would have been much better had it been a little bit higher. But anyway, we did the best we could and we just adjusted and changed it. Anyway, every time I would come into the office, somebody would make a different top and put it on the thing and I’d come in and knock it off. Everybody wanted to do these whimsical tops, and God, we couldn’t do that. The one thing that we did have was the lightning rod and the flagpole. I offered to pay for it, out of our own pocket, but the developer wouldn’t let
129 me do it, which was too bad. It would have helped the height of the building, which would have been nicer. The answer to your question about the “Tops” competition was that I was just having fun that day.
[Tape 5: Side 1] vanR: You were one of the founding members of the Chicago Architectural Club and you were on the board for quite a while. Will you speak about your involvement with the club and at what point you decided to pursue other interests?
Nagle: We set it up in the early 1980s and Jim Hammond, I think, was the first president. Then Carter Manny and Ben and Stanley took turns. I did it in 1984 or 1985 and I was president for a year. By that time, Stanley had lost interest in it. vanR: Do you know why he lost interest?
Nagle: Because he’s Stanley. He wanted to move on to something else. We were still playing tennis then and I assured him that the club should stay together and do good things. I think that after I did it, then someone else who had been part of the Seven did it. Then what really happened was that we turned it over to the younger people who had become much more involved and it became much more open-ended. In the beginning we would review people who we wanted to become join the club but then it really opened up to a broader membership. I think that anybody can join now. I dropped out probably in the late 1980s. I would go to one or two of the meetings, but there wasn’t a lot of activity that interested me, I think that was part of it. It had kind of worn itself out. Steve Wierzbowski took it on for a while. I really can’t keep track of it. I know that they met at what is now the I-Space, at the University of Illinois. I went to a meeting there in May to talk about the competition jury at IIT because Jack and I were competition advisors. That was a good session. There were a lot of people there and it was a lot of fun to see everybody. Maybe I should go back and get involved in the club
130 again. I try to get more people in our office involved, but I think that there isn’t much interest. It was sort of modeled after the old Chicago Architectural Sketch Club, that eventually petered out. vanR: I think it died out during the depression.
Nagle: I’m surprised that it lasted that long. Well, you have to have interesting things and a good focus and that has to do with people who are interested in similar things and leadership and so on. I think that the club suffered. I’m not saying this myself, because Rick Solomon has said this many times to me, but there aren’t people in their thirties and forties in Chicago that are as ambitious as the Chicago Seven were. I think that’s largely because they don’t have the kind of leadership that Stanley gave and the kind of simpatico that we had. So if it doesn’t work it becomes kind of artificial. There have been other groups that have tried to get together and do shows, as I mentioned earlier. But it just hasn’t quite caught on like our group did. But you have to remember that we quit doing it in a very calculated way. I can remember saying to Larry and Stanley, “Well, why don’t we get back together and do another show?” Then we all said, We should go on to other things. vanR: Was it a matter of not having any pressing issues to address?
Nagle: No, that wasn’t it. There are plenty of issues. There are a lot of issues now. It’s just that it worked and it was fun but we decided to let other people do it and if they didn’t, then I guess what happens is what is now. I don’t think that there are a whole lot of interesting things going on these days. It’s sad, for instance, that Inland Architect isn’t still in place. But one thing about the postmodern era is that it was interesting. I look back now and Mies looks pretty good after all this paste-on ornament and all the junk that came out of the postmodern movement and the bad architects who are still doing it. You’ve got to remember that back in the 1970s it was really pretty dull and monolithic and the minimalist buildings really weren’t very good. It was an exciting time to explore history and look at all those things. I mentioned
131 before that you don’t always like the way things work out, and usually what happens is that good architects move ahead and try to do better things while lesser people pick up on what’s already happened. I see that happening a lot today. Historical recall is not very authentic or, frankly, very interesting and it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s like the language of the building and ornament with no idea behind it. We were as interested in history as anybody was when we went back and we were finding all these things that were fun and interesting. We were exploring and doing different things and it was an eclectic time. But I think that some of us were also exploring other things in terms of the possibilities of putting things together in different ways. The “Tops” exhibition was interesting because it was making fun and everybody was doing different tops on buildings, so we just made it into a competition. We were making them realize how corny it was. I think that was a good thing to do. We were looking critically, I think. There have been a number of things that have happened since—I think I mentioned to you when we did the fundraising for the MCA and I did the lanterns on the bustle of the Hancock—that’s making fun of the “pretty” architecture that isn’t very meaningful. I think to that extent it was pretty good. I suppose the Chicago Seven ought to get together and try something again. When we did get together in 1987, that was interesting because we saw where everybody’s work had gone since then. vanR: Let’s talk about that meeting. In April of 1987, a symposium was organized at the Art Institute. It was called the “7 + 11”—the seven for the Chicago Seven and the eleven because it had been eleven years since your first exhibition, “Seven Chicago Architects,” opened in 1976. The seven of you were on the stage talking about your own projects and the current state of architecture. One of the things that was written about that symposium was that the issues raised were discussions about what kind of language would inform architecture and give it meaning. Do you remember that discussion?
Nagle Well, different people said different things. I followed Jim Freed and Jim was in pretty poor health by that time and had difficulty talking. I hadn’t seen him for a while and I didn’t realize how rough a shape he was in, although
132 mentally, he’s just fine. He got up and he talked about the Holocaust Museum in D. C. and how he was trying to find a language to describe what had gone on during the holocaust and about the cracked wall and all that. It was very moving because he was obviously struggling to do this. That was a real struggle and he knew that what he was presenting wasn’t finished and it was an in-progress sort of thing. Frankly, some of it looked like it could have been a little superficial, but when he finally built it, it wasn’t. He’s a smart man and he kept working on it until he got it right. All those things did become very meaningful and very powerful, I think. Then I was next and I said, “Jim is going to be a tough act to follow,” and it really was. What I did was talk about the pops, classics, and jazz—the idea that architecture is a broader field and that people practicing in a serious way have to respond to a lot of different clients and sites and other things. You can’t just lay back and be Miesian and use just glass and steel and beige brick. vanR: You were arguing that architects couldn’t adhere to a single style?
Nagle: Yeah, right. It works differently. If you’re good, your work can be consistent. There’s certain baggage that you have as an architect. Actually, the baggage that we have in my office now is primarily my baggage, because I’m the oldest. But we’ve also been working together for a long time and so we have developed a way of doing things. vanR: Do you mean a process or an aesthetic?
Nagle: A process: the way we draw, the way we think about fenestration on a building, things that we’ve done in the past. We talk that way and we go back and forth. Now, we try to change and move ahead, but it’s one’s nature to develop a style. So what I was getting at, and my point in bringing those things up was that I think that you have to respond… The little book that I showed you was just that—the classic kind of buildings that are really classic modern. Frankly, what I like to use when I’m doing new houses and interiors are classic modern furniture and things that I’ve designed. Primarily I fall back on Corbusier’s furniture and Mies’s and all the rest. You
133 put that together and there is a classic way of doing things that has to do with structure and proportion. It has to do with object buildings, not buildings that are environmental buildings that blend in so much. Usually these are buildings that stand free and you’ll find them in cities. The pops, the vernacular sort of buildings, were buildings that were mostly built in the country that had to do with building in wood or stone and natural materials, that were built to be more environmentally aware. Some of the buildings that we do are difficult to photograph because the buildings sort of blend into the landscape. Sometimes it’s very difficult to photograph the interiors because it’s a sequence of spaces. The last category is jazz, and that has to do with the upbeat things: the two-beat jazz that came out of the early modern times in the twenties and thirties and all that. I’ve always been interested in all three musical forms—but atonal music is not my interest. For building, that has to do with structure that is upbeat and turns corners and has to do with that attitude about things. It’s also a parti, which means that you can’t walk into a building and draw the building the way you do a center-entry house because it’s too complicated. vanR: Can you give some examples of houses that you think fit these categories?
Nagle: In the jazz category I’d say the house the Dunewood house that we built last year. You can’t draw that house, it’s too loose. It really has to do with projections into the environment and turning corners and it does not have axial circulation because it’s curved and shaped. vanR: Do you recall the examples that you presented at the symposium?
Nagle: The jazz part was the Sun Dial House and a house in Colorado that I was working on at the time. vanR: One of the aspects of the “7+11” symposium was to have each of you share a current project and your project from the “Seven Chicago Architects” show. The project that was illustrated in an article about the symposium showed the 401 East Ontario project.
134 Nagle: That was the classics—an object building. It’s symmetrical and classical to the extent that it is classic modern. The building was actually more exciting at one time when we had penthouse apartments and we had a higher step at the top. As the building goes up, we had sundecks on either side, because we couldn’t get the sun down on the lower level, and that’s the exercise room and the pool and we have it up in the sky and it’s a sensational space because you look out over the city, both north and south. Above that we have the mechanical and the cooling and the elevator overruns and there were reasons for all that stepping. But putting the bays on the building and bringing them out to a point lets you step out and look at the next person’s bay like a rowhouse—it’s like bringing it up in the air. Then it also affords views that are angled views. Then at the corners you can get 270-degree views. So the building was built and we feel good about it. For the vernacular building, at the time I was designing in Lake Forest what we called Deerpath Plaza shopping center, a 50,000 square foot plaza with offices. It was very much in the vernacular of Lake Forest and it had to do with what Howard Van Doren Shaw had done in Market Square. We picked up on those materials and forms and shapes, and yet it’s a modern building. If you look at it you know it wasn’t built in 1918 but it was done in 1980s. There were certain things that I wanted to do differently; I wanted the windows pressed back and this and that. But it was kind of exciting to do that at the same time we were doing these very modern, jazzy houses. I think that’s not a bad way to work, to have these different attitudes at work at the same time. When my daughter was writing entries for the book, she kept asking, “What category does this house fall in?” A lot of them fall in between, but the prevailing attitude is that you’re comfortable working in different modes and yet there’s a consistency to the work. For instance, you always see the structure and the way it hits the ground is very similar and a lot of the fenestration is co- mingled. I think that there are too many architects, frankly, who try to do things that maybe they shouldn’t be doing because they’re not good at it. I think that if you feel comfortable with the way you’re moving then the trick is to push yourself and try to move it further. But there are certain things that I just don’t do.
135 vanR: For instance?
Nagle: Well, how can I put it? I don’t do Frank Gehry. I remember when Frank came and he gave a lecture and I went up afterwards and I kiddingly said—I’d known him for years and I was on the jury that gave him the AIA award for his house—“Frank, you’re going to change my whole attitude toward architecture.” I was laughing, and he said “But Jim, you don’t do that.” Of course I don’t. His style came out of his work with artists and art forms and it became his work. I think that the “me-toos” of architects are making a mistake, because his is a very personal way of doing that. I think that Mies was probably meant to be copied; he saw universal space and international things and he meant for architects to take on this doctrine and attitude. The trouble was that it got to be boring and it wasn’t done very well by others. I just read an obituary of Alfred Caldwell and one of the things that he did was that he quit in 1958 when IIT, in their wisdom, hired Skidmore to do the buildings instead of Mies, after Mies had done the first five buildings. All his buildings aren’t wonderful, but Crown Hall was the last one he did and that was wonderful. The library is not so wonderful and all those other buildings…. I would have quit too, if I had been Alfred Caldwell. So I say do what you do and do what you do best and try not to be too au courant. There’s nothing wrong with fashion and style and things change all the time and you’ve got to be with it. The trick, though, which is more fun, is to be creative. What’s happened to America, in these strange times, is that people will call up and ask, “Well, what style do you work in?” I always say, “I try to work in an original style.” I try to do something that’s new and translations of things that have to do with the context and all that, especially in urban and suburban situations. I think that’s the right attitude because I’m that sort of person. I’m not Frank Gehry, who does crazy things. I find that people don’t do that very well. I see a lot of not very good projects when people try to be so whippy and au courant and it really doesn’t come off. It can be very awkward. I think that the people of my bent who have become the best at what they’re doing, are people like Moneo—he does wonderful work, it’s very original. There’s a kind of consistency to it, but it’s
136 unpredictable. We don’t really know, in this office, when we’re starting a project, just what we’re going to do. We really don’t have too many preconceptions. Sometimes we find them when we start working. But the point of what I was trying to get across in the 1987 symposium was that there are many ways to work within your own discipline and come to terms with yourself and your consistency and your ability to move and change. vanR: Did any of that attitude come from working with the six other members of the Chicago Seven?
Nagle: Larry and I were pretty close, but I think that Tom Beeby comes at it completely differently. vanR: How so?
Nagle: Well, Tom is much more academic. He’s a wonderful teacher, and he understands things and he has a tremendous knowledge of architecture. He’s very facile. He’s really interested in classical architecture, which I don’t particularly like. I can appreciate it, but I don’t go out of my way when I travel to see classical buildings, but I go out of my way to see Romanesque buildings. Ben Weese clearly doesn’t come from the same attitude. I’d say that Ben and Stuart are closer together in attitude and interests and tastes. And then Stanley comes at it from his own whimsical way, which is unique. He’s a great cartoonist, and he’s really wonderful for what he does. That’s very different from Jim Freed who comes at it from a much more rigorous way. And there’s Helmut, he looks at things in a very different way than I do. We just did a little competition thing, which I mentioned to you, and what Ralph did and what I did and what Helmut did couldn’t be farther apart. Ralph got the commission. vanR: Do you recall how the 1987 symposium came to be organized?
137 Nagle: Well, Michael Sorkin was the moderator. I guess you’d have to ask Stanley, because he’d remember all that. I guess it was the Art Institute that wanted to do it. vanR: How long had it been since you had been together with the other seven?
Nagle: Well, I hadn’t seen Jim for a long time because he’d been in New York. But the rest of them I saw socially. vanR: Had you ever spoken before about how you reflected on your years together?
Nagle: This was the first time. It was fun, except that I had to follow Jim Freed, which was hard. I can’t remember what Stanley talked about. There was a lot of symbolic content around at that time; people were teaching it at school and everybody was looking at Derrida and all that sort of business. They were trying to bring meaningful things to their buildings. I remember having seen Gaudí’s work and somebody analyzed it and it was really funny because they read all these different things into architecture that I’m not sure are there. There was a lot of that sort of business going on. The wonderful things that were done over the years, like Gunnar Asplund’s work, for instance, if you go to the cemetery and see that, it’s so moving and so wonderful, that’s real content. But there was a lot of this in schools. So I think that we got a little dash of that. I certainly didn’t try to do that. What did everybody else show at the symposium? Larry did Grace Place. Stuart started doing these houses. Tom was into the classical things. Stanley continued to do his thing with the temple here, with a lot of symbolism and all that. Jim’s was loaded with symbolism. Ben did this great church down in Peoria [Westminster Presbyterian]. Ben has one of the best crosses I’ve ever seen in it, the way it is over the altar—he figures all that stuff out and it’s just great. vanR: One of the things that you were quoted as saying at this symposium was that architecture had become more and more commercial and postmodernism was dead, so you were asking what comes next.
138 Nagle: I said that postmodernism was dead and that it was like seeing Paul Newman playing Fast Eddie in The Hustler—then there was another movie made years later and at the end of the movie Newman hits the cue ball and says, “Tell them Fast Eddie is back.” My comment to that was, “Tell them modernism is back.” People were really starting to get fed up and become more interested in what was a much more interesting modernism, which is what is going on now. People in Europe are doing it the best. That has to do with being much more whippy and structural and tectonic. vanR: Which European architects are you particularly interested in?
Nagle: Well, the Dutch, of course. I love them: Mecanoo and those guys, and Wiel Arets and Renzo Piano—they’re wonderful architects. There are certainly a lot of good architects in America. But there’s an attitude in Europe where they feel secure about their history and that enables them to do more modern work and still keep the content of their cities. They can do both things, while we have a real struggle, vis-à-vis the housing that’s going up now that I complain about because I find it symbolically devoid of meaning. vanR: You spoke a moment ago about how theory was being taught in architecture school. When you were asking what was next, where did you expect the next architectural movement to develop?
Nagle: Well, actually, what has happened is that IIT is hot right now. It’s not because it’s particularly a great school—Donna Robertson’s a great director and all that—but because of an interest in technology, they’re interested in IIT because of Mies and Chicago. I remember telling any number of architects in Europe, when I’d have them come to the Graham Foundation to talk, I’d say, “Well, we’re so terribly conservative in Chicago now, we need people like you to come and show us how you’ve worked your way through.” Like in Ticino [Switzerland], to go on to modern buildings that are more upbeat and have to do with what’s coming. They’d say, “Oh, Chicago can’t be conservative! You have this wonderful legend. This is where it’s at.” I said,
139 “Not necessarily. We’re not as cutting-edge as we were in the past.” It was that way when Mies was here and when some of the new architects were coming up. But it’s historic recall that’s brought about the image. Take Mayor Daley and what he’s doing for the city, which is absolutely wonderful, but what he’s doing is very tasteful one-hundred-year old architecture. He’s going back and putting the city together the way it was meant to be one hundred years ago. All the street lamps and the boulevard signs and all that—it’s wonderful to have it and it’s making everybody feel good, but the man’s a politician. When architects say that his father was forward-looking because he did modern buildings, that’s just not the case. If Richard the Second had been mayor back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he would have been doing what everybody wanted in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. What everybody wants now is what he’s doing now. And he likes it, but he likes it because everybody likes it and he’s been talked into liking it. You try to do anything that’s pushing the envelope a little bit and dealing with tectonics and all the machinery that’s running our lives, I think that people are afraid of that. They’re going backwards and trying to do wood-paneled houses and old signs and lampposts and all that. I think that what was done on State Street is beautiful, it couldn’t have been better detailed and I think that Skidmore did a great job. But, frankly, I’m a modernist and I’d rather see things that were more interesting. vanR: When you said that postmodernism was dead, did you expect that the next movement would come from students and be taught in the schools?
Nagle: Oh, yeah. I think that younger people are current—obviously there are good students and bad students—but the point is that all you’ve got to do is teach for a semester to find out what’s going on. What’s wonderful about being on the Graham Foundation board is that we get requests for money and review one hundred or one hundred and twenty proposals every six months and you find out what people are interested in. There is the classical society of architects who grasp each other’s hands and go in their own direction. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that, because the guys who are
140 doing it well are doing it very authentically, like Ron Krier and the rest of them. But I’m not particularly interested in it. vanR: Do you have any other notable memories of the symposium?
Nagle: Well, I think that there were some interesting things. The Sulzer Library that Tom did was very good—I think that he did quite a modern building, the way that he did the steel lintels on the windows and it has a wonderful tectonic quality to it, although you kind of get lost when you’re in the building. The attitude of the siting of it, I think that Tom is very good at that. He really came out of Mies, when he was working at C.F. Murphy. Gene Summers is a very powerful person and Gene Summers took Tom under his wing when he was at Murphy’s office and they proceeded to design a whole bunch of things together. Then Tom left and went with Hammond; Jim had come out of that same school. I think that little bank they did in Ripon, Wisconsin is still one of the best Miesian buildings. I love coming back to this thing. To be able to work that way, and change it and yet have this interest in tectonics and tactile feelings about buildings like that, that really has to do with being modern and something that has to do with history. It’s quite interesting. I was trying to do some of that in those other publications where we were building in context but we were using tile and the lintels. I wish we could do more of that, but it scares the hell out of people. It’s just amazing. We’re finally getting one client on the South Side off of the historic a little bit in a whole series of townhouses. I just won’t do that historic stuff because if that’s what they want, they can go somewhere else, because we’re just too busy. What we do is to take the same proportions and the same shapes and all that. vanR: Would you say that the Schiller Street townhouses are an example of what you’re talking about?
Nagle: Yes, exactly. There what we did was we did the stringers and we set the brick back and we did that sort of detailing. Larry had done some houses that really had some blank walls and he doesn’t do that any more because we
141 learn, right? I learned, too, by doing this, that the interesting detailing made it richer and you learn from that. As you get older and look around, you find out. You also are influenced by history because of what we went through. The Schiller Street townhouses are a good example and I use it a lot. We’re trying to get a job now at IIT to do neighborhood for-sale housing, which is slanted toward the staff and the professionals down there so that they have a place to live. So how do you balance the community and the campus? I’d love to get that job and try to figure that out. I used the Schiller Street houses as an example of that when we went there to be interviewed for the IIT job. I think that you can do both things. What happens is that when you start out, you’re not sure of what you’re going to do. Then when you start to do it, sometimes you get better ideas. Then sometimes you are forced to cut back because people won’t do it. vanR: In the Schiller Street project, what influence did the client have?
Nagle: He had seem the Hunziker house that I did in Lincoln Park, the house with the white car in front, and he said, “Wow, that’s really great. How about townhouses like that?” I said “You’re on!” So we did that, except we changed it, of course, It’s made out of masonry and it’s shaped to the views. One of the things that I‘ve done is that I’ve spent half my professional life working on housing of one sort or another. I really am interested in it and I’m not going to give up until we get some really good projects to do the way we want to. vanR: Do you find it’s easier to do housing for individual clients or for developers?
Nagle: Well, individual clients, generally. But the developers that are good are the ones where one or two people make the decisions and not a committee. Then the people who aren’t hung up on what the market absolutely has to be. Habitat has been a wonderful client, letting us do that. I’m sort of surprised they let us do that and the building is working, it works really well. Now we’re working on other projects with them and they are interested in
142 something that’s upbeat—I truly am tired of looking at all those drab, historical looking buildings that are out there. vanR: Bringing us up to the recent past, in 1997 the Chicago Seven were among those on the Chicago Tribune’s list of the most notable contributors to the last 150 years of the arts in Chicago. The entry for the Chicago Seven read as follows, “this group of rebels opened the way for a more inclusive version of Chicago’s architectural history, including tradition-minded architects and unorthodox modernists left out of the standard modernist canon.” Do you think that was an appropriate assessment of your contributions?
Nagle: It’s very good, sure. But it should have mentioned our own work too. vanR: Well, that was going to be my next question. This citation doesn’t mention your own designs at all.
Nagle: It should. The point was, like Stanley said, that it was our time to change things. And, by the way, it’s still happening. We’re still trying to push the envelope and change things all the time. I think that all of the Seven are doing this, but the Tribune missed our own work. The unorthodox modernist thing was really me at the very outset saying, Let’s look at those guys, like Rebori and Keck and these other people, whom nobody had looked at in the early 1970s when we put that little show on at the Glessner house. Then when we got together and did the Chicago Architects show and catalog, that was really interesting. Revisionist history is good. Sigfried Giedion wasn’t right—it didn’t happen the way he wrote and it’s really good to do a revisionist history. I think we had a lot to do with the acceptance of interest in buildings that were historical and building in context and urbanism and all that. I think that we got off track at times when we were working on the world’s fair; I think that we missed an opportunity there. vanR: Because it didn’t happen?
143 Nagle: Yes, it didn’t come about. First of all, today fairs are a little bit antique, frankly. I think that they aren’t the way they were in 1893, and we missed that by a year. We missed it because I think that Bruce Graham and others were too ambitious. I think that what they should have done is realize that it can’t be the same kind of fair as it was one hundred years ago. They are not going to build the islands and the bridges and all the infrastructure. People aren’t going to come from all over the country to see a world’s fair because they’ve got television and there are other things that people can do for entertainment. It’s unfortunate because museums are now dealing in entertainment and I think they shouldn’t be; they should be dealing in more serious things. I think we’ve messed things up. I didn’t work in the planning of the fair as much as I did the outskirts; we were trying to figure out how to get the river to come all the way back to the lake. I worked with Ralph Johnson and some other people, that was my part of it. When we did the little charrettes for the world’s fair, that was interesting—I remember working with Jaquelin Robertson and Diane Legge. What we tried to do was bring the boats over from other countries and build slips where they could build everything and transport it all that way. We had the Viking ship the furthest away and everything was focused on that and everything else just grew like a branches out from that. Those were some interesting ideas and I think that what was done was too traditional. They started to build islands and then I think it was Tom and Stanley and others who tried to recreate Venice here in Chicago. I don’t think that was right; it wasn’t forward- looking enough. It was wonderful to have a city on the water, but it wasn’t a strong enough idea to get people excited enough to spend enough money. I think that if they had done something that was simpler and that had a better idea… We helped everybody miss on that effort and we didn’t do things that worked. But if you look at the body of work that everybody’s done, then and since, I think you’ll find that it’s very good. Now it isn’t always as rewarding as it was then because it isn’t sometimes quite as novel.
[Tape 5: Side 2]
144 Nagle: I guess the part I like is that now and then you get surprises and things that are really good. I think that Chicago can do it as well as anywhere. We’ve just got to get out of this mire. Everybody’s trying to get away from these ordinary things. One of the problems, too, is that when you go through a recession, there can be tough times. In 1991 and 1992 it was hard. There are lots of architects and lots of competition. We’ve given up many things, like graphics and interior design, construction management and we’ve also given up program management as architects. In this office, we are actually doing some of that again; we’re doing a convent where we’re going to follow through and do what architects used to do, which is to be construction managers as well. We’ve given up so much of that that the process gets watered down. It isn’t that you go into the committee where the committee asks, “Well, how many churches have you done in order to be able to do this church?” or whatever it is. I don’t know how young architects get work. What they do is they work for another architect and then they say that they did the work for them. I remember getting hired for a job that never got built—the AMVETS Teaching and Nursing Facility out at the University of Illinois. The client actually hired us because we said that we hadn’t done one of those buildings before but that we had always wanted to do one of them. We did a lot of research on it and we said, “You people know how to put them together, why don’t we not come with all sorts of prejudice and instead come and programmatically solve these kind of things. That’s another thing that happens to be “in” right now in teaching is this detailing of things and of putting things together and programming things that are socially conscious, like Stanley’s Archeworks and all that. Social issues have been neglected and largely because there wasn’t a lot of work. People said, We’ve got to do affordable housing and clinics for poor people. It was a wonderful time but there wasn’t a lot of money around. Now there’s a lot of money and we have a real opportunity to do these things because the flow is there. Not too long ago you went home and weren’t bothered by five phone calls every night from someone trying to get money from you; it used to be a lot quieter. Times have changed now. I felt this coming on in 1987, for instance, that times were changing and that we were moving out of this, that the next thing was coming out of Europe and that peoples’ interests were in modernism and
145 social consciousness. By the time the 1990s came along, everybody sobered up and began to look at things and look at us now—there are more big egos out there building bigger houses and all this stuff than there ever was. That’s America. vanR: If you had to do it all over again, would you join the Chicago Seven?
Nagle: Oh, absolutely, sure. It would be fun to do more projects together. I’d like to do that. I personally like all these people and it was an interesting time. Then the four were added—Jerry Horn is really good and continues to do work in the smaller firm—they’re not like the old lumbering Holabird and Root that it used to be but now the work is better and it is run differently. They don’t do a lot of projects of which only the few good ones are Jerry’s, instead they do a lot of good ones. Cindy Weese has gone on to be an important educator and she and Ben are very close in their design attitudes. Ken Schroeder came out of the Charlie Moore attitude and has done very nice work. And Helmut, of course, he’s back doing some very important work again in Europe in tectonics. He’s not doing those post offices that look like mailboxes. I remember being the competition advisor for IIT when Helmut got up to show his work, he had a board and lights that went on and all this stuff and he said, “I hope this isn’t too corny.” Well, it was a little corny. He’s fascinated by that sort of stuff and I think that’s interesting—he’s much better doing that than some of the things that we’ve done in the past. Would I do it all over again? Sure. Would I change it? Of course. vanR: How would you change it?
Nagle: Well, now that I know more I’d do things differently than I did at Dayton Street, for instance. I did that when I really wanted to do something that was sort of Italianate in that particular context for a wonderful client. I found that the modernism in the building that was really good was because it was so clean. I’d seen Codussi’s work in Venice and I just was knocked out by it and the simple forms. So, yeah, I wouldn’t do that again; I’d push for something else now, more like what I did on Schiller Street. But this is ten years ago
146 now too and today we’d push further. But it’s hard. You just don’t see very much work that’s different and interesting, I don’t think. But, boy, you see a lot of it in Europe. vanR: Do you think that the changes that came about in the 1970s were inevitable?
Nagle: Well, if the Chicago Seven had never been formed, or we’d never been born, I don’t think that Michael Graves would have changed his path from being a modern architect to become a postmodern architect and then becoming the most influential architect for a period of about five or six years. I mean, Richardson was popular for twenty years. Graves had as much impact in building because he built so much more in terms of influencing architects and all that. So, sure, we probably helped—I haven’t thought this through—but we probably helped to sort of popularize eclecticism, which was then and is now, but we certainly didn’t cause the postmodern movement or anything like that. vanR: If you think of it in a Chicago context, how do you characterize your impact?
Nagle: Oh, I remember the Grays and the Whites and us at the Graham Foundation and the wows when Larry showed the house with the circles that he was working on. It had gone from a modern house…actually it was very nice house because it was kind of flush and it had the beginnings of what was postmodern. Tom was showing the farmhouse with the enormous window that he had done, and I did some things like that too. But, boy, you look at them now and everybody copied those things so badly and did so much of it. Like Peter Bohlin says, “You want to get rid of the taint, you want to get away from that, but not me, I didn’t do that, I will never admit to it,” but it’s simply not true. We all did those things. At the time you get an idea that you thought was interesting and it was instantly copied or we were all doing it at the same time. As you get older you get a little bit more sober and you take a longer look at things. I started to tell you about when we were doing the highrise building at 401 East Ontario, every day I’d come into the office and people would have put pointed roofs on it—some were hip roofs and
147 sheds roofs and all this sort of stuff—every morning I’d walk in and knock it off the top. They were all saying, “Come on Jim, get with it. Get a little po- mo.” But it would have been a terrible thing to do. The building is what it is, and it would have looked funny with that on the top, of course. vanR: So do you have the final say in your office?
Nagle: Right. Well, once in a while it’s nice to be right, but I’ve done things that are wrong, too—we all have. Finally, what you have to do is look at things and say that it’s corny and it doesn’t look right. It’s an eyeball profession. You can try to intellectualize it and you can do all these different things and give it your best shot at the moment you hit the paper. But in the long run, you’ve got to be critical and hard on yourself. Mies always used these wonderful rich materials in his best buildings—the verdi marble and the polished columns—and the minimalists that are coming out of Europe now and some of the people in America understand that again. We certainly work that way. I’m doing my own cottage and I’m doing totally minimal things—wonderful wood materials and there are about six different woods. vanR: Can you mention the architects you think are doing the kind of modernism you like?
Nagle: Oh, well, Herzog and de Meuron in Switzerland; Siza’s work in Portugal. That’s a real interest right now that I think we’ll see and appreciate and will grow to be better. And there’s Kazuyo Sejima, the Japanese minimalist. You know, if you want minimalist, the Japanese are just so much better at it than anybody else. They always go the extra step; they’re just obsessive about it. vanR: Well, as this interview comes to a close, I wonder if you would speak about what you think was your greatest opportunity in architecture.
Nagle: Well, coming to Chicago. It was wonderful. I don’t think that I could have done what I did anywhere else. I’m always surprised when people say, “Well, were you working with this or doing that?” What we’re trying to do
148 now in our office is not a one-man show by any means. We have very talented partners and associates and interesting design work and they’re putting their hands in and changing all that. What Jack and I both are promoting now is the office and the good work: we’re trying to set it up so that the office will continue when we hang it up or aren’t around as much. We’re trying to make something that comes out of a straightforward logic but with an upbeat attitude about what’s going on in architecture. It’s about not being trendy and all that, but trying to be really good. I think that Chicago is a place where you can do that. I had a wonderful time and I had a wonderful education when I was in Cambridge, but my God, that work was so much the same and everybody was doing the same thing. There wasn’t much difference in Cambridge. It didn’t have the vitality of this city. For all my complaining about what’s going on right now, there are some awfully good buildings being done right now and there’s a dynamism right now everywhere in the country because these are good times. I hope they last, but I know they won’t and in time it will fade. I think that Chicago has never had a recession or anything like what happened in California and the East Coast. The other opportunity I had was going to work—knowing that you wanted your own office—for a guy like Stanley and working with a guy like Larry. And Jack Hartray has just been great—working with somebody who understands technology is really good and who is really careful and sober about that. And working with my younger partners and all that… The best that has happened to me professionally was moving to this town and getting to know people like the Chicago Seven and working in an office where I had an opportunity to do good buildings and interesting work. That’s the best. vanR: What you do you think your greatest risk has been?
Nagle: Building big buildings. The wires are all out there, you’ve got to watch out. That’s true risk, that really is risk! What you’re getting paid for what your exposure is, is outrageous. Along with getting paid more, architects should get more respect, you know like Rodney Dangerfield. You read articles about what’s going on in the city but they don’t mention the architects. They mention the developer and who’s doing what but they don’t mention the
149 architects anymore. That’s because so much of it looks like it came out of Brooks Brothers. vanR: Is that because the work is being done by builders and not architects?
Nagle: There are a lot of architects working for development companies that are never mentioned. They are the ones putting the product out there. But I’m afraid the product, when it starts to look so generic, becomes a problem. The biggest risk is practicing and building buildings and taking chances every day, just getting things up and out. It would be much simpler—and I never chose to work this way—but there are times when I’d like to pull back and have a very small office and just do everything perfectly. vanR: A boutique studio?
Nagle: Right. I was thinking of something with higher intellectual aspiration than that, but something like the size of a boutique studio. Just saying, “I’m only going to do this, and I’m going to do it really well and I’m going to draw it myself.” Maybe I’ll do that still, who knows. vanR: One hundred years from now, for what would you like to be remembered?
Nagle: Well, I was always surprised that I did as well as I did, so just being a good architect and building a lot of nice buildings and having a portfolio. It would be nice to be thought of as a good professional. The other thing that I did is to support the profession; I care about it and felt I was part of a team in the construction industry that was trying to make a better world. The things that I really get cracked up about are like when I went out to Garibaldi Square the other day and the landscaping was so lush and so wonderful it just looked so good. There are one hundred and forty families living out there and it’s nice. It made me feel good. vanR: Who was the landscape architect on that project?
150 Nagle: Actually, I did it with the Lannert Group and I forgot who did the installation, but we did a lot of that. We did a bosque of trees in the cul-de- sac and all that. But I hadn’t been out there for a while and this has been one great year for growing, let me tell you. Finally the environment has really matured; it’s about eight years old now. It just really looks solid and good. I love doing housing like that. I like making great environments. I go back every now and then and I see buildings that I haven’t seen for a while, like my sister’s house in California. I went back there and saw it not too many years ago—I did that house in the 1970s. Boy, is that a neat house! It felt good to go back there and see that. She’s screwed it up in a few places, but the idea is that I did things that were pretty nice. That’s what we’re trying to do now. We’ve got one house that’s going in the ground on Monday and I’m going to the site. I think that it’s going to be—of course, all architects are fickle and they always think that the projects they’re working on are going to be the best—but I think that it’s going to be the best one yet. vanR: What’s the name of the project?
Nagle: It’s the next house. It’s under construction. vanR: Can you reveal who the client is?
Nagle: It’s one of the owners of the contracting company, Triodyne-Wangler. We’re doing the house in Highland Park and I think that it’s going to be quite special. We’re all excited about it. It was a little dry around here in the early 1990s; I went back to doing a few remodelings on things that we had done. But it was fun also to go back and learn about the new materials and deal with small things again. Like the work that we did in Miami at the Ransom Everglades School, we didn’t publish it much but there were some really nice projects that we did down there that were kind of fun. It’s good every now and then to get a break and to be able to get away. Tom Beeby once said, and I think he’s right, that you can get too busy and do too much work and then you’re not doing anything well. You’ve got to watch that. I remember I was embarrassed one time when I gave a lecture in Wisconsin, probably in the
151 late 1970s or early 1980s, I gave what I thought was really a good locker-room talk about how buildings should come together and we should build communities rather than monuments—it probably had to do with housing. When I got all done, the first question that came out from the audience was, “Do you do your own marketing?” That’s what the students had on their mind. The guy came up later and apologized because I sort of got after him about it. He said, “Well, I didn’t mean it that way. You’re just so enthusiastic about what you’re doing, I just figured that you did your own marketing.” That really takes the wind out of your sails, I’ll tell you. The risk is your next building. As Stanley puts it, “What have you done for me lately?” Is the next building going to be any good? That’s what’s neat about having partners that are critical of each other and work together. Don and Dirk and I are working on one project where all three of us have had a hand in the design. Sometimes you can make a pretty bad stew out of all that. But there are times when you all have the right attitude and you do the right thing. I know enough to pull out of it at a certain point and let Don should finish it because I knew he could really do it better. That’s nice to work like that and to have a studio like that. I’d like to be remembered for that too, putting together good projects and putting together a good firm. vanR: Well, is there anything that you’d like to say that I haven’t asked about?
Nagle: Actually, I think that it’s nice to have the Art Institute put all this history together. I would hope that you’d organize more symposiums like we did in 1987 and get other people involved. Or get some of us involved with other people or however you want us to do it. I think that there should be more dialogue that is published because while we were having this enormous building boom, I don’t think that there’s enough controversy. There aren’t enough people banging on each other’s teapots to force them to do better work and to be more responsible. Even in the early stages you see some of this planning being done that is just so dreadful. Some renderer did it and it wasn’t thoughtfully put together. Jack and I just can’t do that sort of thing. Somebody comes in and they want to do something and we take it very seriously. You have to figure out how everything works. We evolve. We
152 don’t sit down and do these frivolous drawings that then turn into fluffy architecture. That isn’t the way we operate. You can’t have everybody like us or that would be boring too. But there needs to be more dialogue. I think that the Art Institute should get that going again. I think that show that John Zukowsky had in the early 1990s was kind of nice. vanR: Are you speaking of “Chicago Architecture and Design: 1923-1993”?
Nagle: Yeah, that was good, to see all that come together. It was a sort of a ring-a- ding-ding show because you walked in and there was all this stuff going on but the real content was not what I expected. On the other hand, the Alvar Aalto exhibit, when you read the catalog… vanR: You’re speaking of the Aalto exhibit recently at MoMA?
Nagle: I missed the show but I’ve seen all the buildings, I’ve been to the buildings. The catalog is what’s important. It tells about what he was thinking about and what was going on. I’m reading it now up at my cottage, sitting under the clear cedar and beechwood and feeling very influenced by him. I’m reading it and it was done by very smart people, Kenneth Frampton and others. I think that we need more of that kind of dialogue to understand better what it is we’re doing and what it is we shouldn’t be doing, which is knocking out the same old projects. That’s what I guess I have to say. I’d like to see the Art Institute take more of a lead in that. The Graham Foundation tries and I think that we’ll do better now that Rick’s back after being sick. The Graham Foundation funded one project with landscape architecture recently and we pushed for that. Actually, the last issue of Landscape Architect tells what the Graham Foundation grant was all about. We don’t teach landscape architecture in the schools but we ought to. Architects should get more involved in it and understand it better. You do have Rem Koolhaas and the big guns coming in now and then, but I think that there could be more. Architects are not really good at sitting around talking because architecture is a visual art and they tend to pontificate and their egos get in the way. But I think that the dialogue when you have to produce
153 something and tell what it is that you like, that’s what dialogue is, I think. More of this sort of thing would be good. Maybe we ought to do that more at the Graham, I’ll bring that up with Rick. vanR: Well, I thank you very much for your time and thoughtfulness in this project.
Nagle: And thank you.
154 SELECTED REFERENCES
READINGS ABOUT THE CHICAGO SEVEN Boissière, Olivier. "Le Concours du Chicago Tribune Revisité." L'architecture d'aujourd'hui 211 (October 1980):VII-VIII. Bourgeois, Denis. "Anciens Contre Modernes." AI Cree 179 (March/April 1980):74-79,152. Casari, Maurizio and Pavan, Vincenzo. New Chicago Architecture (exhibition catalog). Chicago: Rizzoli, 1981. Chatain, Elizabeth. "On the Town With The Lively Chicago Seven." Inland Architect 22 (February 1978):22-23. Cohen, Stuart E. Chicago Architects. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976. _____. "Late Entries." Progressive Architecture 61 (June 1980):94-99. _____. “Two Tales of a City: Chicago.” Progressive Architecture 57 (September 1976):24. Cohen, Stuart E. and Tigerman, Stanley. Chicago Tribune Tower Competition & Late Entries. New York: Rizzoli International, 1980 "Exhibition Review: Seven Chicago Architects." The Harvard Architectural Review 1 (Spring 1980):240-247. Greenspan, David. "Letters." Inland Architect 21 (August 1977):22-23. Grube, Oswald W., Pran, Peter C. and Schulze, Franz. 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago (exhibition catalog). Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara, 1976. Houston, Andre F. "Opinion." Inland Architect 20 (September 1976):6. Kent, Cheryl. "The Chicago Seven: Retiring Rebels." Inland Architect 31 (July/August 1987):5- 6, 9. Klotz, Heinrich. Revision der Moderne: Postmoderne Architektur 1960-1980. (exhibition catalog) Frankfurt am Main: Prestel-Verlag, 1984. Knobel, Lance "Recent Work of the Chicago Seven." The Architectural Review (London) CLXVII (June 1980):362-371. Laine, Christian K. "The Tribune Competition 1980." Inland Architect 24 (June 1980):11-17. “Les Mysteres de Chicago ou l’histoire mystifiée.” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 186 (September 1976): XXII-XXIII. “Letters.” Inland Architect 20 (July 1976):25-27. Miller, Nory. "Chicago." Progressive Architecture 61 (June 1980):71-72. _____. "Chicago Seven Playing the Role." Progressive Architecture 58 (April 1977):38, 43.
155 _____. "Chicago's Design Yippies Stage an Art Show." Inland Architect 21 (March 1977):10-17. _____. “Projections on Projects.” Progressive Architecture 59 (January 1978):29. _____. "War of Ideas." Inland Architect 20 (March 1976):6-28. Morrison, C.L. "Chicago: Chicago Seven." Artforum 17 (October 1978):72. _____. "Chicago: 'Seven Chicago Architects' Richard Gray Gallery." Artforum XV (April 1977):73. Pran, Peter. “The Diversity of Design Among Chicago Architects Today.” L’architettura 23 (December 1977):434-74 Schulze, Franz. "Letters." Inland Architect 22 (February 1978):24-25. Seven Chicago Architects. Exhibition catalog with essay by Dennis Adrian. Chicago: Richard Gray Gallery, 1976. “Seven Chicago Architects” Harvard Architecture Review 1 (Spring 1980):240-259. "The Exquisite Corpse." A + U 93 (June 1978):93-104. Tigerman, Stanley. "Modernism and the Canonical Chicago Architectural Condition." The Harvard Architecture Review 1 (Spring 1980):171-180. Town Houses. Exhibition catalog with foreword by Carter Manny. Chicago: The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1978. Walter Kelly Gallery. "Chicago Seven The Exquisite Corpse." December 16, 1977, (exhibition invitation). Woodhouse, David. "New Chicago Architecture." Inland Architect 25 (November/December 1981):36-37.
156 READINGS ABOUT JAMES LEE NAGLE “A House by Booth; a House by Nagle.” Inland Architect 19 April 1975: 21-22. “Award: David Plaza: An Urban Infill Project of Townhouses Over Shops, Chicago.” Progressive Architecture 56 January 1975: 56-57. “Booth & Nagle,” A + U 73 January 1977: 78-80. “Booth & Nagle, Architects/Planners.” Progressive Architecture 56 January 1975: 56-57. “Booth & Nagle.” A + U 72 December 1976: [63-]66. Bruegmann, Robert. “Little Journeys to the Offices of Architects.” Inland Architect 27 May/June 1983: 9-29. “California Split: The 1979 C. C. AIA Awards,” Inland Architect 23 October 1979: 21-23. “Contemporary Houses of the World.” A + U 101 February 1979: 7-170. “Courtyard House, Evanston, Illinois, 1975.” GA houses 8 1981: 50-[53] “Dayton Townhouses, Chicago.” Chicago Architectural Journal 5 1985: 136-137. “Duplex Apartment.” A + U 79 July 1979: 96-97. “Family Lighthouse, Door County, Wisconsin.” Architectural Record 170 Mid-May 1982: 100- 103. “Four architects who set up shop on the offbeat side of the street.” Inland Architect, 16 June 1972: 12-17. “Garibaldi Square, Chicago, Illinois.” Urban Land Institute, Project reference file 22 April- June 1992: [1-4]. Goff, Lisa. “Schiller Street Residences.” Progressive Architecture 70 February 1989: 88-91. “Hart Residence.” A + U 72 December 1976: 67-70. “House on Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago.” Architectural Review 167 June 1980: 370. “Hyde Park House on Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 1979-80.” GA houses 8 1981: 38- [41]. “The Imperfect Tradition: Building with Nagle/Hartray.” Inland Architect 33 March/April 1989: 52-58. “James Nagle: Residence in Dallas.” A +U 101 February 1979: 23-24. “James Nagle: The Sun Dial House, “A + U 79 May 1977: 122-125. “James L. Nagle.” A + U 146 November 1982: 60-65. “Market Square and Deerpath Plaza.” Architectural Record 181 March 1993: 85-89. Miller, Nory. “Chicago’s Awards: the built, unbuilt and ineligible.” Inland Architect 21 November 1977: 8-13.
157 “Modules at Bay: Booth & Nagle explore the organic nature of structural order.” Architectural Forum January/February 1974: 80-85. “The Nagle House, Chicago, Illinois USA 1978,” Toshi jutaku 190 August 1983: 46-47. “Nagle Lumber Company, Iowa City.” Architectural Record 154 August 1973: 128-131. “New Projects: The Way Things are Shaping Up.” Inland Architect. February 1978:12-15 “Private Residence, Evanston, Illinois.” A + U 72 December 1976: 63-65. “Private Residence, Des Moines.” Architectural Record 155 Mid-May 1974: 50-51. “Private Residence, Northern Minnesota.” Architectural Record 151 Mid-May 1972: 64-65. “Putting dormitories in context.” Architectural Record 170 October 1982: 96-101. “Record houses of 1970.” Architectural Record, 147 Mid-May 1970: 25-[85] “Record houses of 1971.” Architectural Record, 149 Mid-May 1971: 21-81. “Record houses of 1972.” Architectural Record, 151 Mid-May 1972: 19-78. “Record houses of 1974.” Architectural Record, 155 Mid-May 1974: 49-106. “Record Houses of 1975.” Architectural Record, 157 Mid-May 1975: 49-116. “Record Houses of 1980.” Architectural Record, 167 Mid-May 1980: 49-116. "Regional Recall: Park Glen, Taylorville, Illinois," Architectural Record 173 February 1985: 106-107. “Riverwoods House, No.1, Riverwoods, Illinois, 1977.” GA houses 8 1981: [46]-[49]. “Taylorville Housing for the Elderly, Taylorville, Illinois.” Inland Architect 29 March/April 1985: 24-25. Vogel, Carol. “Architecture: James L. Nagle: House in Hyde Park.” Architectural Digest 39 April 1982: 134-[137].
158 JAMES LEE NAGLE
Born: 5 August 1937, Iowa City, Iowa
Education: Stanford University, B. A., 1955-1959 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B. Arch, 1962 Harvard University, M. Arch, 1964
Military Service: U. S. Navy Civil Engineering Corps, 1959-61
Professional Experience: William H. Brown Associates, 1962-63 Ashley-Meyer Associates, 1963-64 Stanley Tigerman, 1965-1966 Booth & Nagle, 1966-1977 Booth, Nagle & Hartray, 1977-1979 Nagle, Hartray (now Nagle, Hartray, Danker, Kagan, McKay Architects), 1979-present
Teaching Experience: Instructor, University of Illinois, Chicago, 1969-72
Selected Honors And Awards: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1980 Fulbright Fellowship, The Netherlands, 1964-65
Public Service: American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter, Chairman, Housing Committee, 1972-1973 American Institute of Architects, National Committee on Design, Member, 1976-1979 Chicago School of Architecture Foundation, Vice-president, 1970-1974 Chicago School of Architecture Foundation, Board of Trustees, 1970- 1977 Chicago School of Architecture Foundation, President, 1974-75
Selected Exhibitions: “Chicago Architects, 1870-present,” Glessner House, Chicago, Illinois, 1969 “Chicago Architects,” Cooper-Union, New York City, 1976; Time-Life Building, Chicago, Illinois, 1976 "Seven Chicago Architects," Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1977 “The Exquisite Corpse,” Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1977 “Town Houses,” Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois, 1978; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1978 “Late Entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, 1980; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, 1980; Walker Art Center,
159 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1981; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1981; Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, Texas, 1981; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, 1982 “Chicago Architects Design,” The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1981 “New Chicago Architecture,” Verona, Italy, 1981; Graham Foundation, Chicago, Illinois 1982 “TOPS”, Chicago Architectural Club, Chicago, Illinois, 1983 “150 Years of Chicago Architecture,” Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois, 1985 “Chicago Architecture & Design: 1923-1993,” Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1993
160 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS
Aalto, Alvar 17, 24, 25, 57, 83, 92, 109, 153 Chicago Architectural Club 67, 97, 103, Adams, Gordon 83 107, 128, 130 Addams, Jane 58 Chicago Architectural Foundation 60 Anderson, Lawrence 27 Chicago Stock Exchange Building, Archeworks 145 Chicago, Illinois 49, 55 Arco Gas Station (prototype) 63, 79 Churchill, Winston 128 Arena Theatre, Washington, D. C. 50 Clarke, Henry B. (house, aka Widow Arets, Weil 139 Clarke house), Chicago, Illinois 55 Asplund, Gunnar 138 Codussi, Mauro 123, 146 Audrain, Calvert W. (Cal) 2 Cohen, Stuart 60, 62, 64, 65, 73, 77, 79, 88, 103, 137-38 Bach, Ira 37 Cook, Brad 41, 46 Bakema, Jacob Berend 34 Cook, Brad (house), Brainerd, Minnesota Barglow, Peter (house), Chicago, Illinois 43-44, 48 42 Cook, Dan 87 Barragán, Luis 49 Cook, Dan (house), Dallas, Texas 79 Barr-Saunders Offices and Warehouse, Currie, Leonard 24-25 Channahon, Illinois 99 Bateman School, Chicago, Illinois 97 Daley, Richard J. 140 Beeby, Thomas H. (Tom) 43, 51, 64, 66, 70, Daley, Richard M. (son of Richard J.) 140 74, 76-77, 79, 80, 87, 88, 90, 91, 113, 114, Danielson, Scott 11 137-38. 141, 144, 147, 151 Danker, Dirk 26, 41-42, 76, 118, 124, 152 Belluschi, Pietro 15, 16, 18, 59 David’s Plaza, Chicago, Illinois 99, 101-2, Benjamin, Susan 61 105 Blake, Peter 106 Dayton Street Townhouses, Chicago, Bohlin, Peter 57, 84, 100, 147 Illinois 123, 146 Booth, Laurence O. (Larry) 1, 2, 8, 11, 12, Deerpath Plaza Shopping Center, Lake 17, 21, 36, 37, 40-42, 45, 60, 62-65, 77, Forest, Illinois 135 79-81, 83, 84, 89, 97, 98, 100, 103, 113, de Meuron, Pierre 148 114, 117-20, 131, 137, 141, 147, 150 Derrida, Jacques 138 Booth, Nagle & Hartray 98 Despres, Leon 49 Brazilian Pavilion, Cité Universitaire, Despres, Marian 51-52 Paris, France 48 Diamant, Robert 35 Brenner, Dan 43, 51-52, 53 Dilet, Marc 117 Breuer, Marcel 21, 25, 47, 126 Doyle, Deborah 96 Brown, Bill 45-46 Dunewood Retreat (house), Bridgman, Brown, Bill (house), Des Moines, Iowa 43- Michigan 122, 134 44, 47, 49 Brownson, Jacques C. (Jack) 63 Eames, Charles and Ray 14 Bush-Brown, Albert 19 Eames, Charles and Ray (house), Pacific Palisades, California 13-14 Caldwell, Alfred 74, 104, 136 Eisenman, Peter 82, 114 Caminos, Horacio 16 Ellwood, Craig 110 Carbide & Carbon Building, Chicago, Entenza, John 13 Illinois 129 Esherick, Joe 40 Casa del Fascio, Lake Como, Italy 90-91 Catalano, Eduardo 16-17, 18 Fallingwater, see Kaufmann, Edgar J (house)
161 Farmer, Edward 6 Gwathmey, Charles 47, 82, 88 First National Bank of Ripon, Ripon, Wisconsin 141 Habitat Company 26, 127, 142 Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, Haid, David 42, 63, 66 California 8, 11 Hammond, James Wright (Jim) 35, 80, 400 Central Avenue, Highland Park, 130, 141 Illinois 82-83 Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 129 401 East Ontario, Chicago, Illinois 125, Hanna, Paul R. (house), Palo Alto, 129, 134, 147 California 10 Frampton, Kenneth 153 Hardy, Holzman & Pfeiffer 56 Freed, James Ingo (Jim) 72, 73, 76-77, 115, Hart, Sue (house), San Juan Capistrano, 132-33, 137-38 California 63, 151 Fry, Leon 98 Hartray, Jack 35, 42, 50, 80-81, 90, 91, 117- Fugman, Robert 96 18, 124, 129, 149, 150, 152 Hasbrouck, Wilbert (Will) 49, 51 Gamble, David (house), Pasadena, Hedrich, Jack 60-62 California 51 Hedjuk, John 64-65, 82, 87 Garibaldi Square, Chicago, Illinois 150 Helmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (HOK) 105 Garner, Hjordis 41 Herman Miller Health Sciences Division Garrick Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 49, 55 Building, Zeeland, Michigan 110-20 Gaudí, Antoni 138 Hertzberger, Herman 34 Gehry, Frank 82, 98, 136 Herzog, Jacques 148 Gehry, Frank (house), Santa Monica, Hilberseimer, Ludwig 22 California 99 Hill, Henry 8 Getty Center, Los Angeles, California 88 Hill, Lewis 51 Gidwitz, Willard (house), Chicago, Illinois Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 44 122 Hodgetts, Craig 98 Giedion, Sigfried 12, 49, 60, 70, 143 Holabird & Root 146 Glessner, Frances 51 Hoover, Herbert 2 Glessner, John and Frances (house), Horn, Gerald (Jerry) 66, 70, 94, 108, 110, Chicago, Illinois 49-50, 52, 54, 55, 60- 115, 146 61 House on the Lake, Glencoe, Illinois 99 Goettsch, James 96 Hudson Street Townhouses, Chicago, Goldberg, Bertrand (Bud) 114 Illinois 38, 42 Goldsmith, Myron 114 Hunziker, Robert and Jane (house), Goody, Marvin 16 Chicago, Illinois 101, 142 Grace Place, Chicago, Illinois 138 Graham, Bruce 66, 114, 144 Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown Graham Foundation for Advanced Hall, Chicago, Illinois 136 Studies in the Fine Arts 62, 82, 95, 104, 140, 153 Jacobs, Jane 39, 57 Grant Place Flats, see Portals at Grant Place Jahn, Helmut 72, 73, 92, 94, 107, 108, 113, Graves, Michael 59, 147 115, 137, 146 Gray, Richard 73, 78 Jencks, Charles 82-83 Greenberg, Allan 104 Johnson, Philip 26, 44, 50, 114 Gropius, Walter 9, 15, 24, 83 Johnson, Ralph 31-32, 68, 75, 92, 137, 144 Gropius, Walter (house), Lincoln, Jones, Quincy 13 Massachusetts 24-25, 47 Gross, Steven 96, 120 Kahn, Louis 24, 26, 37, 123 Grube, Oswald 60 Kahn, Matt 6
162 Karr, Joe 22 Nagle Hartray 117 Kaufmann, Edgar J. (house, aka Near North Village, Springfield, Ohio 85, Fallingwater), Bear Run, Pennsylvania 126 61 Near West Townhouses, Chicago, Illinois Keck, George Fred 47, 61, 143 120, 123 Kennedy, David 8 Nereim, Anders 96 Kennedy, Edward (Ted) 26 Neutra, Richard 48 Kennedy, Robert 26 Newman, Oscar 39 Koolhaas, Rem 153 Newman, Paul 139 Kovler Gymnasium, Laboratory School, Newton, Norman 20 University of Chicago, Chicago, New York Five 71, 86 Illinois 58, 123 Northwestern University Dormitories, Krier, Ronald (Ron) 115, 141 Evanston, Illinois 59 Kump, Ernest 8, 11 Oud, J.J.P. 31, 75, 112 Lannert Group 150 Ovresat, Ray 53 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret 22, 24, 29, 74, 83, 109, 112, 116, 133 Park Forest Community Center, Park Legge Kemp, Diane 2, 144 Forest, Illinois 79 Lehmann Court Townhouses, Chicago, Park Glen Elderly Housing, Taylorville, Illinois 120-21 Illinois 120, 126 Lighthouse (house), Door County, Pei, I. M. 114 Wisconsin 84, 85, 109 Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 61 Loos, Adolph 114, 123 Pflueger, John 5 Los Angeles Twelve 71, 86 Pflueger, Timothy 5 Lurie, Paul and Margaret (house), Phillips, Frederick F. (Rick) 68 Evanston, Illinois 63 Piano, Renzo 139 Picasso Museum, Barcelona, Spain 28 Macsai, John 29, 128 Poli, Joseph 96 Madlener, Albert F. (house), Chicago, Pond & Pond 58 Illinois 51 Portals at Grant Place (aka Grant Place Maki, Fumihiko 20 Flats), Chicago, Illinois 83, 120 Manny, Carter H. 70, 86, 107, 130 Prairie Avenue Bookshop 29 Maybeck, Bernard 3, 5, 6 Pran, Peter 60, 63, 96, 119 McCarthy, Gene 8 Protech, Max 71 McCurry, Margaret 90 Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, Missouri 57 McKay, Don 41, 42, 118, 152 Mecanoo 139 Ransom Everglades School, Miami, Meier, Richard 47, 87, 106-7 Florida 151 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 11, 25, 26, 42, Rapson, Ralph 23, 122 60, 62-64, 78, 108, 109, 131, 133, 136, Read, Frederick 96 140, 141, 148 Revell, Viljo 17-18 Migdal, Norman 113 Rebori, Andrew N. (Andy) 47, 61, 62, 143 Miller, Nory 56, 65-66 Richard Gray Gallery 71-78 Millon, Henry 19, 39 Richardson, Henry Hobson 49-50, 53, 59, Moneo, Rafael 124, 136 147 Murphy, C.F., Associates 43 Riverwoods House, Riverwoods, Illinois Myer, Jack 16, 19 99, 102 Robertson, Donna 22, 139 Nagle, George (brother of Jim) 41 Robertson, Jaquelin 144
163 Robie, Frederick (house), Chicago, Illinois Swiss Pavilion, Cité Universitaire, Paris, 122 France 48 Roesch, Peter 35 Rookery Building, Chicago, Illinois 51 Terragni, Guiseppe 90-91 Rowe, Peter 29 Thompson, Ben 18, 21, 22-23, 24, 26, 27, 56 Rudolph, Christopher H. (Chris) 68, 74- Thompson, Victor 6, 9, 12 75, 117 Tigerman, Stanley 11, 33, 36, 37, 43, 57, 60, Rudolph, Paul 24, 26, 36, 102 61, 62, 64-66, 68-71, 73, 76-79, 84, 86, 88-89, 90, 96-97, 98, 103, 107, 108, 110, Sasaki, Hideo 21, 67 111, 113, 122, 130, 131, 137-38, 143, 144, Scherer, Julianne 117 150, 152 Schiller Street Townhouses, Chicago, Turnbull, Richard 82 Illinois 106, 141-42, 146 Schindler, Rudolph 5, 13, 48 van Den Broek, Johannes Hendrik 34 Schmeidl, Bruce 75, 117 van Der Meulen, John 122 Schrieber, John and Katherine (house), van Eesteren, Cornelis 34 Door County, Wisconsin 111 van Eyck, Aldo 33 Schroeder, Kenneth (Ken) 94, 146 Venturi, Robert 57, 59, 114, 121 Schulze, Franz 60, 63 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 48 Schweikher, Paul 61, 62 Vreeland, Tim 98 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 129 Sejima, Kazuyo 148 Walter Kelly Gallery 88, 94 Sert, Josép Lluis 18, 21, 24, 29 Webster Street Townhouses, Chicago, Shaw, Howard Van Doren 135 Illinois 38 Shlaes, Jared (Jerry) 38, 39 Weese, Benjamin (Ben) 49-50, 52, 53, 60, Sitte, Camillo 19 62, 65, 70, 77, 79, 80, 86, 88, 97, 113, Siza Vieira, Alvaro Joaquim Melo 148 115, 130, 137-38, 146 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 35 Weese, Cynthia (Cindy) 94, 146 Solomon, Richard (Rick) 131, 153 Weese, Harry 35, 36, 50, 54, 56, 61, 62, 114 Sorkin, Michael 138 Westbeth Artists’ Housing, New York Speyer, A. James (Jim) 42, 63 City, New York 88 Spooner, Bill 52 Willow Park Townhouses, Iowa City, Sprague, Paul 53 Iowa 120, 122 Staufffer, Tom 49 Wolfe, Thomas (Tom) 58 Standard Oil Building (now B.P. Amoco), Woodlawn Avenue House (aka Hyde Chicago, Illinois 129 Park House), Chicago, Illinois 111, Stern, Robert A.M. 79. 82 120-21, 122 Stone, Edward Durell 9 World’s Finest Chocolate Factory, Sullivan, Louis 3, 49 Chicago, Illinois 120-21 Sulzer, Conrad, Library, Chicago, Illinois Worsley, John 8 141 Wright, Frank Lloyd 3, 5, 7-8, 10, 17, 48, Summers, Gene 43, 141 49, 60, 61, 122 Sun Dial House (project) 72, 74, 75, 93, Wurster, William 8 117, 134 Sweetser, Arthur (Art) 8 Zalewski, Joe 29 Zukowsky, John 153
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