ORAL HISTORY OF GENE SUMMERS

Interviewed by Pauline A. Saliga

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright Ó 1993 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.

ii CONTENTS

Preface iv Outline of Topics v Oral History 1 Selected References 109 Appendix: Resume 112 Index of Names and Buildings 114

iii PREFACE

In the fall of 1987, I met with Gene Summers for two days in The Art Institute of Chicago to discuss his career to date. Because, early in his career, Summers was the supervising architect for some of Mies van der Rohe's most celebrated projects, including the Seagram Building (1956) and the National Gallery in Berlin (1960), his work is often closely associated with that of Mies. However, Summers's career is also distinguished by many critically-acclaimed buildings that he, himself, designed, the best known of which is the McCormick Place Convention Center (1970) on Chicago's lakefront. A charming and engaging man, Summers is notable among architects for both his considerable talent and his uncanny humility. Since the time we spoke, Summers returned from his work as a sculptor in the south of France to Chicago to head the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he received his own architectural training four decades ago. However, he recently resigned from that post in the spring of 1993.

Mr. Summer's five-hour oral history was recorded on four 90-minute cassette tapes which have been transcribed by Kai Enenbach and minimally edited by Sarah Underhill to maintain the spirit and flow of his recollections. I owe a special note of thanks to Maurice Blanks, an architect and research assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute, who did an excellent job of researching the biography and bibliography of Mr. Summers and to Meredith Cole, a Brown University student, who did the final edit on the manuscript. The transcription is available for research in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago as well as at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

This oral history was sponsored by the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago in cooperation with the Canadian Centre for Architecture. We are most grateful to the Canadian Centre, and its founder and director, Phyllis Lambert, for providing funding to record the impressions of one of Mies's most talented protégés, Gene Summers. We are also most grateful to Mr. Summers, himself, for sharing so freely his observations, opinions and memories of a most important chapter in the history of American and world architecture.

Pauline Saliga Associate Curator of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago

iv OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Architectural Education at Texas A&M 1 Graduate Study at the Illinois Institute of Technology 8 Caine House Project 21 Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois 22 Use of Models in the Design Process in Mies's Office 25 Use of Collage in the Design Process 26 Service in the U.S. Corps of Engineers 29 Projects Built in Korea During World War II 31 Illinois Institute of Technology Chapel 33 Seagram Building and Plaza, New York City 38 Phyllis Bronfman Lambert's Involvement in the Seagram Building 43 Mies's Approach to Taking on New Clients 49 Bacardi Building Project, Cuba 50 Mies's Plan for the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus 57 Schaefer Museum Project, Schweinfurt, Germany 60 National Gallery, Berlin 61 Designing Museum Gallery Space 64 Role in Mies's Office 65 Mies's Favorite Artists 66 Mies's Relationship with Lora Marx 68 Federal Center, Chicago 69 Decision to Leave Mies's Office 75 Decision to Open an Office 76 Decision to Join C.F. Murphy as Design Partner 76 McCormick Place, Chicago 77 Malcolm X Junior College, Chicago 86 Interest in Landscape Architecture 88 Decision to Leave C.F. Murphy Associates and Start a Development Company with Phyllis Lambert 89 Move to France 92

v Furniture Design 92 Helmut Jahn 94 Career in Relationship to Mies 96 Relationship with Mies 98 Architectural Drawings 99 Relationship between Richard M. Daley and Charles Murphy, Sr. 103 Art Collection 105

vi Gene Summers

Saliga: Today is October 7, 1987, and I'm speaking with Gene Summers in The Art Institute of Chicago. Gene, I wonder if you can tell me, why did you choose architecture as your profession? We'll start at the very beginning.

Summers: That's pretty difficult. The town that I grew up in was Bryan, Texas, and I probably changed my mind three times between aeronautical engineering, veterinary medicine and architecture. I think that really what happened is at the last minute my father, who is a paint contractor, was doing a job and the architect had come over one Saturday afternoon, and he asked me what I was going to do. He, essentially, got me so excited about it that that really made me decide at the last minute.

Saliga: How old were you then?

Summers: I was actually sixteen. I sort of got out of school right before I turned seventeen. This was in 1945 and the war was just about over, the second World War. I was going immediately from high school to college. The college was Texas A&M, which is very close to the hometown that I lived in, Bryan.

Saliga: Is that why you went to school there?

Summers: Yes. It was a matter of survival.

Saliga: Exactly, plus there were all of those GIs coming back from school. Summers: Actually they didn't start back until, I think 1946 or 1947 was the big influx of the GIs. It was a strange situation where I seemed to be particularly young and two years later you'd get the GIs coming back. They were considerably older; they seemed like they were considerably older.

Saliga: So you went to Texas A&M thinking that you would go into architecture from the very beginning?

Summers: No, you go immediately into it. There was no course that you would go through first. I took architecture from my freshman year right through.

Saliga: So you had to jump right in.

Summers: It was a five-year course. I loved it from the first minute. I had no problem there.

Saliga: You probably loved it all along, when you were young, don't you think?

Summers: I can't tell you any stories like I'm sure a lot of architects can by saying that they saw this building under construction and it was great and everything. The town I was in was so small and most of the buildings were wood frames. There was no good architecture around, anyway. So I can't say that. The school itself, the teachers were always enthusiastic. I think it's still true even today that if you go into the school of architecture at some university, as my son later did, you either like it from the first day or else you find out you better get out of it. That certainly was the way it was with me. I really enjoyed it.

Saliga: When you were at Texas A&M what was their curriculum like?

Summers: It was interesting in retrospect. They had been off the old Beaux Arts program for probably two or three years, only two or three years. They had been on that program, and drawings were still around the school so you could see what they were doing then. But, they went from that disciplined type of

2 program to a totally, almost irrational system, where every professor had his own way of teaching; he could do what he wanted. He had a certain program to teach, be it construction or pure design or graphics, but they let those teachers do what they really felt. You'd get a teacher from MIT or Harvard and they would have a totally different outlook on what you were doing. It was actually quite confusing as I look back.

Saliga: I would think so for a freshman coming into this.

Summers: Everything that was stressed was, you should be different, you should be different, be an individual. Anything you'd do in design, thinking of design, the really ultimate aim was simply to do something different. Presentation of your project was really as important as what the design was. That was just the way they looked at these things. You were judged probably more on that presentation—how unique it was, how well-done it was—than in fact what the basis of your design was.

Saliga: In a way that's still kind of a holdover from the Beaux Arts approach. It was the drawings that were so important.

Summers: Yes, but they were wild drawings. I remember getting this striated plywood and you'd make your drawings and you'd sort of paste these drawings on this painted plywood. They were really wild.

Saliga: That's not like the Beaux Arts system.

Summers: No. They taught you how to use the airbrush. That was the sophomore year as I recall. That was a fairly new instrument then. They'd teach you how to watercolor and use conté crayon.

Saliga: What kind of architecture did they teach you to design, then?

3 Summers: That's hard to remember even. I specifically remember, I think his name was Bill Allen, a professor, in my junior year. He was a recent Harvard graduate. In fact, he's the first person that seemed to have any kind of basic background in the history of modern architecture. From day one there everybody was sort of a Wrightian fan. It was very strong in that influence. But Bill Allen had worked with Gropius so he had the European background. That was the first time, in fact, I'd even heard of Mies. I went through three years of school before I even heard of Mies. That was about 1947 or 1948. Bill was a good teacher. I had another teacher that, later, became fairly well-known, Bill Caudill, who was extremely successful with the firm in Texas, Caudill, Rowlette & Scott. Bill was a teacher who had come from MIT. He had quite a different idea, which was much more experimental. He was really caught up in research on a project and trying to get the design through really knowing what the problem was and researching it.

Saliga: You mean researching the program or the needs of the client?

Summers: For instance, one summer, I think it was in my junior year, I worked for him. He had a grant from the Experimental Engineering School at Texas A&M. He had convinced them that what we should do is build what is called an "experimental classroom." He had gotten a master's degree at MIT in primary school construction so he was very interested in that and he was pursuing that. We made the drawings for this room that was on a circular railroad track. It had a circular track so the whole room could rotate. It had windows that you could change the heights of, the roof actually could go from a flat roof to a pitched roof to an inverted, so you had all these possibilities of changing the shape of the room. Then he had a large fan like they use in a wind tunnel, and using smoke and photographs you could see what the shape of the building did related to the way the wind was blowing. This was the kind of thing that he was really hung up on. He pursued that pretty much the rest of his life and did quite well.

Saliga: With schools?

4 Summers: Yes. He really made his name and his firm through school construction.

Saliga: And you studied with him?

Summers: Yes, I think my senior year I studied with him, and then I worked for him two summers before coming to Chicago.

Saliga: His idea was really that if you keep the environment flexible that the students will learn more?

Summer: No, what he was interested was air conditioning. He used the "experimental classrooms" for primary schools, when, in those days, air conditioning was very expensive, and you really didn't think if air conditioning in primary schools. So, if you had a given site then you would probably know or could find out what wind direction the prevailing winds came from, find out what the sun angles are, and therefore he had put all that information to use in the design and orientation of his school and the design of that classroom. So, the shape of the building came from that kind of study that he did. I tell you, it sounds really a lot more logical than sometimes it ended up as. It was a great sales tool, particularly. You'd go to a school board, and you'd give them all the options. And then you'd end up the building wouldn't be exactly like the research told you to do it. But, that was his line and he was good.

Saliga: You said that you worked for him for a couple of summers. Did you work on actual schools?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: What did you do with him?

Summers: I wasn't a designer. I was in school, but I was a draftsman and would make working drawings.

5 Saliga: For projects in Texas?

Summers: Yes, and Oklahoma. He did a lot of buildings in Oklahoma because he was from Oklahoma.

Saliga: So, is he the only one who you worked with when you were at Texas A&M?

Summers: No, I worked my sophomore year for an architect who did houses in the local area, Bryan College Station, by the name of Bill Mayfield. He had been a graduate of Texas A&M and for years had practiced in Bryan. I worked during the summer. Actually, because of the war and the whole speed-up program, of the years I was at A&M, I was in school, I believe, three of the summers. So I didn't have too much time to work other than go to school. Two of the summers I worked for Caudill, and one summer I worked for Mayfield.

Saliga: Did you also travel when you were at Texas A&M? Was that part of the curriculum?

Summers: I think the best thing actually that we had at A&M at that particular time was that in your fifth-year class the last thing you did was take a field trip, sort of ending up the whole school year before you graduated. They were good field trips. I think our class was twenty or twenty-four people, and that year that we went east. During the latter part of the year you start planning with your classmates and the teacher where you want to go. We actually took a really good trip that was influential to me in my later life in that we went east. We went up first to Chicago to see Mies and to visit IIT; we went to see Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook; we went to Harvard to see Gropius; to Philadelphia to see Stonorov; we saw a lot of Wright buildings in the Chicago area; we saw New York and visited, I think, with Harrison & Abramovitz there. That was a very good trip, and I had decided, I had already decided, that I was going to go to graduate school. I had applied to IIT, Cranbrook and Yale, and actually we went also to New Haven. I applied to those three schools and, in fact, had

6 gotten accepted by those three schools. That gave me a chance to visit them and make a decision where I wanted to go in September. That's the only travel program we had during the school years. But, that was a very good one.

Saliga: Was the idea that they were helping you shop for colleges?

Summers: No, not at all, not at all. The year previous the school had gone to California. It's funny how easily your life can go one way or the other just by something that you have really no control over. I often had thought, what would have happened if we had gone to California? I guess I would have gotten to California earlier.

Saliga: What did make you decide to choose IIT over Yale or Cranbrook?

Summers: That's really a good question and I've thought about that, and people have asked me that and I wish I could give you a really good answer because the impression that I had at time was almost the opposite. IIT was in a slum, an absolute slum. I mean here we were, a young bunch of kids from a small town in Texas, and we had never been to a city in the first place, besides Houston, which wasn't too big a city then. So we arrive in Chicago, and it’s dirty, I think that was in April. It was cold, you didn't see any sunshine. We go down to IIT, and we see that and it's a pretty awful impression. We spoke with Mies and you couldn't understand him. He was speaking with such a German accent that George Danforth was sitting there kind of helping, although he was speaking in English, he had to sort of help out. We ended up going to Cranbrook, and it was gorgeous. The weather was beautiful, the rosebuds were out and Saarinen was a sweetheart. Gropius was nice, and Yale was nice. Somehow I wanted to go to IIT though I can't say that was clearly the best school. It just happened that way. It certainly was a clear choice though on my part. I wasn't forced to go to one or the other, but it was a good choice.

Saliga: Yes, it was an excellent choice. Did you think that the quality of education would be better?

7 Summers: This was at a time towards the end of the school year where they also had what I think they still have—it's what's called "open house." That occurred then, and you could see all the different years of school exhibited. There was really a clear direction—that was obvious. But, it was unusual for us, particularly for me, to see this after going to a school that every time you'd changed years and changed teachers you'd get a different direction. I'm sure that that had an influence on the situation, on that decision.

Saliga: But you knew all along that you'd be going to graduate school?

Summers: I had decided in my last year at A&M that I was going to go to graduate school, or at least start graduate school. I wanted to go out of Texas and go to one of the larger cities to practice architecture because the larger buildings and more significant buildings are done there. If you don't work on those buildings, you'll never learn.

Saliga: So did you always want to work on big buildings?

Summers: Yes. Small buildings, like small houses, are just as much fun and just as much of a challenge, I mean they're just as hard to do as a big building. Sometimes they're more irritating because you have to deal with housewives and househusbands, but I think the architectural problems, while they change in scope it's still a problem and it's still enjoyable to do. But, it's clear also that if you're going to try to be successful you've got to get there and do some more significant buildings.

Saliga: When you started at IIT Crown Hall wasn't completed yet?

Summers: No, it wasn't.

Saliga: Where did you study?

8 Summers: We studied in Alumni Hall, which was called the Navy Building then. It's the two-story building, brick, with the steel frame. I think it was the third building that Mies built. The railroad buildings were built. That was, I think, the first that he built, and then the Metallurgy Building was built, the Chemistry Building and the Navy Building. The Navy Building was built for the Naval ROTC at that time, and downstairs is where they had their large hall and they had some guns and things there. It's quite a nice space. Upstairs there were a few classrooms and the Department of Architecture used those. They used that whole second floor of the building, and there must have been six or seven rooms that were thirty-by-thirty or thirty-by-forty and one very large room that was thirty-by-, maybe, one hundred feet. The whole school really was there.

Saliga: So undergraduate classes and graduate classes were both held there?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: Did the undergraduates and graduates have much to do with each other? Or were they totally separate programs?

Summers: There were separate programs and there were separate rooms, but it was all a relatively small area. Everybody could kind of walk around and see what everybody else was doing. You would particularly know more of the people in the senior year of school and graduate school. There was freedom of movement although most of your friends were in graduate school, that's because it's where you were working.

Saliga: Who were the people who were in graduate school with you at the time, do you remember?

Summers: Oh goodness, some of them I remember, David Tamminga, Jim Ferris, I can't think. I think we had a total of eight people in graduate school.

9 Saliga: It was small. Did that mean that you got a lot of personalized attention from Mies?

Summers: Yes we did. Not unlike the way he really worked in his office. He would come in maybe at 10:30 or 11:00 and would go to the office and get his business done there with George Danforth. George was his administrative assistant in the school. Then he'd come down and see the graduate class. We would have a couple of hours of his undivided attention, and he'd go around. It was good It was good in that respect. He was not very busy in his office then, so he had more time.

Saliga: Did he actually lecture, or did he just present problems to you that he then helped you work out?

Summers: Mies never lectured. I mean he didn't lecture at school, and he didn't lecture in the office, and he didn't really correct you either. You would sit around him and he would talk, but nothing in a formal structured manner. He would go around and he would talk to you, but he seldom would say, "Try this" or "Try that. Much more he would just say, "Keep working on it."

Saliga: And you would have to decide to try this or that.

Summers: You'd sit there and think, "My God, what does he mean keep working? What does he want me to do?" The fact is he didn't know either, he didn't know. You find out later that you really don't get solutions by thinking about them. You get them by working on them. That's the only way you can do it. He was not one that would sit at the desk and stay there long enough that he could sort of work out an idea. He would sometimes make a sketch, but the sketch was always generally so hard to read, and it wasn't developed. It would just sort of go in that direction. It was certainly to his credit that somehow by osmosis, through both the office and the school, what was always clear was his direction: the essence of architecture being structure and the expression of that structure. That was clear to the students and to the people in the office. It

10 was towards that that you always work, so that was clear, and that was what made the thing work without his sitting down and having to tell you exactly what to do.

Saliga: On each detail.

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: Did you also study with Hilberseimer and Peterhans. Were they part of your study there?

Summers: Yes, we had one or two courses. Graduate school was two years, and both years we had classes with them. Peterhans had a lecture in philosophy, not architectural philosophy, but philosophy, which was very interesting. It was a beginning class so you really started becoming acquainted with some of the words because it's a language in itself. Hilberseimer had city planning courses that he taught in graduate school. So, we were in contact with them really as much as with Mies because they would be around more. Mies would give you a project to work on and then you would be working on that for weeks and weeks and weeks, and he'd come by and see it but you'd still keep working. You didn't see a lot of Mies, but nearly every day you'd see him.

Saliga: Do you feel that Hilberseimer and Peterhans were as influential in your development as Mies was?

Summers: No. They were people that you really respected and you would learn something from them, but it had no influence at all as far as comparing it to Mies's influence.

Saliga: So you weren't, for instance, tempted to go into city planning?

Summers: No, I wasn't interested.

11 Saliga: Just in architecture.

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: I guess the first time you would have met Mies would have been when you took this trip when you were in school.

Summers: It was.

Saliga: Did you have any sense about his stature in the world? Was it a thrill to meet him?

Summers: Sure. He was known, although he was not as well-known to us as Gropius was, that group of students, simply because we had this teacher that had studied with Gropius. But, the same teacher, Bill Allen, also introduced us to Mies in our classes. Of course the major book that had been written about Mies was the Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue so we had that to look at. We knew his work, and we certainly were impressed. The minute you met the man—as a group we met him, not as individuals—he had a presence about him that lasted as long as I knew him. I guess he had it all his life, he must have. You really felt like there's somebody there, you really did.

Saliga: Somebody important.

Summers: Oh yes, just his bearing.

Saliga: So it's not like it was charisma?

Summers: No, it was more as if God were over there on the other side of the table. It sounds a little silly and that's certainly overemphasized, but there was that feeling. He has this presence about him. He certainly was an introvert, not an extrovert. He didn't impress you with his talk. He wouldn't talk unless a question was really asked, but there was this presence. There was that

12 presence: his bearing, the way he sat and the way he would stand, even though in those days—the earliest time I met him I think he was sixty-three or sixty- four—-he had arthritis even then, so he was doing some limping. But, you know he'd just stand up He had always had a beautiful blue or brown suit on, mainly blue, with his gold watch fob coming out and his cigar. He just had a presence to him that you knew there was someone there and there was just no nonsense.

Saliga: Maybe that's part of the Mies mystique.

Summers: I'm sure it is. He has to impress everyone like that. Of course a lot of people that are not architects who didn't know really who he was but had heard that maybe he was a famous architect, some people would get a different impression of him. They would think that he's very serious, not serious, but stuck up, but that was his personality. He just was that way.

Saliga: He was just not outgoing.

Summers: He was strictly the introvert.

Saliga: But he had a sense of humor, didn't he?

Summers: Yes, but it didn't come out too much. You had to be around him a lot, and always the sense of humor was there, more after the first or second martini. It got a lot easier to talk to him after that.

Saliga: Getting back to Mies, Hilberseimer and Peterhans, do you feel that Mies was the most effective teacher, or do you think one of the others was? Effective in getting the message across.

Summers: Yes, certainly because his overall direction and philosophy of architecture was clearly established, and he was that person to have established it, and even though Peterhans and Hilberseimer ascribed to that they didn't come up with

13 it. So, just in that respect alone, Mies was a more respected person. I'm not sure if I really answered that properly or not. All of the teachers that we had there in graduate school—Caldwell never taught us, he lectured several times—they were really good, they were all good. They were professionals, really professionals. Certainly having come from Texas A&M and having been through that school, these people were clearly professionals, all of them, and respected because of that. The whole program at the school—everybody had the feeling, both the teachers and students, that you were really doing something. This was something new and you were part of it, even as a student.

Saliga: So did you feel that there was a kind of sense of purpose of the school?

Summers: Absolutely.

Saliga: Franz Schulze wrote a lot about the sense of camaraderie that there was down at IIT and how people would get together with Mies after school and go to dinner and continue talking and working for hours into the night. Did everyone feel like they were working toward a particular goal or working together as a group?

Summers: Definitely. You asked something earlier now that I didn't really finish. You were asking which one of them might have been more influential, and who did you get the most out of? I think actually, and I was only there for two years as the other graduate students were, and some of the graduate students, like myself, did not go to IIT. Most of them had been to IIT, and so they had more years of this same direction. I think if I had not had later experience in Mies's office and if, instead, I had gone to work immediately for someone else, I would guarantee that I would have lost that. Two years is just not enough, seven years is not enough.

Saliga: You would have lost what?

14 Summers: That direction, that sense of direction and purpose that was clear there at school. You have to have reinforcement all of the time, and you have to have the experience of building a building with that direction. The idea of having the direction and doing a project is one thing, but doing a building, it just takes experience. I think that without a doubt if I'd gone back to Texas and worked for someone, which I almost did, I could easily have not had that experience and lost that whole sense of direction.

Saliga: This might be asking the obvious but, how would you explain that sense of direction or that sense of purpose? How would you describe it?

Summers: As I said before—and Mies has used different ways of saying it—if you look at everything that he has said and you try to come down to what he's all about, it really is structure. Clearly to me his most important contribution was that one should express the essence of architecture; that's the number one goal. He clearly felt, after reading a great deal, that the essence of our society at that time, of our civilization—he questioned whether we had a civilization let alone a culture, but certainly of our time—was a combination of science and economics. He never said it like that. But, science and economics, in fact, is technology. That's what technology is, science and economics. The combination of those produces things that we call technological products. Technology was the key essence of our time, in his way of thinking. I think there was no question it was. I still think it is, even though the whole direction of architecture doesn't look at that, it's still that. Mies felt that, and he put all of his goals in any building he designed towards that. As far as architecture goes, he took that and he reasoned that structure is the one thing you have to have. You can do a lot of buildings with walls, without walls—most of them, of course, with, because you have this environment to make, but some of them you don't have to have. The one thing you do have to have is structure. Therefore, the refinement, the development and the expression of that element, structure, is the thing that I believe without any question is the most important aspect of all of his work and his ideas.

15 Saliga: That's what you learned from him and that's what you carried with you.

Summers: And, that's what the school was all about and that's what his work later was all about. He really didn't clearly develop that until he got to the United States. It was starting in Europe. You could see the beginning of it, but it was really in the United States that he got that clear direction, formulated that. He didn't do that solely by working at a desk; he did it by reading. He did a lot of it by reading his philosophy books. He was a great reader, as you know.

Saliga: Do you know of any books in particular that were very influential for him?

Summers: I know a story that he told. I don't know if it's been told but it should be told; I thought it was really appropriate. In New York, during the Seagram days there, the Architectural League of New York had asked Mies if he would come and give a lecture to the students, and Mies said, "No, no lecture." He said, "If you want to let me sit down and have everybody gather around in an informal manner we'll talk, we'll just talk." He said, "That's great." During that evening Mies made the remark that he learned a lot by reading. He told a story, he said, "You know I used to have three thousand books in Berlin. When I came to the United States I couldn't bring them all. I whittled it down to three hundred books. Of the three hundred books there are probably thirty that are really worth keeping." Then somebody said, "Well, what are the thirty?" He said, "You know you're lazy. You have to read the three thousand before you know what the thirty are." I won't tell you either what the thirty were because I didn't know all the thirty. His basic interest in reading was primarily philosophy, some of which was religious philosophy, which all philosophy has got a touch of. He also—the thing I think I was amazed about—he was very interested in astronomy and the whole idea of how the world was formed. He read these books about the Big Bang Principle which Hoyle had put forward. Those were really interesting books to him. I started reading a few of those upon his recommendations, and they were interesting. They had nothing to do about architecture, but it had to do about science, ideas and facts.

16 Saliga: And maybe in some way, somehow it all connected at some point.

Summers: Oh yes, because it's a search for truth, which is what he was after in his architecture, as they were after in their field.

Saliga: An interesting common denominator. What did he have you read at IIT?

Summers: Well, it wasn't really until afterwards, until I was in his office and was much closer to him did we talk a lot and start reading.

Saliga: So he didn't have the students read books by Le Corbusier or Giedion?

Summers: No, never about architecture, never about architecture. Viollet le Duc, yes, the French architect-builder, but never anything contemporary, as far as architecture goes. He didn't even talk a lot about the history of architecture, historical buildings. The Pitti Palace in Florence is one of his favorite buildings, and occasionally he would remark that that was a building that was really influential to him. He said when he was doing the concrete office building project, the one that slightly splays out as it goes up, he said that that building, the Pitti Palace in Florence, was a great influence on him on that particular design because it's such a strong building.

Saliga: But it doesn't splay out, does it?

Summers: No, it doesn't. I only saw it two years ago for the first time. It is a strong building. It has these enormous bands of heavy stone, and it's just as if it's weighting the whole building down. I can see where he got at the idea of making the top of his concrete building heavier than the base. You know he gets this feeling. It's not a strong splay in his concrete building, but it's there. It makes the building sit on the ground heavier, and the Pitti Palace in Florence is that way for a different reason the way they did it.

17 Saliga: It's interesting that he considered the feelings that the building evoked in himself rather than just the form of the building. So many people just consider its style, or its form, or whatever.

Summers: The other architect that he talked of—but this was not during school really, it was later that we were talking—the architect that he really admired was Palladio. Not because of the inventions of Palladio, but because of the discipline and the order that he put into his designs. That you can see in Mies's buildings. People thought of him as a modern architect devoid of any classicism but that's just so wrong. The classicism just didn't come forth in a form. It came forth both in the energy and the way he ordered a plan or an elevation.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Summers: I would liken Mies's school more to a technical school than to a university school which deals in more intellectual endeavors. He was teaching you how to draw, how to do some very basic things, not sophisticated ideas, not sophisticated problems in design, but towards this end of getting a clear structure and getting a clear plan.

Saliga: There were a lot of people who considered Mies a kind of figurehead of architecture that had a lot of social implications, especially the GIs coming back after the war who came to study architecture with Mies. I think they were looking toward Mies to help them develop a new world better than the old that they hoped to leave behind. I guess his charisma, or his sense of presence, really came into play. How do you respond to that idea that a lot of people saw Mies as this kind of figurehead?

Summers: I wasn't aware of it in the sense that somebody would express very clearly that view. I think that all architects, probably the young architects still feel, that the minute they go out and do a building, they have a strong idea that this building is going to influence the rest of the world at the best. At the worst it's

18 going to influence a few people in the neighborhood. Mies really never talked about that. One thing he did talk about to me at least—I don't know if he expressed this to other people or not—one of the things he really wanted to do, he said, "If I can get ten architects a year," and this is one of the reasons he really wanted to teach. If he could get ten architects a year out of his college he would be really happy because with this direction he thought then that he would have enough good architecture sprouting up around the country that it would in fact be an influence, be a strong thing. That was early, and then later he said, "God, if I can just get ten architects all together." I don't remember when he first said that to me, but later on, much later on he said, "If I can just get ten all together I'll be lucky."

Saliga: Do you think that he felt that it wasn't all going so well, maybe his philosophy of education wasn't going over so well?

Summers: I think that people, number one, are fooled by the fact that whatever your school is and whatever the philosophy of that school has been, five years of school, if you have a five-year course of architecture, is just not enough for a young mind. It's not enough for a young mind. It's not enough for a old mind let alone a young mind. Putting that into the practice of architecture it just doesn't happen. I don't think Mies even thought about that. I don't think he thought about that. It was only later that he started thinking. I think before you find out whether you have a good architect, whether you have in fact taught a good architect, they have to prove that they've done these buildings. You have a lot of other things to consider—can they get the jobs, and after they get the jobs, can they actually build the buildings?

Saliga: Did he ever mention students whom he was proud of?

Summers: No.

Saliga: It wouldn't have been in his character, I guess.

19 Summers: Essentially it is not in his character. Certainly Goldsmith was a person that he admired, there's no doubt about that, and Jacques Brownson was someone that he thought was a good architect, that's clear. Just speaking of myself, all the time I was in his office and as close as I was to him in the later years, he told me three times that I had done a good job. One time was on the chapel when I didn't really feel like I'd done a good job. I had supervised the chapel. I was real young, and it was one of the first things I did in the office. He said I did a good job. But, after being in Chicago for twenty-five years, and I think about sixteen of those years I was in his office, to have somebody tell you only three times that you'd done a good job—I'd call it unusual. That was his way. Later you got to understand that, and you obviously didn't expect it. You can't do that today. You can't deal with people that way.

Saliga: What were the other two times that he told you you did a good job?

Summers: I don't remember the second time. The third time was actually after I'd left the office. It was while McCormick Place was being built. The structure was up, and he was sick. He had Lora Marx call. Lora called me one Monday, and she said, "Mies had asked me to drive him by McCormick Place. We did, and he just wanted me to call you and say he thinks that's a good building." For him to do that was a major concession. He didn't do those things and that just wasn't his character.

Saliga: And for him to go out of his way to tell you that. We've already started talking about you working in Mies's office, we might as well continue in that direction. You began working in his office when you were still a student, right?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: What were some of the early projects that you worked on?

Summers: I know the first thing that I did. I was going to school one day and ran into Ed Duckett. I went to have coffee at the Student Union and had coffee with Ed

20 Duckett. Ed was working in the office then, I think there were no more than five people in the office then; it was really small. Joe Fujikawa was there, Myron Goldsmith was there, Ed Duckett was there, I believe Ogden Hannaford was there, and Willie Dunlap was there, Bill Dunlap. Ed said, "Would you like to come in and work on this model we've got?" That was the greatest thing that ever happened, really something special, so sure I'd do that, that would be great. It was the Caine House, a project that never got built. It was a glass house. The project was done for Mr. Caine, who was in the steel business. I made trees. I think for six weeks I cut sponge rubber and made trees. Here I had, at that time, six years of college and I made trees. That was great, just to get your foot in the door there was wonderful. I went from that to making presentation drawings on the house. I believe the next thing we did were some trees for another model. I worked only on models and a few drawings, never any design. Ed told me that that was it. During that whole period of working there Mies knew me visually from the school, knew me by sight, but I don't think he knew my name. He certainly didn't call it. There were six people in the office, but he would hardly every call anybody by their name. Ed said that that was all the work, school was out, and I left and went back to Texas to try to find a job for the summer.

Saliga: This was in between your two years?

Summers: Right, this was in 1950, the summer of 1950. I got a telegram. It was signed Mies, but I'm sure that Mr. Bonnet sent the telegram. It was great, he said, "Please come back." That was a thrill. I worked the summer there. He said that I should go ahead and go back to graduate school and don't try to work. I started working again after I finished graduate school.

Saliga: In his office you mean?

Summers: In his office.

Saliga: So in the beginning Mies didn't really hire you.

21 Summers: No, he didn't hire me. Ed Duckett brought me in just to work on the model.

Saliga: When you then worked for Mies after graduate school, did you work on any of the IIT buildings? What did you work on then?

Summers: The Farnsworth House was going on then, and one of the first things that I did on a building was I started the detailing on the core of the building and working actually with the cabinetmaker Karl Freund. I'll never forget him, he was really a good cabinetmaker in Algonquin, Illinois. I went out with Mies and Karl to select the wood, primavera, which was the wood paneling for the core of the house. We didn't have titles, or Mies never gave titles, but essentially there was always somebody in charge of a building project. That was sometimes determined because nobody else would take that, so you just had to do it. He would never tell you, "You're in charge of this. You're in charge of that." Myron Goldsmith was in charge of the Farnsworth House. You knew whether you were in charge by the way Mies would act to you. He would go up to Myron and ask about the Farnsworth House. He'd go up to Joe Fujikawa and ask about Promontory or 860 Lake Shore Drive, so you knew in who he'd go see. He was not what you'd call an organization man. I worked on the core of the Farnsworth House with Karl Freund and with Myron. I worked on the mullions of the Farnsworth House. I never will forget I built those mullions. It's actually for the terrace of the Farnsworth House, which was an enclosed screen. We had our office in Ohio Street then. I built those mullions on a wood saw in the office full size. They were nine and a half feet high, or nine foot four inches high. There were two of them. I put them on my shoulders, took them to the railroad station and took them to Plano and walked from the train station to the house and installed them so that Mies could see them the following weekend, full scale.

Saliga: That was above and beyond the call of duty.

22 Summers: It's all part of it, it was great fun. I felt a little silly going through the Loop with these two big pieces of wood over my shoulders.

Saliga: I didn't realize that you worked on the Farnsworth House.

Summers: I had no instrumental role in it. The detailing on the core I did work on. That was a good experience. The concept of the core had already been established, and it was just more a matter of the working drawing and working actually with the cabinetmaker.

Saliga: Were you aware of the lawsuit and all of the nastiness that followed?

Summers: It was very much part of the office, absolutely. It was a terrible experience, terrible time in the office. It was all anybody could think about. It was traumatic in every sense of the word.

Saliga: Did people think that Mies's office was threatened, for instance? That he, personally, would go bankrupt?

Summers: No, nobody ever felt that. None of us at that time were close to the finances of the office so we just didn't know, and it didn't ever occur to us. It was a bad scene. Better Homes and Gardens magazine, that was really anti-Mies, took up the journalistic role of damning Mies for getting into this whole thing. It was really bad. Better Homes and Gardens was a pro-Wrightian magazine, and they took every chance that they had to hit Mies or any other European architect really. They just didn't like the so-called clean lines and white surfaces.

Saliga: Especially for a house.

Summers: If you stop and think about it, as I think of it in retrospect and see what they were putting in the magazines then, and their advertisers were putting in their magazines, it was a philosophy that was alien to their direction and also to their advertisers' business. I can kind of see that. Wright was not the same as

23 these other people either, but there was more of that feeling in it. They could take it.

Saliga: There would be less antagonism. When you worked in Mies's office during those early years you said it was a small office, again, did everybody share the responsibility? Did people feel they had a lot of individual responsibility for projects, or were all of the decisions being made by Mies?

Summers: It was different early because there really were fewer jobs and there were, of course, fewer people. There were six people in the office, I think, counting myself, when I first went in, probably not counting Mr. Bonnet. Felix Bonnet was the sort of office manager/secretary, the whole works. He was a European. He took care of all that business. There were a few jobs, and there was just a feeling in the office that everything we were doing was important. We just knew that what we were doing was important. Even then, though, while he would sit down at your desk and look at what you were doing, he would make a few sketches, but he's not one of those people that I would have to deal with later in my career as an architect who would tell you where to go or how to do it. He would simply look at it and say, "Work on it, work on it some more." It got done. Although he wouldn't do a lot of the stuff himself, he was able to clearly make the decisions by either drawings or by models. In the early years there was a distinct difference between the way we worked. We worked with sketches a lot. We used these Apex pads that were that size. He insisted that we just sketch a lot, make three-dimensional sketches of details of parts of the building. Later it developed, and it was somewhat of a crutch, I feel, on his part, that he would want a model of the thing. It was always easier instead of looking at a drawing and saying, "That's okay," to make a model of it. He had no interest in or even the slightest remotest thought of efficiency of an office as far as getting a job done. That just didn't enter his mind. He was only interested in getting this thing done in the right manner, not any kind of speed.

Saliga: You mean so that it was designed properly in his mind?

24 Summers: To have it designed properly was what he was interested in. I mentioned the other aspect because later as you get into a bigger office you have to think about getting the job done as well, speed as far as an efficiency of getting it done. That was never, never ever of any interest of him. It just never came out. I have wondered how some the clients stuck with us because it took forever to do some of these things. Sometimes it was the client's fault, but sometimes it took us a long time in the office.

Saliga: You mentioned that in the beginning you used drawings and then later used models. Why do you think there was a change there? Why do you think he went to models?

Summers: I think it's easier, and certainly you see more. There's nothing like having a model; it's a great tool.

Saliga: At what point would have he started using models?

Summers: Models were always a part of the office and even in Europe he did models. When we were doing the early IIT buildings, the first years that I was in the office, just know that we did many, many more sketches, stacks and stacks of sketches of details. We would not make that final model; we may not even have made a model, but later on we made models almost exclusively. Consequently you didn't do as much sketching. You did that study in the form of models, which took longer, but was much more effective because you could see it, really see it.

Saliga: What effect would that have on either the design or the way that you conceptualized the design?

Summers: As I mentioned about the mullion of the Farnsworth House, it was probably Mies. I don't remember getting any order; we made that model full-size, and we took it out to the house. The steel structure was up; we put it on the steel

25 structure, and we painted it white. When you looked at it you had to make a judgment. You had to say, "Yes, that's right," or, "We should make this stop a little larger or this reveal a little smaller." You could see just exactly how it was going to be. That's really important. I think that Mies did a lot; it's not something that anyone can prove or anything, but I certainly know that offices were not making models like we were making models. Today almost every office makes models or has them made. We made more of our models for study. We'd nearly always have a presentation model as well, but I was thinking more of detail models.

Saliga: Were those models destroyed afterwards?

Summers: Some of them were; most of them were.

Saliga: Most don't exist now.

Summers: The Museum of Modern Art still has a number. We did one of the Berlin Museum which was a quarter-scale model of the column when we were studying the column. That's a model that's about as high as this room, about nine feet high, but that was quarter-scale. They have that model.

Saliga: I would think as part of the process, though, that they'd just be too difficult to keep.

Summers: Yes, and you'd just end up with too much in storage space. You always hated to throw the stuff out, but about every three years we'd have to go through a major clean-up.

Saliga: That I don't even want to know about. When I was talking with Jim Speyer he said that because you couldn't really keep all of these three-dimensional models, one of the ways of recording the information was to do a collage instead. Does that seem right to you?

26 Summers: The collage was not done for that reason, and I'm not sure that he meant it exactly for that reason. We didn't even use photography. We photographed most of the models, but they were nearly always photographs of a final model. We didn't photograph the models. Other than just holding the stuff we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know the importance of this stuff as documents. It's lucky that they have what they have; on the other hand, I also know that they've got a lot of stuff that just is unimportant too. There are reams and reams of what we call butter-paper sketches and things that are just unimportant. But, who makes that decision of whether to throw it away or not? That must be an age-old problem with a museum.

Saliga: Certainly at this point you wouldn't be throwing them away, no matter how insignificant they were.

Summers: We discussed it at one time when I was on the advisory counsel of the Mies archive, and we were just thinking about it; it never happened. It's terrible. You have this great big piece of paper, and do you throw that away? Yeah, you throw it away. I was much more apt to throw it away than Arthur Drexler was.

Saliga: These office cleaning binges are something that architecture musuem curators would not want to hear about. I know that, for instance, Ed Duckett has a lot of material that I guess came from these office cleaning binges. He's been telling us about it and lending us photographs and all kinds of things related to the Mies centennial.

Summers: He would certainly be one to either have them or have photographs because Ed was the master model-maker.

Saliga: Did you also save anything from the cleaning binges?

Summers: I didn't have anything from my entire days with Mies. I did have one thing, and that was a sketch, the sketch that's been published. I was in his office

27 one day working on the Seagram Building, and he said, "Gene, we have to make a model and study the pools." He kind of made a little sketch—it was really a nice little one-point perspective sketch with his two favorite Maillol sculptures on either side. That sketch is again on Apex paper. I had that, and I believe I gave that to Phyllis [Lambert] because of it being the Seagram Building. The only other thing I have that I kept, and I found it years later, was a sketch—maybe later we'll talk about an interesting story on the Cuba building—and that was a sketch that I did, but he put some things on it. I didn't get anything; I didn't take anything. It never dawned on me to take drawings or things out of the office. I wouldn't have taken them out of the office, but I certainly could have asked him for a drawing and I'm sure he would have given it to me or let me take it. We didn't have any idea that these things would some day be valuable, we really didn't. We had no concept of it. I didn't at least.

Saliga: There was a different approach to architectural drawings then, who knew that there would be a market for them later on.

Summers: I remember this drawing that he put in an auction for the benefit of the School of Design. It was one of the small but quite nice glass skyscrapers. George Danforth bought that at the auction at the Arts Club for fifty dollars. I think that was the only drawing he had in the auction; he gave it to them for auction. There was no market for them then. I'm actually quite amazed that Mies saved as many things over the years that he did in fact save. During the days here in Chicago he never told us, "Keep those drawings here, do this or do that." He never told us that. We'd just put them in the file drawers and forget it. You didn't go out of your way to throw something out. We'd have a project, and you'd end up with a roll of drawings eight inches in diameter. You'd wrap it up with brown paper and forget it for a couple of years, and then we'd go on a major clean up. I don't think that we had very many major clean ups, thank goodness, but we'd throw out whole rolls of this stuff. A lot of it survived. The one thing that he did have that was good and we kept was a good photographic collection of all is work. That was simply to keep

28 some kind of realistic document of what his work was. Every time we did a model or every time we had a building done we'd end up, at least here in Chicago, using Hedrich-Blessing. We always used the same photographer, not only because we knew him and they were good, but because it kept the negatives all in one place. We ended up giving him, in fact, a lot of the early negatives. Not giving them to him, but having him keep them in the file so if we had to have a photograph of the glass skyscraper, we'd just order it from Hedrich. I suspect that those particular negatives are with the museum now. All of the negatives of the buildings that Hedrich took I assume are still with Hedrich-Blessing because it's their property.

Saliga: Before we go on to Seagram I wanted to ask you about your service in the Corps of Engineers. From 1953 to 1955 you were with the U.S. Corps of Engineers. What did you do with them?

Summers: The college I went to was a military school, Texas A&M was military. I had an officer's commission having graduated from A&M, but I was actually an officer in the Armored Corps. At that time, I didn't know I was going to end up having to go into the Army, so I went into what we call an outfit. It was a company, a military company. I could have gone into Infantry, Corps of Engineers, Chemical Corps, anything. The Armored Corps was sort of a gung ho outfit, and so I went into that, C troop cavalry. When I was in Mies's office in the early 1950's and the Korean War was on, I kept thinking I was going to get called up, but I never did get called up. Finally, one day I got a call from the Draft Board, which was still in Bryan. I was living in Chicago, working in the office, and I was supervising a chapel. I knew the lady that called me. She was on the Draft Board, and she said, "Gene, you have to do something about this. Here you are sitting in Chicago, and you have to get into the Army." I said, "I will. I'll go in with my commission, but couldn't you give me some time because right now I'm supervising a chapel." Good old Southern Baptist came through and said, "There's nothing more important than doing a church." I got probably a six or eight month deferment so that I could finish the supervision of the chapel. Then I "volunteered" my services.

29 Rather than going in as a private, I preferred going in as a lieutenant. Instead of going into the Armored Corps—and I had orders to report in Virginia to the Armored Corps teaching center—I knew Congressman Teague, who conveniently happened to be head of the Armed Forces Committee in Congress. I went by and I had my orders, and I told him, "Look, Congressman, I have my architect's degree, a graduate degree. I've gone to architecture school for seven years, and I really think I can do the Army more good in the Engineer Corps." He said, "That makes sense to me." I was supposed to report the next day. He picks up the telephone, calls a general in the Pentagon. I'm over at the Pentagon ten minutes later speaking to this general. I'm transferred that afternoon to the Corps of Engineers, and I'm at Fort Belvoir the next day reporting. That's got to be the fastest change of orders.

Saliga: Where was that?

Summers: Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I actually ended up getting there at an off-time because it was primarily for refreshing officers before they got sent overseas. As I recall that was a ten- or eleven-month training period. I got there and I ended up reporting to this colonel. His secretary is at the front desk; he's back in the office. I didn't see him, but I said who I was, and I said, "I'm an architect." This guys roars out of the office, and he said, "You're an architect. I need you." I end up for about three months, totally on my own, detailing cabinets for the Officers Club, which was a pretty nice soft job. That gave me time to understand what was going on at Fort Belvoir. They had a program there, which was their engineering, research and development branch. I went to see the full colonel that was in charge of that and told him my experience. He said, "It would be great to have you." I worked there for about eight months, and then they told me that I had to go overseas. He said, "It's a rule that every officer has to go overseas." Before I had to go overseas I had to go through this school.

Saliga: What did you work on for the eight months?

30 Summers: Prefabricated buildings.

Saliga: For the Army?

Summers: Yes. It was developing a series of prefabricated buildings using the same parts. It was a lot of fun.

Saliga: It was all different kinds of buildings using the same parts?

Summers: Yes, using the same parts. Sometimes when you were getting into longer spans, you'd have a different truss, but what you were really trying to do was to design a series of buildings using as few parts as possible that could be used in many types of buildings. We had an office of about ten men working on that. I think I was the only officer. They were mainly noncommissioned officers that had experience in engineering and architecture. It was good; I enjoyed it. I went through the school and got shipped off to Korea. The irony of the whole thing was that if I had stayed in the Armored Corps, I'd have gone to Germany instead of Korea. I just learned it later. When we got shipped out they said the Armored Corps officers were all going to Germany; they didn't go to Korea. Anyway, my experiences there were not bad. I got over there just about the time the armistice was signed. It was signed about a week or two weeks after I was there. I didn't see any action, so to speak. I had a platoon, and we built probably three or four big warehouses and bridges, and actually even built a church for one of the communities. It was a good experience. It's something you don't want to go through, but once having gone through it, it's okay.

Saliga: It also gave you some experience to design buildings on your own.

Summers: Yes, and it was really funny, too, because having just gotten through with this problem of trying to make these prototype buildings, the minute we got overseas and we'd get these cases, these weren't now the same buildings we

31 worked on because those hadn't been put into production yet. We got these building packages for barracks or for warehouses. We'd set upon trying to change them, to make it different and we did. Another architect friend and I built a geodesic dome for our officers quarters. We probably had the fanciest officers quarters in Korea.

Saliga: So you really didn't have the choice whether to build Miesian buildings or not?

Summers: Not quite. The only reason we built that dome was because we had pipe, and it took only one length of two-by-four and one section of pipe. We built the whole thing out of those two parts and bolts. That was actually pretty interesting. It was fun living in it because we covered it with clear plastic and so it was light; it was really great. We put mezzanines in it and we had sort of a sauna in it and bar. It was quite the thing.

Saliga: Like the church you built.

Summers: That was nice, that was a rock church. It was a very simple but quite nice building built out of rock. In fact it wasn't too far in size from the chapel at IIT. It didn't have a flat roof, but it was that big. It had a pitched roof and was built out of really nice stone. Certainly we had better masons in Korea than we did on the bricks at IIT. We built some bridges, those were not big bridges. These were bridges of maybe a forty- to fifty-foot span, built out of wood and stone abutments.

Saliga: When you were getting your education in the Texas A&M and IIT did you study engineering as well as architecture?

Summers: Not at IIT. In architecture, I think in every school, certainly we had it, you had to have certain engineering courses. You had to have electrical engineering, structural engineering, a certain amount of civil engineering, all of them enough to give you a basic grasp of how to do this, but not enough that you could

32 really design a bridge. You could get a good feel of what to do. A lot of the stuff was improvising and just having a feel of what size that something should be and doing it.

Saliga: Or having a feeling of how strong the materials were.

Summers: Yes.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Saliga: You weren't in Korea for a very long time then?

Summers: No, eleven months.

Saliga: You built a lot in eleven months actually. You were busy.

Summers: Yes, we really did. All of that was built just by my platoon. I guess the only thing that I ever got in trouble with is that I love to build, and I'd be up on the roof hammering in corrugated metal or something, and I'd get chewed out by the colonel because officers aren't supposed to pick up a tool or do any work; they're supposed to be supervising. Other than that, I had a fairly uneventful Army career.

Saliga: Before you left for the service, had you finished the IIT chapel?

Summers: Yes, it was finished.

Saliga: How did that work? Did Mies actually conceptualize the chapel, and you were in charge of seeing it built?

Summers: I didn't actually do any of the design on it. I think the design had been started before 1949. I got there in September of 1949, to Chicago. Bruno Conterato was working on the chapel, and there was really a different design that was

33 done; you probably have seen it. Then Bruno worked on the revision of it, and it's quite a different building. It's a much simpler building now than it was before, and it cost less money. I just ended up really at the tail end of that job, supervising the construction. It was really at that point that I got involved in some of the details of the building that hadn't really been decided and some of the materials. There are a couple of interesting stories, one of which has to do with lighting. Lighting in the office was always a problem. Mies really was not interested in lighting. He knew what he liked and what he didn't like, but neither he nor anybody else in the office knew very much about designing lighting. They had a scheme of hiding the lights along the outside of a steel joist that washed the length of this brick wall. This brick wall was eighteen feet high. Of course, there was a twelve-inch brick wall that supported this. That was determined by the maximum structural height that you could build a twelve-inch brick wall. That's what created that eighteen feet. They had lights to wash the brick wall and then bounce off of it. That was the main lighting, off those two brick walls on the side and then lights in the front that were lighting the altar and the curtain behind the altar. The light that had been decided was sort of what you'd call a bullet light. It was a spun aluminum fixture that was maybe twelve inches long. Consequently, it struck out and it didn't look very nice. Mies came out one day and he said, "That's awful. Get rid of them," and he left. Here I was, I think I must have been all of twenty-one then, and I'm supposed to convince this electrical contractor to take these things out. Mies didn't say anything about who was going to pay for it. I knew the office wasn't going to pay for it. I went to the electrical contractor and I said, "I've got a real problem. I've got a real problem, and you've got to help me with it. My boss just came out here, and he said these fixtures are awful. He says he doesn't want to be able to see these things." He sympathized with me and he said, "Well, go try to find something and we'll see what we can do." I ended up finding a light that is actually used on the outdoor of filling stations. It's a very small porcelainized steel shell, but instead of twelve inches long it was about seven or eight inches at the most. We were able to get those lights up into the beam so that you could just barely see them from certain angles. It was an improvement, and I

34 got the electrical contractor to take the other ones out and put the new ones up without any cost, which is some kind of miracle. I found out rather than being tough with these people you do a lot better by trying to make them sympathize with you. The only funny story about the chapel was the—there are actually three funny stories—in order. Maybe this is the reason that Mies said I did a good job in the end. One day we got the travertine; that was the altar. All the chapel was natural materials; we had the brick walls, the beige brick walls, campus brick; we had terrazzo floors, and we had a solid travertine altar. There were three pieces of stone under the altar, six inches thick each, and these pieces were three and a half feet wide and six and a half feet deep, side by side. The altarpiece was a big solid piece of travertine sitting on top of that. The travertine shows up at the job in a truck, and they commence to unload it, the three slabs first, and they end up breaking one of these big slabs. The travertine contractor was really sad. The general contractor was sad. This marble all came from Italy; it was all matched. You'd never get the darn stuff again. The piece that broke was an outside piece. There were two outside pieces and one inside piece. The edge of the travertine was honed. That's the way you finish it, you can either polish it or hone it, and Mies always liked honed travertine so it's not highly polished. It's smoother than the sawn finish that you get when you saw the block of travertine. I said, "Why don't we just switch the pieces and we will put the crack under the altar itself." I was lucky because it just fit under the altar. We didn't have to move the altar at all to cover that crack. We changed the pieces and honed the outside. I didn't want Mies to ever discover there was a broken piece of travertine under that slab, so I went to Mies, and I told him what happened. He said, "Ya, that's good." Another funny story relating to chapel was the cross behind the altar was a stainless steel cross, solid stainless steel. Gerry Griffith, I believe, was the man that built that. When I went out to inspect it before bringing it out to the job, the thing was crooked, really crooked. It's really hard to straighten out a piece of stainless steel. This stainless was about three and a half inches deep by two and a half inches wide, solid stainless, not sheets, polished. When you polish these things very often you'll build up heat, and it bends it. This thing was bent. It was not

35 something that was totally obvious, but it was too obvious. I told him, "Look, we can't use this thing. What are we going to do?" I don't know whose idea it was—I called Ed Duckett into the thing because he knew Gerry Griffith. I said, "Ed, what are we going to do?" I don't know whether it was Ed's idea or Gerry's idea, but we ended up putting this cross for this church on the back of this trailer, taking it to an automobile repair shop and putting it on a hydraulic jack and springing it straight. That's how we straightened out the cross for the chapel.

Saliga: So you had to bring all your resources into play.

Summers: Yes. The other thing that gives you more insight into some of Mies's sensitivities, particularly in color, related to the curtain of the chapel. Because the price of this whole church was very little, I think the whole church cost sixty-five or seventy-five thousand dollars, we had a natural shantung silk curtain planned behind the altar. This was eighteen feet high by thirty feet wide, or about thirty-six feet I think it was. The color of the curtain hadn't been selected, so I talked to Mies about it. I said, "How do you want to do this?" He said, "Why don't you go down and get colors." He had certain colors that were dyed in Switzerland. This is Chinese silk, raw shantung silk. There was a particular group of these that were done in Switzerland and had just beautiful colors. We used them a lot throughout the years that I was there, either in a house or even in collages and models. He said, "Get the biggest sample you can get." I remember he said, "Bring beige, bring black." There was also a kind of pea green. It sounds bad, but it was a beautiful green, very light, very subtle green. There was also a rose; it was a very nice color. There might have been about five or six colors. He said, "I will meet you out there with Bishop Conklin, and we'll decide then what color." So, the bishop comes out with Mies. I had quite large samples; they were probably eight or nine feet, pretty big. I had a ladder and I had them all set up. I put them back there one at a time. It was just great to hear Mies start this sales pitch. He didn't really know what he wanted himself, but he kept talking about this really great colorful color. I could tell from the very beginning that

36 Bishop Conklin liked the rose—it was beautiful—all of the colors were nice. We weren't going to do the black. This wonderful beautiful, bright color that Mies kept talking about ended up being beige, pretty much the same color as the brick. I had several other situations just like that, that related to color with Mies the rest of my days there. It was nice, but I mean, beige.

Saliga: And he was able to convince the bishop?

Summers: And he convinced the bishop. Curtains were one of the things that provoked the whole Farnsworth problem.

Saliga: The curtains?

Summers: Oh yes, curtains in the house, that was allegedly the thing that sparked the big fight between Edith Farnsworth and Mies.

Saliga: What was the debate?

Summers: The color of the curtains. She wanted yellow curtains, and Mies wanted beige curtains. When I say beige, it's actually natural silk, which is beige. It's a gorgeous color. Mies wanted that, and his idea was perfectly obvious and objective to us in the office, because these beautiful trees around were golden, natural golden and red in the fall. Why put a yellow or put any kind of a strong color there that would be in competition with these beautiful natural colors? The floor was travertine, and it worked together and it made sense. By the way, he got his shantung silk curtains in the Farnsworth House too. As we understood it at the time in the office, that's what sparked the whole feud. I'm relatively sure that it went beyond that. That was the thing that started it all out. We were working at the time on furniture and the different kinds of materials to put on the Barcelona furniture.

Saliga: I want to get into the work that you did when you returned from the service, when you came to Mies's office after the service.

37 Summers: When I got out of the service, because I had left from Chicago, I was discharged at Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago. I wanted to go by and say hello to Mies, but I had every reason and every thought of going back to Texas and starting my own practice at that time. I went by and called him up, and I said I'd like to see him. He said, "Yes, come on by." I went by his apartment and before saying practically three words or three sentences, he says, "What building would you like to work on: Seagram or the Houston museum?" I swallowed hard and said, "I can't forgo working on the Seagram Building so I'll do that." I went immediately to New York.

Saliga: So you started right in on Seagram. You opened an office in New York for Mies?

Summers: No, actually the office was already there. I got in late on that. I didn't have anything to do with the overall scheme of the building; that was done by the time I arrived back on the scene. My work really ended up as taking that concept from the model and getting it developed, designwise. We had a working-drawing firm, Kahn & Jacobs, that did the working drawings. We had an office that I was more or less in charge of. I say more or less because when I went there David Haid was there, and Ed Duckett. Mies eventually sent them back and I stayed. I had one other person out of the Chicago office, Henry Kanazawa, and the rest of the people were all local New Yorkers, some of whom were from Philip Johnson's office. After a while I ended up being in charge of that. You only knew you were in charge because Mies would call you and ask, "How's this going? How's that going?" I ended up doing most of the design detailing on the building from what had already begun on the concept of it. The bronze had been decided, but the types of granite, types of marble, and none of the detailing on the bronze had been done. I got involved in all of that and it was a great experience.

Saliga: Did Philip Johnson have anything to do with the detailing?

38 Summers: No. I shouldn't say no; he had very specific things that he did, that Mies asked him to do. One of them was the lighting in the building, and again, as I think back, it was something Mies just simply wasn't interested in. Philip did a good job. He got one of the leading lighting people in New York at the time, Richard Kelly, and together they worked out a scheme using a luminous ceiling for the first three or four grids on the perimeter of the building, so that from the outside you would get these planes of light. That was certainly the first major high-rise building that had used luminous ceilings to that extent. Luminous ceilings were not something unknown, but they did that. Behind the perimeter of luminous was a more straightforward fluorescent lighting system. Philip certainly should be given credit for that, and he also did the detailing of the elevators, which I'm delighted to give him credit for doing because I don't think they're very good. He did not having anything else until later. You probably know the story about when Mies got asked to leave New York because he didn't have a New York architectural license. Mies got really upset over the whole thing, and he packed up and he told me to come too. We went back to Chicago. At that time I was living with my wife in White Plains, New York. I packed up the house, and we moved back to Chicago. Mr. Bronfman, the head of Seagram, had said, "Look, I'll talk to Rockefeller." Nelson Rockefeller was governor then, and he knew Rockefeller. Mies said, "I don't want to have anything to do with that. I'm a director of an accredited school of architecture. I've got a license in Illinois." The whole thing was absolutely stupid because what they were saying is that he did not have a high school diploma; therefore, he could not get his New York license. They were just people that didn't like him, didn't like the fact that he was in New York, doing a job in New York. We went back, and I spent several weeks formulating letters that Mies would write to Germany to the Cathedral School that he went to. He got the stuff back, and then I wrote to the New York people and got that stuff transferred there, and finally they gave him the license. That was late in the job; the building was well into construction and Mies never did go back to New York to live, as he was when I first came there. He was actually living in the Barclay Hotel. He would come back to Chicago maybe every two weeks, but he was in New York. It was during that

39 period that I really got to know Mies because I was practically the only person there from his own office. We had lunch, and we dinner, and we had weekends. I was with him a lot. In those days we traveled, when we did go to Chicago, back and forth on the train. We spent a lot of time talking on the train. That's when I really got to know Mies; when I felt like I got to know Mies.

Saliga: Did you have to move back to New York then, once he got his license?

Summers: My wife didn't, but I actually ended up moving back to New York, staying in a hotel. The point of this was to talk about what Philip did. We'd started a model of the plaza, and Mies wanted to work on the plaza. So, I built this big model of the first six floors of the building. The thing filled up this room; it was a big model. We had a workshop there, and I had a couple of people. I always liked to work on models anyway, so I got involved in that and we built models. We built this thing with the whole idea that we'd start working on the plaza. Just as we got the model finished, and it didn't have a scheme attached as to what to do about the plaza, we had to go back. Mies told Philip, "Philip, why don't you work on the plaza." I was cringing to myself about this, because that's probably the second most important thing to the whole building, with the skin being the first, and the space, the way it sits back and everything, and here you're going to let this guy detail it. It was quite funny the way it worked out, because when we got the whole thing resolved we came back, and Philip had used the model and had his scheme built for it. What he had done was—he was using a blue ceramic tile. Here you have a granite plaza and a bronze building, he had a blue ceramic tile pool that was like a dog leg, because in the front of the building where the space is, the space narrows on the side of the building. That pool went all the way from the front, and it was exactly one foot from the edge of the vertical plaza wall. The tile went up so you could see this blue tile in the model and you could imagine it in reality. It went right back, and the columns were actually six inches away from the water on the back. It was really unpleasant. When Mies saw it he sat there with his cigar looking at it, and

40 Philip was there, probably nervous I'm sure, and Mies just didn't say anything. He didn't say anything at all. Philip was saying to him, "The building is coming up out of the water, rising up out of the water." I never will forget that evening. Mies said, "Ya, that's exactly what doesn't happen, the building doesn't rise out of the water." He really didn't say a thing to Philip, but the next day he had me tear the thing off and start with it again.

Saliga: So you designed the plaza?

Summers: I can't say that I designed it; I was involved directly with Mies when it was done. I did a lot of the detailing on the plaza, that I can certainly say I did specifically. When you're working with somebody on a model like that, there are times when you are working and you can't say you did this or he did that; you just do it. I always thought, and I still think, of all the things that I did in that office of Mies's that I know that I did, I still firmly believe they're his, because he had the right to say, "No." A lot of time he told me, "No," too, to different buildings and different things. He had the right, and many times he did. In spite of the fact that some of the buildings I absolutely did, I think of them as his buildings.

Saliga: Getting back to the plaza of the Seagram Building, what was the story with the sculpture there? Originally wasn't there supposed to be some sculpture?

Summers: Yes. Early, when it was decided that there would be the water. And I think also an insight to Mies which I always really appreciated appeared with the element that we now think of as the bench on the side of the pools and on the edge of the plaza. You had to have something to keep people from falling off. The natural thing to do, which was in fact in the first small model, where quite low walls. These walls might have been three or three and a half feet high, in marble. But, it was Mies's idea to use this bench. I ended up making the bench wider, fitting it really within the modules, but also making it wide enough so that you couldn't fall over it. If you make a kind of normal bench that's twenty-one inches wide somebody could walk up to that and just

41 tumble right over. You have a pretty hard time tumbling over this four and a half foot wide bench. Mies had the idea that rather than use a wall we should use the bench, that somebody could sit on that thing. That is really characteristic of elements that he would put into buildings; things that could be used rather than just an element that had a pure visual aspect to it. Once we had the model made with the bench, and he was satisfied with the bench and the pool he started saying, "Maybe we should have sculpture." I started making this stuff out of tin foil, using aluminum foil to make sort of organic forms. He got interested in that and started doing some himself. In fact the model, when it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, had these sculptures there. I'm sure they're in the photographs. I think one of them was sprayed gold, one of them was black, and one of them was silver, the idea of this kind of crushed steel, stainless steel and black bronze and gilded bronze. At that same time I was very interested in the artist Giacometti. I had collected some of his drawings. It was before Bunshaft and Skidmore had Giacometti do a project for Chase Manhattan; it was never finally done. I approached Mies and I said, "I think this guy is really good." Giacometti at that time was known, but he wasn't a Picasso, exactly the same name as Picasso, in New York at least. I showed Mies a lot of his work, and I never will forget this, his remark, "You know, Gene, we can't do that. Can you imagine if we put those things up in the pool? I can just think that the public would say, 'Those things look like drunken sailors out there.' What would that reflection on the Seagram people be?" I thought that was pretty interesting that he was thinking that he didn't want to have any controversy. In the end he said, "I think it's better without anything." He definitely liked the idea that later came about of having sculpture and different things. He particularly liked—I think he particularly liked it, I don't know if he did or I did, I know I liked it—the Ulmich head that was put on the plaza. It was great. It was this thing ten or twelve feet high, I don't remember the height now, but this thing was plopped right in the middle of the plaza, not in the middle but off to the side. It was just great. I think that is a nice idea of changing things. I believe that was Phyllis's idea. I think Phyllis actually had

42 the idea of changing things. It's not a regular program, necessarily, but every once in a while they'll put something out on the plaza.

Saliga: So Phyllis Lambert did have a lot of input?

Summers: Phyllis was really important to that whole thing.

Saliga: A lot has been written about how Phyllis convinced her father to use Mies. Do you know why another architect wasn't chosen? I know that Wright and Le Corbusier were being considered.

Summers: What she told me, and the story has been well-published, when she did get her father's okay she went to the Museum of Modern Art, and it was either Philip Johnson or Alfred Barr—one of the two of them, it may be both—gave her a list of who they thought were the great architects. Mies was one of them, Saarinen was one of them, Le Corbusier was one and Wright was one, and there were probably several others in there. She went around and interviewed all those people. In the end she made the decision to have Mies.

Saliga: So it was strictly from interviewing people?

Summers: Yes. I don't know if she was influenced by anyone. If she was, it was probably by the Museum of Modern Art, I would guess. But, I don't know if that's so or not.

Saliga: Did she have any input into the design at all?

Summers: She didn't try to. She certainly had input when we ran into a problem, like no other client. She had an office right in our office. Her office was between Philip's and Mies's.

Saliga: She was an architect by then?

43 Summers: No, she wasn't an architect at all. She had finished her schooling. She had graduated in art, not art history even; it was in fine arts. She was just interested in the process. I'm sure it was probably her very first experience of seeing a building get done. It was a great opportunity for her, and it was a great situation for us, because when we had a problem that came up relating to money or deciding on a material, we could go to Phyllis and say, "Can you get this cleared?" or, "Can you help us some way?" and she would do it. She kept up with what was going on. She'd come out and look and see what we were doing in the office. She was the director of planning and ran the conferences. We had weekly conferences with the contractor, and this was even before the building was finished, I mean designed, finished design. The contractor was already selected. That building was done in a very, very professional manner. They had a special committee that met for several weeks.

Saliga: About the design?

Summers: No, not about the design. The building had been designed, the concept was there, but really about the facilities within the building: the bathrooms, the elevators, the maintenance of the building. That was worthwhile; that was really worthwhile.

Saliga: Was this committee made up from people of the Seagram Company, people who were going to work in the building?

Summers: No, it was an independent committee. It wasn't formed especially for the Seagram Building. It was a group of people that were building managers. It cost a certain amount of money for them to review the design of a building. They got a fee for it, but it was something that had been in the works for years, which they had done on other buildings. The group of people were all working managers or knew something; they might be real estate people. For instance, Cushman Wakefield, the real estate people, were involved. There

44 were on the committee, and they would talk about sizes of floors or this or that, what's good for rental. It was a practical kind of committee.

Saliga: This is a committee that Seagram put together?

Summers: They hired that committee. I'm quite sure they didn't put the members together; that was done by that group of office managers. As I recall it was a two-week review, every day, very extensive. They would meet six or eight hours a day and go over the drawings and make suggestions. As I also recall, never anything to do with design as far as aesthetics go. Just functions.

Saliga: So much has been written about the Seagram Building, about it being a revolutionary building, or a uniquely successful building in its design and execution. What do you see as the most important aspect of the building, or the most revolutionary aspect?

Summers: There are two things that are important about the building. The one that to me clearly is the most important thing is that it is the most highly refined of Mies's idea of a high-rise building, using the very best materials and the best detailing. From that point of view, it couldn't be done better, that idea that he always had about structure or expression of structure. The other aspect that is important is one that has more to do with the environment, and that's the plaza. You can see the building, unlike so many. It wasn't the first time that somebody left space on a building, but it was among the first. Lever House, across the street, which was a pretty well-known building at that time, had space, but it created it with a low element. It still pretty much covered the whole site. That was a very controversial issue. The controversy was more over not using all the space that you had. It even was late in the design—the building was up, the plaza had been designed, the plaza hadn't been constructed, but Mr. Bronfman came in. He had been approached by some banks that were going to pay him multi-million-dollar-a-year rents. He came in and said, "We think we need to fill in the space." That was a very critical period. Mies was sent out to Mr. Bronfman's house for dinner, I say sent out,

45 I mean he was invited, but it was practically like the king had called. He went out with Mr. Crandel, who was the president of George Fuller Construction Company, the contractor. Crandel was a good friend of Bronfman's. Bronfman tried to convince Mies to fill it in, and Mies was not going to be convinced.

Saliga: That was after the building had already been built.

Summers: The building was under construction, and the steel frame was all the way up. The bronze was being put on.

Saliga: How did Mies convince him? Do you know?

Summers: I think in the end Mies didn't do the convincing. Mies never was a very good salesman. He wasn't. He either had good clients that let him do these things, or somebody else had to do that. Phyllis got involved, and she couldn't do too much with her father. Crandel was really not for it; he understood it. Then in the end, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore got involved. He was a friend of Crandel's, and he knew what was happening. He actually ended up writing a letter or going to see Bronfman, I think it was a letter, and he said, "You've got a national monument here that's not been finished. You can't ruin this." I think that that had a lot to do with it. Everybody was against it, other than the bankers; they wanted the space. But in the end Bronfman made the decision not to do it.

Saliga: I didn't realize that there was a controversy so late in the process of building the building.

Summers: It could have been done, but it wouldn't have been easy. It would have ruined it.

Saliga: Wouldn't that have gone against the zoning laws?

46 Summers: You could have done it. You could have done a one-story space.

Saliga: They didn't want a tower?

Summers: No, the tower he couldn't have done because the building was built pretty much to the maximum. The one story he could have put in. He just wanted to have this banking floor there, prime space right on Park Avenue.

Saliga: I didn't realize that. And the bronze color, do you know how that was decided upon? Who decided upon that?

Summers: I'm sure Mies did. The bronze was before my time, so to speak. I was still in the Army. When I first knew of the building I saw it on the boat coming back from Korea in a magazine. Time magazine had a little model of it. It was bronze then, so that decision was made. That would have been his decision, that's clear, that it was bronze. That's clearly Mies's decision. I wasn't there when he made that decision, but I'm dead certain nobody else would have come up with that. I was there when he decided instead of having clear glass he wanted to have colored glass. That was an interesting process to get that, because none of the big companies wanted to go in and do it. Finally he actually went to Phyllis and said, "Phyllis, who makes your whiskey bottles?" She found out, I think it was Franklin Glass, and we went there and talked to them about it. They made samples and ended up making it. The major companies now make it, but that's a particularly nice glass because it's got a rose-like color to it; it's not the strictly brown that you see today. I thought that was pretty good, and again typical of Mies being very practical. Who makes their bottles? They make thousands of bottles with colored glass, so who not?

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Summers: He had also had a lot of experience in Europe with colored glass. The Silk Exhibition had it. The Barcelona Pavilion had colored glass in it. He had had

47 some background on that. At that time, the Lever House was the first important building using a green glass, but obviously you don't want to use a green tint with a bronze color.

Saliga: We left off at Seagram, but was there anything else that you wanted to bring up?

Summers: We could probably talk the next three hours abut Seagram alone, but let's see. I think that we had talked about the fact that I got there after the project had really been conceived. I started working on the internal planning and the detailing of the building. There were a lot of explorations on materials that we did, finishing the bronze. That certainly was the largest bronze building that must have ever been done. We did a lot of research actually on the patina on that, which was interesting. It made me, later, interested in bronze. Mies's problem with licensing was ridiculous but political, and that got resolved. I think, as I said, Mies never really came back to live in New York. He would visit it occasionally. I got sent back and stayed for about another year while the building was really under construction, and we were finishing up. It might be worth saying that, in later years, the way we built the Seagram Building developed into quite a business, which was called "fast-tracking," where you actually are designing at the same time they're building. We didn't realize that that was going to develop into something, but we actually built that building that way. We started with incomplete drawings, but we finished the foundations and the structural drawings. The building got done faster, and that was because the contractor was established before the project was finished, I mean, the project design was finished. He got involved from the very beginning. It was a very good relationship. George F. Fuller was the construction company. It was a good relationship, and it went very well.

Saliga: How was the building received by your peers when it was first completed, from your perception?

48 Summers: Very well, actually very well. I don't really recall any adverse criticism of the building, and we certainly got positive help from people like Bunshaft, as I mentioned, with this episode on the plaza. I think the better architects realized right when the building was published as a project that it was going to be a special building. The building was not a controversial building. It never was.

Saliga: No, not at all, only the plaza maybe.

Summers: The plaza only in the sense that maybe some businessmen said, "Oh my gosh, you're using all that space up."

Saliga: Apparently, from what Franz Schulze has written, at the time Seagram was built, Mies's office was so busy that many other commissions had to be turned down. Was there anything that you wish had come to the office?

Summers: First of all, I don't believe that. It wasn't the case. I don't know of any buildings that were turned down. Buildings never came to the office fast and steady. Mies never went out and really sought buildings. When he did get a commission it happened that somebody would know of him or be told of him and would come in and talk to us in the office as a group, either Joe Fujikawa and Mies, or myself and Mies. We ended up showing them around, and either got the job or not, but I always thought that Mies should be more selective, in fact, in some of the jobs he took. I should say not just jobs, but projects. People would come in with projects, and they'd say they just want him to do this project and plead with him, and he'd say, "Sure, we'll do it." A lot of these didn't get built. I remember one was kind of an arts club in Ireland. It was a very small thing, fifty thousand square feet. This Irishman made such a strong case and flattered Mies so much, that he took it on. It didn't last very long. It was more conversation than anything, but it was an attitude that Mies had. If somebody came, he would hardly turn them down. There was an exception to that, which I think also influenced my leaving the office. For instance, after the Seagram job, and I don't remember exactly how long,

49 maybe two years or a year and a half, Mies was invited to be interviewed for the World Trade Center in New York. At that time he wasn't feeling too well, so Joe and I ended up going to New York and being interviewed. We had a very good reception, and I think we had a chance at getting the job because it wasn't a wide-open competition. There were just a selected number of architects that were being interviewed. When we got back to Chicago, and we related this to Mies, he said, "I don't want to do that project." That was an exception to what I was saying earlier. Mies had finished a building. He knew how good the building was in New York. He felt it was important to have a good building there, and he was getting tired and just didn't want to take on such a project.

Saliga: He was up in years by that time and not in good health.

Summers: I'm not exactly sure what the timing was, but that was probably a couple of years before I left the office. I don't remember at the time of the Seagram him turning down any building. We got the Bacardi Building project right at the end of the Seagram Building.

Saliga: Was there some connection between the owners of liquor companies knowing one another?

Summers: No, not at all.

Saliga: How did he get the Bacardi commission, or how did they know about Mies?

Summers: José Bosch was president of Bacardi and one of the owners. He was actually a man that was only slightly younger than Mies, a really great gentleman. He came in the office and said he had seen the story in Life magazine on Mies. He said he saw a picture of Crown Hall, and he said, "I'd like to have a building just like that, big space, open space." You know Mies loved that so that was an instant attraction, and both people liked each other. That's how that developed.

50 Saliga: What was you role in the project, which was never built?

Summers: It was pretty strong. By the time I left we'd finished the Seagram Building. I ended up getting nearly, well, not nearly, all of the buildings that came into the office that were not apartment buildings. Joe handled all of the Greenwald-related projects, which were the apartment projects. After Herb Greenwald died, Barney Weissbourd took over, and Joe handled all those buildings. Most of the other projects, I can't say all of them because I can't recall, but most of these other projects, say, there are really not any titles. There were no "project managers," but that's what we were. I traveled with Mies to Cuba, and after the first few meetings I did all of the contact with the client. That's the way it was on all the other projects. Mies would get involved in the beginning with the client, just to be there, but hardly ever after that unless the client came to Chicago. He didn't travel that much, and the client understood it because of his age.

Saliga: So Mies would come up with the basic design solution for the building?

Summers: Cuba was a really special situation and an interesting one. Bosch came to Chicago to see if we were interested, and Mies said, "Yes." He then said, "Well, you have to come to Cuba and see the site," which of course we did. Mies and I went first to Havana where we were put up in the Hotel Nationale. We spent a night or two nights there being entertained. This was prior to Castro's days there. Mr. Bosch was a wonderful host. Later we went down to Santiago, Cuba, and looked at the site. Of course during this period we were thinking and talking together about the building. I once wrote an article about this, but it was slightly tainted to be honest; it didn't exactly happen the way I said it. The fact is, after Mies and I had seen the site we came back. Mies was anxious to do the building just exactly like Crown Hall, exposed steel, glass on the outside. We talked about it, and I said, "Mies, you just can't do that. Here we are in Cuba, and the salt air will absolutely kill the building in three years, and the glass is on the outside and the sun is going to

51 bake the people inside like this." We were sitting out on the terrace of the balcony, and I said, "We're sitting under the shade under this big overhang, and maybe we should try something like that." I sketched up actually a square building and had a ten-meter—I'm trying to think what it was now, it was about six meters, I believe it was six meters—about an eighteen-foot overhang on the building with this wide passageway. I drew a little sketch on a napkin. It was a grid system for the roof. We had been interested in the office in grid systems since Myron Goldsmith had actually worked on the Fifty-by-Fifty House. One of the Fifty-by-Fifty solutions was a two-way grid system on a very small roof, but the structural principle works at any scale. I started with a grid roof out of prestressed concrete with the idea that it was prestressed concrete instead of steel so that you wouldn't get into the salt air problem. I drew this, and then I put a column at every rib so that as you looked at this thing it had a lot of columns. Mies look at it, and he said, "No, that looks like Gropius's embassy." He hardly ever would mention Gropius. So I took the napkin and said, "Okay, and then I just ended up putting two columns on the side. By that time we'd sort of retired upstairs after dinner and were having a beer, and we had another napkin. I picked up the napkin, and I made a sketch, and I put two columns on each side. He said, "That's it. Let me have that." So he grabs it, gets my pen, and he puts a little bat right on the top of the roof edge, right in the middle. He said, "That's it," and then he drew a little tree. He could always draw really nice trees. The bat was Bacardi's symbol, Bacardi rum.

Saliga: An actual bat, I was wondering.

Summers: It wasn't detailed. It looked more like an eagle in the sketch. That actually is the way that building was conceived. That building is what ended up to be the National Gallery as it took form in different things. That's step one in the series towards the National Gallery in Berlin, and the Schweinfurt project came in the middle of that. Perhaps we'll get to that later.

Saliga: I shudder to ask, Where are the napkin sketches? Do they exist?

52 Summers: Yes, I think that one I have, actually.

Saliga: Really? What a wonderful thing to have.

Summers: I told you I had two sketches. I gave one to Phyllis, and the other one I think I have. Either I have it or the museum has it, I'm not sure. That was really the concept of that building. It was interesting because we were working with Saenz, Cancio & Martin, the Cuban engineering firm, true Spanish engineers. They were very good engineers. He said, "Anything you want to do, we'll do it. We can do it." That's not exactly the way we looked at architecture, but we certainly were interested in clear structural ideas. I showed him a better drawing of it the next day, and I started asking him, "What do you think about this? Can we prestress this grid or post-stress it and then support it on the eight columns, two on each side of the building?" He hesitated, and he said, "Yes, we can but that really will be a challenge." There were some interesting technical things that occurred later regarding that structure. It developed smoothly. We worked with Frank Kornacker on some of the structural problems in Chicago. He was helping us. It was really an interesting building, and Mr. Bosch was a wonderful client. He had this story that I think is worth telling, showing how great a client he was. He had a limp. I don't know why or what it was from; I never asked him, but he did limp. The site had a slope to it so we had two entrances. One, the front entrance, had these grand steps isometrically placed on the site. Then on the side of the building, there was another entry underground where you could walk immediately in right from the car, if you drove up in your car. These grand stairs led to the upper floor on the outside to the terrace connecting to the building. That was really more of a formal monumental entry. Functionally, the building was going to be entered in the other direction. When we first showed him the model—and he always called me Mr. Summers, and that was a little embarrassing because I think I could have been his son—he said, "Yes, Mr. Summers, I think that these stairs are going to give me a lot of trouble with my leg, but if you think that's what they should be then, that's what they should

53 be." I almost cried. He was really great. Then I explained to him, "Mr. Bosch, I do want you to know that those are important, but we have an entry over on the side that you can go immediately in. You don't have to go up any steps." He was a great client. His desk was right out in the open, and he said, "I want to see my people, and I want my people to see me." He had a true open plan.

Saliga: So it was really nothing like corporate America at that point.

Summers: No.

Saliga: I was surprised that he wanted to adapt the Crown Hall model because it's just an open plan.

Summers: It's totally open. There was the large utility stack that went through which went floor to ceiling. That was the only element. Then there were two low walls that were for the backing up of files, but it was open.

Saliga: Do you think that would have worked for an office? Do you think that that would have functioned well?

Summers: Yes, sure, it does today, they do it today. It's really typical of a lot of banks. A building that later developed that's not too dissimilar in size was the Toronto Dominion Center Bank space. Something will work, if the attitude is there of the persons that run the company. It was too bad that before it all got going—we had finished the working drawings, they had in fact constructed a fence around the site—when the Castro thing broke. Bosch, in fact, said in the beginning they were going to go ahead and build it because he was a supporter of Castro at that time. Because Batista really had this reputation, and I don't know for a fact so I'm not getting into the politics, but he had stolen money from everywhere. Bosch probably knew more about it than anybody. He was really a supporter of Castro, and I think he even supported him money wise.

54 Saliga: Why didn't it go through?

Summers: He told me later. When that one canceled out we went on to do the Mexico City Bacardi Building. During those days I asked him about what happened. He said that he had been invited to fly from Cuba to Washington in the plane with Castro when Castro was visiting the United Nations at one point. This was very early. He said they had a stopover in Atlanta, Georgia, and he got off the plane and left because he then realized for the first time, on this trip that he was able to talk to Castro, that he was a Communist. That's not what he thought was going to happen, so he got off and left. He had trouble getting one of his sons out of Cuba, but he finally negotiated and got him, but he got his family out before Castro locked them all out.

Saliga: Briefly, what were your impressions of Cuba before Castro?

Summers: I thought it was pretty fantastic. They had all kinds of tourists down there, the weather was great, and there were all kinds of nightlife. Bosch took us out.

Saliga: What was the architecture like?

Summers: Tropical, white and open. I think the thing that impressed me the most was it was the first experience I'd had in any kind of building where you could just open the windows and the doors up and not have screens, having come from Texas and later in Chicago where you have all the mosquitoes.

Saliga: They don't have mosquitoes?

Summers: What happens is that the breeze off of the ocean keeps them cleared out. California is like that too to a degree, but not as much as that island. It just is a wonderful thing; you walk out in this balmy, beautiful breeze, the palm trees are blowing and the air. It was fantastic.

55 Saliga: You must have been very disappointed when the project didn't go through.

Summers: We were, but the last time we were there, when we presented the project, and Castro had taken over then, we presented the project to some of the members of Bacardi's Board of Directors. I believe it was in the Hilton Hotel there. Mies and I were going up after that presentation for a dinner in Castro's honor. These Cuban kids with long hair, the guerrillas that had been fighting out there in their fatigues with a machine gun, came into the elevators throwing this thing around and kind of hitting you in the stomach. When we left Cuba that time it was really terrible, they searched us. They made Mies and me both take all of our clothes off, our shoes off; they searched those suitcases. What was happening during that period is Batista's people were taking money out of the country so Castro was trying to stop it, and they just really searched everybody. That was the last trip that we made to Cuba. It was a great project while it lasted. They had been great clients.

Saliga: Was Mies terribly disappointed? Did he ever say how he felt?

Summers: No. There are so many projects that you do as an architect that never get done that you just condition yourself to it. Certainly you're disappointed, but something like that particular case was understandable. It was not the architect's fault that the client didn't like it; it wasn't the client's fault that he couldn't afford it; it was a third element.

Saliga: It seems to me right around the same time that the Bacardi project fell through, that was right around the time that Mies retired from teaching at IIT, around 1958.

Summers: I don't know a date now that he retired, but it was close to that date if it wasn't that date.

56 Saliga: I'm sure you recall, though, that around the same time that he retired from teaching, he also lost the commission to finish the campus.

Summers: That's what triggered the retirement.

Saliga: So it wasn't the other way around?

Summers: No, as far as I remember. I might be wrong there. You have probably spoken to people that are more knowledgeable than I am on that. I know that Mies never got mad, but he was very unhappy about what happened there. Among other reasons, the library building was one of his favorite buildings that he planned many years before. It was a great building. To have Skidmore come in and take it away was really sad.

Saliga: But it was a political thing with the school, wasn't it?

Summers: It was always political.

Saliga: The new dean didn't want Mies to finish the campus?

Summers: Skidmore was very involved in it then, and I think Bill Hartmann might have been on the Board of Directors, or somebody was. I'm not criticizing Skidmore, although they were certainly criticized among architects. But that's business, that's what it's all about. You go out, and you have to fight for it, and you have to plug along. We weren't very happy with it, but it's what happened.

Saliga: You said Mies never go angry, but he must have been angry about this.

Summers: I would say he was bitter but not to the point of really saying something or doing something. He just was really unhappy. The people around him were probably more bitter and showed it more. I remember people like Alfred Caldwell. I don't know if he resigned at that time, but he was really bitter.

57 Saliga: I think he did.

Summers: He was really bitter. It was a poor choice for the school at that time to make a move like that. I think it's ironic, and a point that has always been difficult for me to totally understand, when Mies did the architecture building he broke design with what he intended originally to do on the campus. He had a design for the arts and architecture building that was a steel structure with a brick infill that would have tied in with the first buildings on the campus. For him to have broken and go to this totally steel and glass building with the structural system that he used, as much as I like the architecture building, I personally thought it was the wrong thing to do. Not that I was going to say it at that time. I wasn't in the position I was later. I certainly would have later. I didn't think he should have done that. I think it should have been more unified. The irony of it, he built it, and certainly Crown Hall is one of his best buildings, but due to that change that he made, Skidmore turned around, once they got the job, and also broke from the old system. I think it's a pity. The school lost something from that. Their design is more taking off of Crown Hall of course, but I think the whole concept of the campus with its modular system both in planning and the modular system within the structure of each individual unit was the very kernel of the whole idea, and then he changed it for that building. That's what great artists do sometimes.

Saliga: Yes, and I think it's interesting that he felt that even though he had devised this modular system that he still could feel free to break with that system and design a building that was really significant.

Summers: I personally would not have done that. I would have held back. He could have done that building somewhere else. But I think it's an interesting point, and it certainly influenced the campus design.

Saliga: Just to speculate, though, you said he changed his mind midstream with the campus.

58 Summers: He really didn't change his mind.

Saliga: He changed the system.

Summers: He had this idea. The building had been developed in school, I mean Crown Hall, the idea had been developed in school. He really wanted to build that building. I do know that part of the reason for this is that Henry Crown was going to give money for this thing. I don't know if he was ever asked, directly or indirectly by anyone, to make this a special building because of that, but it's certainly possible. Henry Crown entered my life in a design decision much later on, with McCormick Place, but I'll tell you that later.

Saliga: We wanted to talk about the National Gallery in Berlin as coming off of the Bacardi project. You said that the Bacardi project was adapted for the National Gallery.

Summers: The story is, I think, work elaborating on a bit. The Bacardi Building, I really believe, was one of the most important buildings that was done in all of Mies's later years.

Saliga: Why is that?

Summers: It was probably the clearest structure, and that's what it was all about. That's what the whole thing was all about. I don't want to say Bacardi's better than Crown Hall. I certainly don't want to say that, but it's equal to it at least. It had the advantage over Crown Hall of even more clearly showing that curtain wall from the structure, because the curtain wall was set back in the case of Bacardi and the Berlin Museum as it went on. It was extremely clear. The structure of the building became in fact a plane, so you had an interior/exterior spatial relationship on Bacardi and on the Berlin Museum, where in Crown Hall I consider it as an interior space; it's a volume. The building is a volumetric form because the glass encloses it, and it becomes

59 therefore an inside space, even though you can see outside. There's nothing in the ceiling line that projects out beyond the glass, so it has a different kind of space, and one that actually goes back a bit more to the Barcelona Pavilion, where you had this planar roof. I thought, and I still think, it's one of the better, really best buildings of Mies's time.

Saliga: Did he maintain the overhang on roofs to keep sunlight off of the art works, was that the idea? Or to keep sunlight out of the building?

Summers: Let me try to answer that later, as we go through this. The Bacardi Building project stopped and then time went on, and we got a request through Dirk Lohan's future father-in-law, who was a man by the name of Georg Schaefer, who owned the ball-bearing plant in Schweinfurt, Germany, called Kugelfischer, one of the great ball-bearing plants in Germany. Mr. Schaefer's family had owned it, and he had run it for years. He was interested particularly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German art, and he had an enormous collection of it. He wanted a museum and he wanted to build it in Schweinfurt. I don't know how he approached Dirk or whether Dirk approached him, but in any case we got the message that he wanted to do this. I worked on the project; it wasn't an enormous project, but it was still the size of Bacardi and almost as big as what was to have been the National Gallery. In any case, I worked on that project. Mies was, at this time, not well, and he was at home quite a lot. I would do things, or people in the office that worked with me would do things, and I would take them over to Mies's apartment and go over them. I had designed this building for the Schweinfurt museum that was actually a three-by-three bay, very large bays, about sixty-five-feet-square bays. It had a base on it of brick, using a red brick actually. I had visited Schweinfurt. Mies hadn't at that time because of his sickness, but I had visited it, and I got this impression of what the whole town was. I thought we should use a red brick platform and then almost a parapet wall, a wall at the base of the outside wall of brick, and then up high, glass. It had a height of approximately twenty-one feet, and whole building, twenty-one to twenty-five feet. Only at the very front and that

60 middle bay, there was all glass where you entered. That gave you a chance of putting art around the outside, using it right up to the edge of the glass. The nine-bay roof was totally enclosed; there was no hole or skylights there. In the very middle, on the floor, there was one bay that went down one level so there was a sculpture court that you looked down on top of, but it was an internal sculpture court. It functioned well, and I took this by to show Mies before going to Schweinfurt to show is to the client. Mies didn't say too much, just, "Ya, good luck." I went to Germany and showed it to Mr. Schaefer. Dirk was going to school there then, and he and I were shown around. Schaefer really liked the plan. He sent a telegram to Mies and said how much he liked it. That made me happy. I get back, and several weeks after I'd come back, then Mies was feeling better, and he came in the office and he said, "Gene, let's look at the model again of Schweinfurt." We had a model of it; it was a nice model, and Mies said, "Ya, why don't we do the Cuba building?" I gulped and stammered around a bit, but then if he wanted to do the Cuba building, we'll do the Cuba building. But, it had to really be done in steel at the point because we were in a country that had a good steel industry and didn't have the same problems with climate as Cuba. I had two problems, and they were really embarrassing problems that I had to handle, not Mies. I had to go back to Schaefer and tell him that Mies wants to try another idea. Then I had to go to Bosch, because at this time the Cuba projects had stopped, but the writing was not on the wall it would never get built. I had to go back to Bosch and tell him we're going to do his building for another client. That was like going to that electrical contractor when I first went into the office. I ended up going to him.

Saliga: Did you really?

Summers: Absolutely. We ended up making a model which still exists today of the Schaefer Museum that is in fact the Berlin Museum. The story goes even further; Schaefer didn't like that building as well.

Saliga: As the one you designed?

61 Summers: Yes. It's not a matter of whether I designed it or what, but he just was not as sympathetic over the building as he had been before. I don't remember what the occasion was, but the thing got postponed; it just got postponed. We never got into working drawings on it, actually working drawings. Very shortly after that Mies got this letter that he was probably the most excited about any building while I was there, and that was from the German government asking him to design the National Gallery, although at that time it was not called the National Gallery. It was to be an exhibition space, and, in fact, a gallery down below. I started working on that, and I did about three different schemes and built models of these and took pictures over to Mies's. I had one scheme where I was really taking the Bacardi idea of the two-way slab roof, and I had put one column on each side using a double cantilevered edge beam. It was a much more dramatic building. I didn't really have a lot of doubt in my mind that it would be too dramatic for Mies. At the same time, though, I did a building that was with a one-way girder like Crown Hall has. In that case the glass was set back from it. It was a different use of that structure, and I did a third solution, which I don't really recall now. I remember those two.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Saliga: Mies was happy to get this commission for the National Gallery.

Summers: First of all it was in Berlin, and Berlin was his town. He was very proud of the fact that they came to him and asked him to do the museum.

Saliga: Did he see it as kind of the crowning achievement of his career to have his mother country come back to him?

Summers: Probably. I don't know if he felt that or not, but I can certainly see how he might, particularly late in his career. It was particularly nice that he was able

62 to do it, I think, at that time. It was in fact, as it ends up, it was the last great building that he did.

Saliga: Do you think he had mixed emotions about doing a project in Germany because he left in the 1930s?

Summers: No, I don't. We had in fact done another project, the Krupp project, and I think if you'd ever had any mixed emotions, you'd have it on the Krupp Administration Building job in Essen.

Saliga: Did you work on that?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: I didn't realize that you had worked on that.

Summers: I traveled to Germany a lot in those days. That was a fun project. I got to meet not only Beitz but Krupp, and it was quite interesting.

Saliga: But that never went through either, did it?

Summers: We did working drawings again, but it never got built.

Saliga: Why did that never get built?

Summers: I don't know. The story I got through some of the people lower down was that they were having bad business experiences at that time. This was a large executive office building, and it was built in Hugel Park near Villa Hugel. It was an expensive endeavor, and they probably thought, "Well, this is one expense we don't really have to have." But we went through working drawings again on that one.

Saliga: And it just fell through?

63 Summers: Yes, got paid, though.

Saliga: That's what counts.

Summers: Well, it helps.

Saliga: Getting back to the National Gallery, how do you think it functions as an art museum? Did you think that it would function as well as Crown Hall or as an office building would have?

Summers: I think it really depends on the people that use it. In the original idea there would be galleries in the lower area, and there are galleries in the lower area. They are very nice and they work well; they function well. The upper gallery was originally an exhibition hall, and they use it now as an exhibition hall. But the success of using a space as large as that depends totally upon the person that makes the exhibition. The time that I saw it, this last year in fact, they had a terrible exhibit there. They had an exhibit that was made up of panels that were seven and a half feet high of photographs that were eight- by-ten. What's the point of putting that kind of show in this large space? But the other extreme of that is to see how beautiful a space can look when it's done right. When Sweeney was the director of the Houston Museum—on the first wing, Cullinan Hall, it actually had a ceiling even higher than Berlin, it didn't have the total volume that Berlin did—Sweeney would make the most extraordinary exhibits in there. I remember one exhibit, I think it was a Miró show, and he had three paintings in this entire space, pretty big pictures, and he hung them from the ceiling. He had three pictures hung from the ceiling and had this great enormous plant in there and that was the whole show. It was gorgeous. Sweeney was in fact a master at making exhibits. I remember when he did one in quite an opposite space, in a brownstone for Guggenheim. He did the Brancusi show, and it, to this day, is one of the most beautiful shows that I've ever seen. He was a master. He was an architect at making exhibits. The problem with most people in a building like Berlin, and in a building like

64 Houston and like Houston's new addition, that hall is large too; most people don't know how to do that. They're not trained to do it.

Saliga: To divide up the space?

Summers: And they end up hating the space because they can't use it. They don't know how to use it. Yes, I think it should be thought of as a great space, but it's hardly ever demonstrated.

Saliga: Used properly.

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: Did Mies ever design any exhibitions, or did you ever design any?

Summers: We designed the first one for the Houston Museum. We were given the list of paintings and sculpture that were going to be there, and it was a very hard show to do. We ended up putting planes in, but it wasn't as good as Sweeney's shows, no question about it, but we didn't have the choice of doing that either, he did. He was the director of the museum, and he was also the master exhibit-maker. He used that space beautifully. He had other spaces in the old building that he could put smaller pictures in, and that's were he put smaller pictures. I know, it's an easy building to criticize, that and Houston, because of that problem.

Saliga: I hate to keep referring to Franz Schulze, but he seems to have written one of the definitive works about Mies's office and the running of his office. He wrote that by the time the Bacardi project was underway and the National Gallery project was underway that you were really a very strong force in the office, that you were really the person who kept Mies's office running and organized. Is that how you see it?

65 Summers: No. I was certainly important. I negotiated a lot of contracts, but I didn't try to run the office. I tried to do the projects that I was assigned. I had a closer relationship than anybody in the office with Mies, probably because I was from Texas, spoke slower, and he could understand me. I don't perceive myself as having been head of the office.

Saliga: You don't think he relied on you for that?

Summers: Oh yes, there's no question about that.

Saliga: I didn't mean that you tried to assume power. I just meant that he relied on you to run the office.

Summers: When I read about it in Schulze's book it sounded a little bit like I was trying to assume the power, and that wasn't the case. It seemed a little bit stronger than I would have put it, let's put it that way. Joe Fujikawa was still a major force in the office. The way you could tell who was more or less in charge was when Mies would call into the office at ten in the morning. When I first came to the office he would always ask for Joe; he was the only one he talked to. He would ask, "How are things going? What's new?" Every day, "What's new?" When I came back from the Seagram Building he would call me and ask that. That's just the way it went. It went from one side to the other side. It was simply because I was in New York with Mies and forced to be the only person there. We had a lot of talks about art. I was always interested in painting, and he was always interested in painting. We'd talk more about painting at dinner than we'd talk about architecture. We'd talk about business and architecture, and we talked about art earlier, talking about Klee and Kandinsky and Nolde.

Saliga: Are those the artists he liked the most?

Summers: Yes, and Picasso. We talked about all of them, Braque, he loved Braque. I have to tell you this story about Klee though while we're thinking of artists, but it

66 relates to architecture and it relates to Mies's sensitivity about color which we touched on in the curtain episode. Mies was really excited one evening, and we were talking about paintings and the use of paintings in buildings. He said, "I would like to have done a house that had a wall that was painted by Klee, really colorful. And paintings on two sides, on one side black and on the other side white. But here, this really colorful painting." His idea of color was a northern Germanic-type color. He came to the window one day in Lora Marx's apartment and said, "Gene, come over here and look at this." It was foggy out. This was across from 860 Lake Shore Drive, and it was foggy. He said, "Look at that, look at that green." I had to look really hard, it was so subtle, and that was his palette. He loved the subtleties, and black and white to him were color, that was color to him.

Saliga: And that would have been his colorful painting, the black and white?

Summers: Yes, absolutely, that was his idea, a black painting on one side and a white painting on the other side by Klee. Klee was, in fact, his favorite painter. He selected a lot of his pictures and bought them.

Saliga: Did he know Klee?

Summers: Yes, he knew Klee.

Saliga: At the Bauhaus?

Summers: Yes, and he knew Lehmbruck and he knew Kandinsky, of course. He was a very good friend of Lehmbruck's, a better friend of Lehmbruck's than Klee, but he knew Klee. He was always touched once, he said he went to visit Klee after they had closed the Bauhaus, and Klee was not well. He was in Switzerland. He came into the house. Klee always loved cats, and Mies sat down and this big cat came over and jumped in his lap. Klee was startled and Mies said he said, "My God, this cat never goes near anybody." Mies thought this was some omen, and Klee thought this was some omen that here was a special friend. He

67 loved that one. Beckmann too was a very good friend of Mies's. Mies always said he regretted the fact that Beckmann—if you recall Beckmann did a number of double portraits, it would be he and another person—Beckmann wanted to do one with Mies. Mies said, "Doggone it, I never did do that, I should have done that."

Saliga: You mentioned visiting Lora Marx's apartment. I don't want to get into that whole thing all about Lora Marx because Franz Schulze seems to have closed the chapter on that, but it seems that she was very much a source of comfort for Mies and very close to Mies, especially in his declining years.

Summers: I knew Lora from when I'd come over for dinner. We would occasionally eat dinner together, but not very much. It would almost always happen that I would come over after work and she might be there. She had all sorts of activities that she did, work for Travel Assistance or something, one of the charitable things. She'd come in after work and say hello to Mies. I would be there, and she would leave. She would say hello and goodbye and be very nice. We'd talk a while and then she would leave. Probably had I not been there she would have stayed and had dinner with Mies and talked. She never interfered, is what I'm saying. I always felt very comfortable with Lora. She was almost like a mother to me.

Saliga: Was she practicing art at that time? She was a sculptor wasn't she?

Summers: No, she wasn't. She might have been a sculptor, but she wasn't practicing then, no. As far as I remember she worked during that period, as I said, for Travel Assistance. It was charitable work, but I don't know what she did.

Saliga: Did you work at all on the Dominion Center in Toronto with Mies?

Summers: Yes, totally.

Saliga: Totally? You were in charge of the project?

68 Summers: Yes, when I finally left the office, the third building had been finished and a fourth building was going to be done. Peter Carter was working with me, and he took over at that time. When I left the office most of the jobs were either under construction or done. The only building I think that was not—I think that was even under construction, too—was the library in Washington. That had just started construction. All those buildings had been designed.

Saliga: You had worked with Mies on the designs of the buildings and the detailing? The Federal Center too?

Summers: You have to understand at this time—yes, the Federal Center too—Mies didn't take part too much in all these buildings as far as the day-to-day detailing. I would go in and I would ask him about a specific detail that I thought was important, and I wanted to know whether he agreed with that or not. He just was old at this time, and it's a misconception to think that he was creating during that period. He did not create anything in that sense. Creation takes hard work and he wasn't capable of doing that, but he was certainly capable of making a decision, and he exercised that decision just as he did when he told me to start over on the Schweinfurt museum building. He made those kinds of decisions, at least through my time there.

Saliga: That's why you say even though you might have done the detail work or whatever, come up with the conception, he had the decision.

Summers: He had the decision, absolutely. He's the architect. Not only that, it was his direction. It's not as if I or somebody else in the office went off in another direction. It was his direction. I think what I'm proud of, and I'm sure the people in the office are, is we took part in developing that direction. That we did do. Sometimes people that did as much as Joe and I did would be screaming to heaven that they did the building, but that's nonsense. We knew exactly what we were doing and we're proud of it.

69 Saliga: The Federal Center buildings are all sited so well. Did Mies have anything to say about that, because it seems very sensitive?

Summers: Of course he had something to say about it. The story of the Federal Center starts off when Mies was in Europe, in Greece. It's an interesting story. Skip Genther, of PACE Associates, had asked Mies to go in with him and that they would enter the competition of trying to get the job. It just consisted of putting your names in on a form and mailing them in, sending photographs of work and so forth. PACE had associated with Mies on a number of other jobs, and it was a natural thing to do. Mies was in Europe at the time, I think it was his first trip to Europe since he went over, but he was in Greece with Lora Marx. I got a telephone call from Lyn Hunter at GSA in Washington, D.C. and he said, "We're pleased to tell you that you're one of the architects that have been selected to be interviewed to do the Federal Building." "Enter into contracts," is what he said, not be interviewed. He didn't say, "The job is yours," he said, not, "The job is yours if we successfully negotiate a contract." That's as good as saying the job is yours, let me tell you. We were really pleased and then all of a sudden I had hung up, and I thought they didn't mention PACE. I called back, and I said, "Mr. Hunter, PACE wasn't in on that. There were three other architects involved, but PACE wasn't there." He said, "No, we didn't select them as one." I said, "Well, I'll tell you, I don't know what we're going to do, because I really feel we're morally obligated. We went in together with this thing." At about this time I think I had said something to Skip Genther. I called Hunter back, and Hunter said, "Don't fool yourself. PACE submitted your name and their name but they also submitted one by themselves, without Mies." My moral obligations straightened up quite well. I just called Skip back, and I said, "I don't think that we're obligated, and we're going to go and talk to them." Joe and I were very cautious about the whole thing, and we certainly were on the edge of our chairs because we were going to go into partnership with Schmidt, Garden & Erikson, C.F. Murphy and A. Epstein and Sons. We had worked with Murphy on a project once, and we had worked, I think, with Schmidt Garden on one of the school buildings. At those times it was clearly understood that Mies was the designer, the head architect, and they were an

70 associate architect. It was not a joint venture like this one turned out to be. We had all decided that we were going to meet at the hotel at a certain hour Sunday evening before their Monday morning meeting and just have a drink and talk. I said to Joe, "We'd better talk to them about this thing before we go in." We said, "Look you know, we feel really uncomfortable about this thing because Mies is a designer." I couldn't get a whole sentence out of my mouth. Ray Epstein piped up and he said, "Gene, we're not going to ask you to do the electrical." That really took a load off of our shoulders. Even as it ended up later on, we did run into some troubles with some people in one of the firms. One of the designers in the firm thought it was a joint venture, and, by golly, they got to put their two cents in. But, the principals that we dealt with from the very beginning in the offices were always supportive, and it was clearly our job to design and lead the project.

Saliga: How did the responsibilities break down? I would think it would be very difficult to have four firms work together.

Summers: There were a few times that there were some nerves on edge, but it basically worked fine.

Saliga: But basically the design came out of your office?

Summers: Yes, that was clear. There was this one episode, but that was no problem.

Saliga: What was the one episode?

Summers: I started working on that project before Mies even got back from Europe. Joe wasn't involved in it once we got through with these negotiations. I guess he was busy on apartments, I don't know. But the minute Mies came back I had done some models, different possibilities of things. Mies always had this idea—and it was a good idea, and I played the same trick on him as he would play on clients—you do three schemes. If you put one scheme before a client, they'll almost surely not like it. If you put three schemes out there, they'll surely

71 pick one. It was a good technique, and we all used it. You don't put something down that you don't want. In any case we had three schemes, one scheme that we would all have built. One scheme was taking where the first building was built, the Dirksen Building, and that building became a fifty-six-story building, one building. Across the street was total plaza. I don't know that that has ever been shown in books or not, but it was interesting. That still would have been the best building. That was a good solution. Underground, across the street, was a post office, with the possibility of building a low one. What we were trying to do was open one whole open block. It would have been fantastic, with all of the offices over here. We knew that that was a pie in the sky kind of thing. The second one was a solution similar to what was built. And, the third one was one that was three buildings, and the two buildings across the street were lower and they were symmetrical. Instead of having one taller office building as it is now there were two smaller buildings. That was a relationship of buildings that Mies always liked, two equal-height buildings side by side. He always liked that.

Saliga: But that would have done away with the plaza.

Summers: It would have done away with the plaza. I can't say I convinced Mies of this, but I certainly raised a good point, and the idea was that this was going to be phased; it wasn't going to be all done at the same time. That's the reason we knew that first building, scheme A as we called it, the big tall building, would never get built. I kept telling Mies, "Look, the problem with these things when they're equal is that the program could change." I should say that this first building, by the way, across the street, was also the same height, so all three buildings were the same height. If the program changed, and it did by the way, then you've got a building that may be a little higher or a little lower, and you have no control over it. We had scheme B, which we thought would be done: the first building was one height, the second tower was higher, and, therefore, if it went down two floors or up two floors it didn't change the idea, and then the post office was a one-story building with a big plaza. We took these little models to Washington with the whole team. They had a project manager, and

72 the administrator of GSA was involved, and then Senator Dirksen came over to look at it. The project manager was a grumpy old man: "Over my dead body you'll ever do this scheme A. Over my dead body." He was the one who had given us a program which essentially covered the whole site, both sites, I mean lot line to lot line. It was just a clinker, and that's what he wanted us to do. He didn't like any of the schemes. Then Dirksen comes in, and he loves scheme A. It took us probably a month before GSA convinced him that it just was not going to be possible to raise all the money to build this at one time, but he loved it. He probably knew the building was going to be named after him anyway. That was fun because we did not expect that. Once Dirksen got involved, and he was really trying to fight for scheme A, GSA was happy to take scheme B.

Saliga: So they didn't mind the plaza.

Summers: They didn't bring up this other solution.

Saliga: They didn't feel that the plaza was a waste of space, like so many people seemed to?

Summers: The project manager did. It's not a waste of space. There's a misconception even on something like the Seagram Building for instance, where we were talking about open space. Today, and in those days as well, you could only build with so much space. Whether you go up ten floors more or you go down and spill out on the site, it seems to me that the more open space the better as long as you're not getting a needle of a tower that is an inefficient office space. That was a good project, but it was a project that I must have worked on for ten or twelve years. I think there were two wars in there. Every time there was a war the building stopped. The building really didn't stop, but the appropriation stopped and, therefore, the next phase was delayed.

Saliga: The last phase was finished in 1975. Was it Mies's idea to put sculpture out on the plaza?

73 Summers: No.

Saliga: Whose idea was it to put sculpture in the plaza? Was that because of "two percent for the arts"?

Summers: It was actually Carter Manny's idea, of C.F. Murphy, after Mies had died. When we first had the project, they did not have this law that two percent of a project should go into sculpture or art. That wasn't there. It was later. All the buildings were finished, and Carter had this idea. They asked me, "Who do you think?" and I said, "I think it'd be appropriate for Calder because he was a good friend of Mies's. He liked Calder's work and it had the scale." I didn't know anybody that would really be as appropriate. There were some modern sculptors that would certainly have been good, too, but Calder was of Mies's generation, and I think it's absolutely great, the scarlet red and the black building. I'm sure Mies would have been very happy with it.

Saliga: So he never saw it or even knew anything about it?

Summers: No.

Saliga: It is one of the great spaces in the city. Was that the last project that you worked on in Mies's office?

Summers: No. I left in May of 1965, and I still had work on the Federal Building and I had work on the Washington library. The stuff was all under control; there was no new design at that time, no new projects at that time. But the Berlin Museum was just under construction; everything had been done on that. I had good people working with me on all those projects. Peter Carter was on the Toronto Dominion Center, Jack Bowman was on the Washington library, Dirk Lohan was on the Berlin Museum, Bruno Conterato was on the Federal Center, and there were probably a couple more jobs too, but they were lesser.

74 Saliga: What made you decide to leave the office?

Summers: That was something that had been brewing for a couple of years in my own mind. Mies had talked to me on two or three different occasions about having Joe Fujikawa, Bruno Conterato, and myself become partners with him. I was really aghast at the whole idea, and he didn't talk to them about it. He talked to me at that time about it. I said, "Mies, you can't do that. I mean it's ridiculous. I cannot see somebody being a partner with Frank Lloyd Wright, and I certainly can't see it with you. I mean it's an honor that you would ask us, but I just don't see it. I don't think it's good for you, and I don't particularly think it's good for us. The other thing is what sense does it make when something happens to you that Joe or Bruno or I have ourselves as partners. We're all in design." Some partnerships are good because one person does one thing, one does another. We were all designers. We got along fine, there weren't any conflicts, but on the other hand we didn't need each other. That was really my stand, and he dropped it. Six or eight months later he brought it up again, and I said the same thing. He brought it up again probably another six or eight months after that, and at that point all this stuff was under control. A couple years before Mies had turned down the big building in New York, the possibility of going further and being interviewed on the World Trade Center. It certainly wasn't as if we had the job, or could have gotten it, but he turned down even the possibility. There was no big building; there was nothing there that made me say, "I need to stay and I need to do this." I just said to myself and my wife, "I think this is the time." One night I was at dinner with Mies, and I said, "Mies, I think it's time that I leave." He was a bit shocked, and I told him, "Look, some day I've got to leave. Right now all the jobs are in good shape." He said, "Well, why don't you wait for a couple of years?" I said, "Mies, we couldn't be at a better point right now. There's people in charge of each project, there's nothing new that's really here, and I think that this is the time." He said, "Well, I have to say that I understand. I faced the same thing once, and I understand that." But I don't think he really understood it. That was it, and two weeks later I was gone. Everybody thought, "Gee whiz, they must have had a fight or something."

75 Saliga: Yes, I think that's what everyone thought.

Summers: No, there was not a fight at all. I'm sure Mies wasn't happy with the idea, but he certainly didn't argue with me at any great length. It was pretty much just as you and I talked about it. Two weeks later I started my own office.

Saliga: Did you take any clients with you when you left?

Summers: No.

Saliga: Did you have commissions when you left?

Summers: No, none at all.

Saliga: So you really were just starting fresh.

Summers: Oh yes. I would never have taken a client there, even though that happened six or seven months after I'd started my office. I did a few projects really, and I did a competition. It was six or seven months later Leo Cobur of Kemp—which is Phyllis's company in Canada, or she's one of the trustees; I had worked with him on the Toronto Dominion Center—he called me and asked me if I would help him do a project that was a very small project. It was a study; I wasn't even to be the architect. I actually ended up doing two or three studies for him, but it was not as if I was going to go out and take a building away from Mies. I wouldn't do that.

Saliga: So you mostly worked on competitions and studies. Did you realize any projects while you were on your own?

Summers: No, it just lasted eight or nine months. It was pretty short. The transition happened when Hans Neumann, who worked for Murphy, called me one day. It was after McCormick Place burnt down. I never will forget driving by

76 McCormick, and this thing was flat, smoldering. God, it was shocking. I lived on the South Side, and I drove to work on the North Side. It was something. A couple days after that Hans called me, and he said he'd like to have lunch with me. I had lunch with him at the Arts Club. He said, "How would you like to come and do the McCormick Building for C.F. Murphy?" I said, "Hans, you couldn't make me do that for the world. I wouldn't do that." It was a hot potato, there was no question.

Saliga: Everybody was in on that controversy.

Summers: It was a big controversy between the two newspapers, and that was bad.

Saliga: What do you mean, one newspaper was for it and one was against it?

Summers: Yes, oh sure, that's the reason this whole thing was controversial. It wasn't so much that it was on the lake. It was the fact that Colonel McCormick; who instigated the railroad fair, which is the old railroad fair at the site of McCormick Place; thought that there should be a permanent railroad fair. That ended up turning into a convention hall, which he backed. He's the one that really did all of the politicking and lobbying with the state legislature to get the funds to build the original McCormick Place on that lake. And they named that building McCormick because of his intense interest, the publisher of the Tribune. Well, what is the Marshall Field enterprise, the Daily News, going to do? They're going to take whacks at whatever they do. To just keep the story in sequence, the thing that happened is that I told Hans, "No." I didn't leave Mies's office to come to work for another firm, and I wouldn't want to do the convention hall. As much as I'd like to do it, I wouldn't do it under the circumstances, so that was that. Hans was pretty persistent, and a couple of days later he called again and said, "Let's have lunch again." I said, "Hans, we don't have to have lunch. I don't want to do it." He was really asking only if I would come and design that building, and I said—and I was not trying to make a proposal to him, but I was trying to make my position clear—"The only way I would ever come there is if I was totally the designer, if I was a full

77 partner in the firm, and if I could work on McCormick Place with Mies as we had worked on other projects. But thanks anyway." He hung up and the next day I got a call from Charlie Murphy, Jr. He said, "I'd like to see you." That actually is the way it started. He offered me a partnership. I was fully in charge of design of the whole firm, and I could approach Mies and try to get him involved in McCormick Place, which then was the first thing I did. I went to Mies. It was actually the first time after I had left his office nine months before, and the last time that I ever saw or talked to him, that meeting. I went there in the afternoon to his apartment, and I told him what the whole situation was. I said, "What I would really like is for you to do this building, and I will work with you just exactly as I did in the office." He said, "Gene, I wouldn't touch that thing if the site was the Acropolis and the building was the Parthenon. Controversy I don't need at this time in my life."

Saliga: He was very old then.

Summers: Yes, that was in 1967. I don't think too many people know that before I went to Murphy's I wanted to offer him that possibility because the Convention Hall project that he did was one of the best projects that he did.

Saliga: One of the great projects.

Summers: Not that that particular site could have taken that, but to have given him that opportunity I think it would have been great. On the other hand, I understood it. Mies told me, "I think it's a great opportunity for you, and I think you should do it. I think you should go to that firm because in a big firm you'll get big jobs."

Saliga: And so with that advice you went.

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: It was good advice.

78 Summers: Yes, it was good advice.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Summers: It was really a prime time and perfect time in my life to have that problem, because I had a lot of experience on big buildings. I had done fairly large-span buildings, and it was not something that would intimidate me as a project, McCormick Place, I mean. I certainly didn't know what I was getting into when it came to the personalities involved.

Saliga: How so? What personalities?

Summers: The general manager. A man by the name of Ed Lee was the general manager of McCormick Place, and he was the pet, hand-picked man of Don Maxwell. Don Maxwell was then the editor and publisher of the Tribune. McCormick had died. Don Maxwell had picked Ed Lee, and the Tribune still backed everything that the management of McCormick Place would want. It was still their building in their eyes. At the same time the Daily News, with Emmett Dedmond as the editor at that time—Emmett Dedmond and all of his staff of reporters were attacking McCormick Place and everything that had to do with it. So there was this newspaper battle, and I ended up being absolutely right between that, those two people. Strangely enough, I got along with Dedmond. Dedmond was probably more supportive that Maxwell, no question, in the beginning. Lee was a really bad character. The very first meeting I had with him should have told me the whole story. I went in, I think Hans Neumann was with me, and we sat down at the table with Lee. I said to him at first that, "I'll be in charge for the office and the project and that we were really happy to work on it, and we would like to have any kind of program that they have so we could start working." I said, "I'd love to have a list of convention halls throughout the country that you think we should visit to give us insight before we start on the design process." He said, "We know exactly what we

79 want. You don't have to visit anything." That was the start, right then and there.

Saliga: What did he want? Did he want something like the first McCormick Place?

Summers: What he really wanted is somebody to sit there and make him happy by saying, "Yes" to everything he said. He was just simply a bad character. I hate to say that about somebody, particularly somebody who I guess is now dead. He caused more problems. We went to the mayor about this guy. In the end he cut his own throat. After it was all over, and we had finally won all the battles—in this case I really won these battles because it was a fight with him constantly—in the end he sticks his foot in his mouth by talking about the teamsters. At that point Ray Schesling was the chairman of McCormick Place, and he fired him just like that. This was after the building was finished. It was a terrible thing, terrible situation, and I lost a lot of sleep over that job. We had three different designs. We followed his ideas. We ended up with a four-story exhibition hall. We had a separate Arie Crown Theater, and it was an okay building, but I wasn't really very happy with it. But, it was the best that I thought we could do with his program. You had to build a special, new, really enormous elevator that you drive trucks on to, take them up into the building, unload them and take them back down. I think it would have been a nightmare, but that's what he wanted. It's a bit like if you had to have all your pictures brought up on a truck in the Art Institute, unload up on the fourth floor, and then get back. It's crazy. You couldn't tell him a thing, so we ended up presenting it. He accepted it and then it was published in the newspaper. Then, all of a sudden, all of the exhibitors started this public outcry about the fact that this thing was not functional. It was terrible.

Saliga: With the trucks going up in the elevator?

Summers: Yes. I had told Lee that we ought to talk to these guys, and he'd have nothing of it, nothing whatsoever. The mayor called Charlie and me in and said, "We have to do something about this thing. All this publicity is not good." I told

80 him, "I think we ought to redesign the building. It's as simple as that. And I think we ought to meet with the users of the building and ask them what they would like." Lee was fuming over all of this; he hated it. We met with the users, and they simply said, "Look, it's a very simple problem. We want the biggest, absolutely biggest, space we can get for exhibits, all on one level, if you can do it." I started over on the thing and came up with the solution of the suspension structure. Enter in Henry Crown, after this building. The building spanned the entire length of the site, and the suspension structure went the whole length. There were no columns in the whole structure. I had taken Arie Crown Theater and reduced its size from four thousand, which is an impossible size anyway for a theater, down to twenty-one hundred people, and it was all underground, but it was a theater. It's an enclosed thing, anyway. We then met with users. The users loved it, absolutely loved it. We thought we were off and running. And then one day Charlie Murphy, Sr., gets a telephone call, and he says that Henry Crown would like to meet us for cocktails at the Tavern Club. Well, what does Henry Crown want to meet with me for? Little me. C.F. Murphy, Sr., I can understand. I knew immediately what it was. I absolutely knew it immediately. Murphy Sr. was saying on the way down in a cab, "What do you think he wants?" I said, "I know what he wants. What we have just done in our scheme is visually, not formally, but we have visually eliminated Arie Crown Theater, to him. It's underground, he can't see it. In our first solution we had a separate little building there for Arie Crown Theater, and it's slightly smaller." Arie Crown was Henry Crown's father. It was named after Arie Crown because Henry Crown had given two hundred and fifty thousand dollars toward the original building. He did not want to see this building diminished in size and therefore diminished in importance. I knew that was what he was after. We started off, and he was a very smooth gentlemen. He started talking about the fact that his engineers, A. Epstein and Sons, whom I knew from the Federal Center experience, had told him that this building that I had designed, this suspension building, would really tear itself. It really wouldn't work. I knew exactly what he was talking about as far as what the structural problem was, but I said, "No, they're wrong. I would be delighted if they would come and talk to us about it because

81 I know what they're talking about, I have gone to two of the biggest bridge builders in the United States, in New York, and we have a solution for what they're talking about." Then it kind of came around to the business of the Arie Crown Theater.

Saliga: The real issue.

Summers: He told us a story, and I tried to explain to him that we could make a finer theater out of it. He didn't come right out and say, "Look, I want to have this theater," but the handwriting was on the wall. About this time Mr. Murphy said, "I've got to leave." Also at about this time the whole board shows up at the Tavern Club, the McCormick Place board: George Halas and Wirtz, the Blackhawks owner and a big real estate man, and three or four of the others, Ray Schesling was a member of the board then. They all showed up for drinks and said, "Come on, Gene, join us." Then Crown left. This had all been planned. It had all been set up, and I was probably on my fourth martini by then and on my way to getting slightly snorkeled. I had great experience with Mies of drinking martinis and I had a pretty good capacity. That was quite an evening. They were trying to convince me that they loved the scheme. Somebody had planted the idea that structurally this thing could not work. Wirtz said, "Gene, I really like these things, these things that look like cables there." I said, "They are cables." He said, "We could hang lights on them, and we could still put columns underneath them." They kept trying to tell me that we needed to do this or that on the project that night. It was so funny because Emmett Dedmond, who was the editor of the Daily News, was there at the bar. Everybody was there but Don Maxwell of the Tribune. At one time I went into the bar, and Dedmond stopped and he said, "Gene, Wirtz just came and he says you're really a tough cookie. Keep it up!" I wasn't a tough cookie at all; it wasn't a matter of that. I certainly wasn't changing my mind, in that sense I was stubborn, but not tough. There was no opposition to the building from the people that wanted to use it. The only opposition was the pressure that Crown put upon Maxwell. Maxwell was putting the pressure, then, on us. It got to the point where even Charlie and I had to go talk to Maxwell. Part of

82 the whole problem was that I was strictly getting to the point of being embarrassed, professionally. I had done one project that got publicized, and then we had to start over. This other one appeared in all the newspapers, front page, and to have to turn around and do it again, I told Charlie my first impression, "Charlie, I'm not going to do it. If you want to do it, do it, I'm just not going to do it. There's not a good reason to start over. It's a good building." Maxwell put the pressure on, and I finally said, "All right, I'll try once more."

Saliga: Is that how you came up with two separate buildings under one roof?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: That was a brilliant solution.

Summers: And also to try to open the site up by punching that hole through. That was exactly it.

Saliga: So the theater doesn't really have a great presence of its own, but they know that this is the theater part and this is the exhibition hall part.

Summers: It was. I understand they've closed this in now and so it's buried. It could have been the first scheme.

Saliga: Right, now that they've changed it. But that was acceptable to them, just to make that separation?

Summers: Yes, everybody was happy, and we were off and running.

Saliga: Then your problems were over with McCormick Place?

Summers: No. The building is glass, and Lee was another client in my experience that said, "Over my dead body we'll have glass in this building." He wanted it enclosed, totally enclosed. There are reasons. I understood his point. We had a

83 seventy-five-foot cantilever, an enormous cantilever, so the amount of direct light that got into the building was minimal, except in the very late afternoons in the winter and sunny days. There was a pretty interesting thing that happened on that. It was late, the building was already up or almost finished, and he said, "We've got to solve this problem of sun coming in at this particular time." I said, "All right." I came up with idea of getting Jim Dine, who is a friend and also I collected his work, to do a painting that would have actually been, like, seven hundred feet long. These were to be done on large screens that rolled up. He did a series, what he calls a landscape, where you have a panel of snow, a panel of grass, a panel of different textures and colors. We made a model of it, made a brochure of it. I took it actually to the mayor and showed him.

Saliga: Did the mayor like it?

Summers: He didn't understand it, but he didn't have any problems with it. Lee thought it was awful. We actually made a public presentation of it and in the end Lee gave up the whole idea. There has never been any sun control, not now nor while I was there, and they don't need it.

Saliga: I don't think they have any problems with it.

Summers: No. That was one way of avoiding putting up some awful blinds, by getting this really strong painter to paint this thing.

Saliga: That would have been wonderful.

Summers: It was nice, actually, it was pretty nice. I'm glad they didn't do it at all because I think technically these things would have eventually torn or have gotten dirty.

Saliga: And they are artwork.

84 Summers: Yes, it's really better to do it this way. It was interesting. In retrospect it was a pretty clever way of getting what I wanted anyway.

Saliga: You said that Mies had Lora Marx call you and tell you that he liked the building.

Summers: That was nice, that made my day. I was very happy that he said that.

Saliga: It was a wonderful compliment. Are you happy with the building?

Summers: Yes. I haven't seen it for about four years, even now. I'll try to see it this afternoon. I understand that they enclosed it, and that didn't help anything.

Saliga: But it doesn't look bad. It's very much in keeping with the materials that you used.

Summers: Certainly from the inside it doesn't change. It doesn't change from the outside too much because the cantilever and the structure were very strong; they dominated. What it did change that I always liked a lot is when you could drive right straight through that roof. That was a good feeling, and that they lost. I'm also curious see the other building that is up there and to see how McCormick Place holds there.

Saliga: Do you feel that McCormick Place is the building that you're most proud of of all the buildings you've designed?

Summers: I think so, but for really another reason. I'll come back to that reason in a second. I think that both buildings in Kansas City are equally as good. They're not as big, but both the arena and the convention center there are good buildings. I think the thing about McCormick Place is it was done under such trying conditions. To have pulled it off under those conditions, that was something.

85 Saliga: It was an incredible feat.

Summers: I don't want to say it that way, but I'm proud of that at least. Somebody could have so easily buckled down and that could have been a bomb. So in that sense I'm proud of it, but I would have rather been able to do the second building because it would have been a better building for the purpose.

Saliga: When you were working on McCormick Place there were other projects that came into the Murphy office that you were working on as well, like Malcolm X Junior College.

Summers: A lot of them, Audy Home, Skil, the Rehab Institute. There were a number of buildings.

Saliga: I am curious about Malcolm X College. I have never seen it, but it's a three- block-long building.

Summers: I don't see how you could have missed it, if you ever drive out the Eisenhower Expressway. It's a low building so it is hard to miss. It's only three stories but it's very long.

Saliga: Why did you decide to make it one building instead of breaking it up into a campus, into separate buildings?

Summers: Because the weather in Chicago is so lousy, and it was essentially a junior college, which is a step above a high school, where there's no reason to leave. It was broken up inside. I'd say probably the other reason is that the site, even though it was long, was only a block narrow. You could have put buildings in a row, but you couldn't move them; you couldn't get space. I'm trying to think back because there certainly was some reason beyond just wanting to have a building three blocks long. As I recall, it's really the constrictions and the width of the site that did it. But there is another aspect that I think is correct about the thing from viewing it. When you're using the building, first of all you don't

86 see it. It would have been nice if you did have a campus plan-like situation where you had outside spaces. If the site had allowed that, it would have been nice. But, once you're passing it at fifty-five miles per hour on the freeway, the length of the thing is probably an attribute. It's foreshortened, but you don't really see it very much because it's so low.

Saliga: Was that received as a really successful building?

Summers: Yes, we won some awards. I think it was a good building. Tom Beeby worked with me on that.

Saliga: He was with Murphy then.

Summers: Yes, he was working on it when I came into the office, and he was in his Le Corbusier period then. He was a good man to work with, and he accepted my ideas and worked towards them. He was good. I always enjoyed working with Tom. He worked with me also on the Skil buildings. Those were some nice buildings. We really did only two buildings, but it was a plan that included a main executive office building that never got built.

Saliga: So you were the chief designer for Murphy at that point?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: Brownson was working there at the same time, wasn't he?

Summers: No, Jack had left. Jack had left some years, maybe a couple of years, before I got there. He had gone to the University of Michigan as the head of the Department of Architecture. No, he wasn't there.

Saliga: Had you ever worked with him on anything?

87 Summers: I never did. He was in Mies's office for a very short while before I got there, and of course he was associated with Mies at the school for many years. I knew him as a friend, and I certainly respected his work, but he had left the office.

Saliga: One thing I wanted to ask about all of these C.F. Murphy projects is, when you used landscape architects did you use Alfred Caldwell, or was there a particular firm that you used so that the aesthetic would be similar?

Summers: Whenever I could I did it myself. I have used Caldwell before. I used Caldwell actually later on a project in California a little bit. I've always been interested in landscape. On McCormick Place, Tom Beeby and I did the landscape plan. I really have never used a formal landscape architect outside of that experience I had with Caldwell.

Saliga: What project was that on?

Summers: It was one of our industrial projects in California when we built them ourselves. He actually ended up starting it, and then we ended up in the office finishing it because he then moved out of California. I wanted to get him started and help him actually.

Saliga: Do you enjoy doing the landscape plans?

Summers: Yes. I like plants, I really like plants. It's always been part of my life. I know plants pretty well.

Saliga: Where was the garden at McCormick Place?

Summers: The whole top of the garage, all along the lake. In spite of the fact that it wasn't very wide, it was awfully long. We planted a lot of trees and a walk that wound through the area, and we mounded earth.

88 Saliga: You were at Murphy for about seven years. Why did you finally decide to leave Murphy?

Summers: A couple years before I did leave finally, Phyllis Lambert got interested in architecture, after the Seagram Building, particularly. She went to Yale, took some courses, and then ended up coming to IIT to get a graduate degree. Prior to that, I think the summer before she started at IIT, she called me up one day and said, "Could I work in Mies's office?" I said, "Sure." She worked for a short while in Mies's office, and then she went to IIT and finished her degree, and she opened an office up in Chicago. We kind of kept in contact, not on a regular basis but every once in a while. During the period that I was in Murphy's office, one time she came, and she said she was going to go to Canada and open an office. She was going to go to Toronto where Fairview, her development company, was. I said to her, "Phyllis, why don't you learn the development business? You can influence more architecture there than ever by being an architect. Your brothers and sisters who are, with you, the owners of this company, are not interested in that. They all have their businesses that they're interested in." She said, "Well, that's not a bad idea." The next time I saw her was quite some time later. She said, "Well, I thought about it, but they've got a professional staff there. I'm a stockholder, and I just didn't think it made sense to do that." I don't know if it was at that same time or whether it was later, I think it was at the same time, she said, "Would you consider if we started a development company in the U.S." Fairview at that time had not come into the United States, and she remarked to that extent. She said, "It won't have anything to do with Fairview, but you and I will form a company and be a development company." I said, "Let me think about it." I started thinking about. I think I asked her at one point, "Would you mind if I stayed with Murphy and maybe somehow you can be part of this team as well, and then we'll have another team that are developers?" I explored that with her, and then I explored it with Charlie. Charlie didn't want me to leave the office; that was for sure. He said, "If you can fix up a development company, then do it." I left it at that, and I just never could do anything on the development thing because I was kept busy with all the design. It suddenly became clear to me

89 that it couldn't be done. I couldn't do both. I just decided that experience was something that I was interested in, different kinds of experience, and I had done a lot of office buildings, and I hoped to do more in this different way of doing them. I thought that would be a good thing. It was a hard decision because I was quite successful then and I was going to start all over in a business that I really didn't know. But, I decided to do it, and then I started looking around the country as to where we should go, and I ended up looking at California. Phyllis agreed and that's how it all began.

Saliga: So what kind of projects did you develop, then, with Phyllis?

Summers: We did industrial buildings and we did hotels, the renovation of hotels. We actually had a new hotel project in downtown, an urban redevelopment thing. We even had designed it, but we had the project stopped because of the economy at the time. When that stopped, one day a broker called me and said the Biltmore was for sale. I didn't really know the hotel at that time, but I said I'd go by and look at it. The minute I walked into it, I knew what the price was. I said, "This has got to be better than building a new hotel." I called up Phyllis immediately and I said, "Phyllis, what do you think if were to renovate and redo the Biltmore rather than a new hotel?" Phyllis had already gotten involved in restoration ventures in Montreal, so she was all for it. I went to the CCA, which was the Los Angeles board that dealt with renewal, and told them what I had in mind. They said, "I think it's great. In spite of the fact that we would love to have you do this other project, this is in the same area. It's something somebody else is not going to want to do." At that time they were talking about turning the Biltmore into housing for the elderly, which would have been horrible. It was terrible, right in this urban area, terrible. They were very happy that we were going to do that. We dropped the new building project, and we started that one. We had two other projects that were underway in California, and these were industrial parks. One of them had sixteen building in it, and the other one had six buildings in it.

Saliga: Were you the designer of the buildings?

90 Summers: We designed them. I got my contractor's license. I got my exam. That's the thing that I was most proud of, we built them. We were the contractor. We were the owner, the architect, the contractor, and we ended up managing the industrial project and ended up managing the hotel, a one-thousand-room hotel. If you ever heard the story of the architect that thinks he can do everything, that's what I guess I thought. It was a great experience. It was just wonderful.

Saliga: How long did that last?

Summers: Twelve years.

Saliga: Longer than your time with C.F. Murphy.

Summers: Yes, twelve years, from 1973 until 1985. In 1985 our accountants, which were Price Waterhouse, came to me one day and said, "Gene, we have to tell you this. There's a tax law that could affect Phyllis. She's a Canadian citizen and her money came from Canada, the equity that went into these projects. If she gets her money out by liquidating the companies, she wouldn't have to pay any tax in the United States, any U.S. tax." This was actually about eleven years at that time; we had been very successful. We had not made any money at the time, but all our projects were rented and we were pouring money that we were making back into the Biltmore. We just kept putting it back in. If we were to have sold them, we would have made a profit, and if she had gotten that profit out, there would be no taxes for her. I said, "Well, this is not going to be very good for me, but I certainly can't keep this kind of information away from Phyllis." I went there the first time, and she said, "No, I don't want to do it." But, a little bit later, probably a year later or so, she had a new advisor who was stronger in trying to convince her that this was a good thing. It would have meant a very large sum of tax money that she would have been able to keep rather than pay the government. At the same time I must also say that Phyllis had gotten very, very much more interested and involved, and had in fact started, the whole Canadian Centre for Architecture project. I think that

91 without any doubt I would have done the same thing if I were her. Although I wasn't clapping over the whole thing, I understood it and I wasn't bitter at all, because it was clear. It took about eight months or a year to finally liquidate everything, and we did it barely in time.

Saliga: You mean because the laws were going to change?

Summers: Yes, that was the whole point, of when we had to do it. We had to do by a certain deadline. It was by March of 1985. We got it done just in time. So then I was going to start over on my own.

Saliga: A development company?

Summers: Yes. I didn't know whether to do the development or the architecture. If I had done the architecture I would have come back to Chicago because that's where I know people, but as a developer I knew the development area of California, and I decided to do that. Development has the advantage of you being able to call pretty much all your shots yourself. Even though the disadvantage of it is that you're very much more affected financially by the cyclical times that we go through economically. Before I decided, I said, "Okay, I'm going to go to Europe for a little while. I might stay a whole year."

Saliga: And think about it.

Summers: Not so much think about it. I just wanted to really travel, which I hadn't done. I ended up buying a house in France, and there I am.

Saliga: And staying there.

Summers: And then I got interested in the furniture while I was over there. I'd always been interested in furniture. I'd done a lot of furniture in Mies's office actually, for the buildings. A lot of design, for the Federal Building. I was involved in the

92 designs of furniture for that. I got very interested in the bronze furniture, in doing bronze.

Saliga: How would you describe the furniture that you're designing now?

Summers: I'll show you later, I have the pictures. It's somewhere between sculpture and functional furniture. It has objects on tables, sometimes. I've been working for two years on it, and it will evolve. But, I'm really interested in it and I like doing it a lot because I can design it. Sometimes I'll design it over a drawing board and then I'll go make it out of plaster. Then I take it to the foundry and I have it cast. I'm able to work on it there. You can work on it at every stage. You don't have to talk to clients, you don't have to talk to employees, it's all your own hands. I always enjoyed working in the architectural parts; the most fun of the whole thing is the designing and the drawing and the model-making. That's what I've got now. I don't know how long it will last, but I hope it will last a long time.

Saliga: Do you think you'd ever get back into architecture and development?

Summers: I'm sure that I easily could, but what I'm not really anxious to look at is coming back to a place and opening up an architectural office and having to fight for clients. It's not necessarily a fight in the sense of that kind of struggle, but it is a problem. You do have to do a lot of things that I don't particularly like to do to get jobs. I still like buildings and like to design buildings.

Saliga: I think you'll probably never stop designing buildings. It's part of your nature.

Summers: I enjoy just as much, though, working on a piece of furniture as I do working on a building. To me I don't have a problem. I'll probably end up doing a house pretty soon for myself and that will be fun.

Saliga: Will it be a steel and glass house?

93 Summers: That depends on where it is. If it's in France it won't be. It'll be a stone building if it's in the part that I am now. That's their tradition. They have quarries right near it.

Saliga: There were a few things that I wanted to get back to.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Saliga: When you started your firm on your own after you left Mies's office, the one person who you hired was Helmut Jahn, right out of school.

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: Did you have any idea at that point of his potential?

Summers: Of course not. I started getting some work, and I needed a person. I interviewed three people that were just out of graduate school at IIT. You never know in interviews; that's really hit or miss. I chose Helmut. We really hadn't been there probably two weeks before I got this situation with McCormick Place. I ended up taking Helmut with me to Murphy's office. It certainly wasn't long after that, really working with Helmut, that I knew he was talented. But, at that time I also had Beeby in the office, and John Novack. I also had several other people that were working on buildings that maybe are not as well-known as those people are today. Those people all did projects. They were doing certain projects, and I would work with them on those projects. They were all good, those were all good people. On McCormick Place I actually had more, because it's such a big building. At one time we probably had forty architects working on McCormick Place alone. Helmut was involved in the design of McCormick and stayed on that job for quite awhile. Later he worked on both the Convention Center in Kansas City and the Arena with me. Those two he worked on with me. When I actually ended up leaving Murphy's office, Charlie told me at that time that he wanted to hire another architect. After Brownson left, I think that was one of his ideas, it's probably a

94 very good idea, getting a strong designer in there. They had the political clout to get the jobs and to have somebody good. There were a lot of good buildings done in Murphy's office. He said he was going to get another architect, who will remain nameless. I said, "Charlie, I wouldn't do that. Why don't you just wait? Helmut is there, and why don't you just see how he grows?" I didn't have any doubt about his design abilities. I had doubts about his abilities to deal with clients. He just didn't deal with clients while I was there. I was the one that was doing most of that. He didn't have that opportunity. I didn't know whether he could handle that part, but I said, "I don't see any point in rushing it, let's just leave it as it is." He did and Helmut grew and he's done quite well, I would say.

Saliga: Actually after you left he emerged as the strong designer in that firm. One thing that's kind of interesting to speculate about is—of course it would be impossible for Mies to be alive today—but if he were what do you think his architecture would be like? So many architects have taken Mies's basic vocabulary and grown with it and gone with it. You could even use Helmut as a case. What direction do you think Mies would have gone in?

Summers: It's just impossible to answer that question. First of all, if you take Mies when I knew him, when he was in his sixties, and you were to say what would he have done today, I would say he would not have done anything differently than he was doing then. It was his mentality to be that way. But, if you were to take Mies when he was thirty or forty and put him here today, I think he would do it differently. This is all speculation, and it's kind of absurd to speculate on something like that. But, I definitely have that feeling that Mies as an older man would not change his mind, but Mies as a younger man would be much more exploratory.

Saliga: As he was in his own life.

Summers: Yes. That's about all I can think of on it.

95 Saliga: When all is said and done, how do you regard your career in relation to Mies?

Summers: Better let somebody else answer that one. I would say that one of the great experiences, if not the greatest experience, was my having the opportunity to work with Mies for all those years, so to speak in his golden years, and to be recognized and get a lot of jobs. That was really an honor for me, to have been able to play a part in all of that. I look back upon it as that. I don't know what else to say about it. Certainly after I left the office I carried that on. For a period of time I carried that on. I don't even try to speculate. I don't know what I would have done myself had I stayed in that office in 1973. From then onward where would I be today? That would be, to me, interesting too, but there's no way I can say where I would be. You do these things by working on the projects. Things were beginning to change in my own mind before I left. The buildings that I worked on with Helmut, the Convention Center in Kansas City, the Arena in Kansas City, and the building I worked on with John Novack, which was a project which was across the street from First National Bank that never got built—there were things happening in those buildings that were not in Mies's buildings. It would have changed, but I would never have been a Postmodernist, as I understand Postmodernists. I find it mainly very superficial. Change I would have done. I can sit back and look at one of their buildings and not be offended because I don't feel like I'm a competitor of theirs. But for the most part I think it's meaningless and it won't last very long. It hasn't lasted very long already. I think the thing that hurts me the most about those buildings—and I'm not speaking of any one building, nearly all of them have the same problem—and that is they are spending so much money on their forms that they haven't got the money to do decent details, use decent materials. You take some of Michael Graves's buildings. I haven't seen the Humana Building in Louisville, but I saw the one in Portland. Even though I know Graves and I'm reasonably friendly with him, he has this language that he has developed, and I admire him for that. It's not the language that I wish to speak but I admire him for that. But, what I cannot admire him for is the fact that he will build this form out of tile or out of plaster and paint it. It's just so incongruous to me that you have this strong form and yet it's made up like a

96 stage set. That's what it all comes off as, like a stage set. Without going into names and everything that much, which I really don't want to. I don't put Helmut in that category.

Saliga: What do you think of the State of Illinois Center, some of his older buildings?

Summers: There are buildings that I like better than others, just like the work when I do my own, or Mies's. I think his United Terminal at O’Hare is the best thing he's done. Period.

Saliga: I don't mean to put you on the spot here, but you kind of wonder, too, about the architects who continued strictly in using Mies's vocabulary. What I'm thinking of specifically is the Illinois Center project, where it's tower after tower after tower of the same design. You just wonder where does that end, where does that leave us in the end?

Summers: I'll make this remark about it, and then I think it's about all I can say. I wouldn't have done it. I know that I would not have done that. That was one of the reasons, in fact, that I didn't want to stay in that office. I didn't want to have the problem of working under the Mies label for six years at least after he died. Yet, on the other hand, I did believe in the direction, and I still believe in it. I think out of that comes things. I know I would not have done that, and yet I'll say this. I looked at the buildings this morning as I was walking by, from up in that direction. I'm staying at Helmut's, so Helmut drove me to his office and I walked by them. I tell you, in maybe ten more years after now, when we look back on all this stuff and look at those buildings too, and we get all these things out of our mind, I think they're going to be pretty nice buildings. We'll look at them differently. That's about all I have to say. I don't know what else to say other than I know I wouldn't have done them that way. And yet, I think they will be looked upon twenty, thirty, or forty years from now better than we look upon them today. I would almost bet that. I'll tell you what it's like, I can appreciate this even more. If I built a house today in the south of France, as I said I'd build it out of stone, it's like building a building with a material

97 that was built two thousand years before, and therefore it's going to be less individual. But, if you use all of your know-how in putting this building together, and it's a really good building, and you look back on it, in the long run you'll find a good building. The same kind of thing I think will happen as we look back on buildings like that. We'll see.

Saliga: Is there any subject that we haven't touched upon that you wanted to bring up, or anything that you wanted to go into in more detail? Anything about Mies or about your own work?

Summers: I think it's more important to think of Mies.

Saliga: Do you think that you have any attributes, personally, that enabled you to continue to work so well with Mies?

Summers: I just liked him, beyond being totally respectful of him and his ideas. After the Seagram experience that I had, which was working on one of the greatest buildings he ever did and being such a part of the thing, on top of all of that, we were thrown into a situation where he was living in New York by himself and I was in New York, and the only one in the office. He was forced, he was actually forced to rely on me more. We had dinner and lunch, so we just got a lot closer. I had this strong interest and love of art that he also had, so I'm sure that all those things combined. I think I also, in modesty, am, in fact, modest. That is something that I think that he appreciated. I wasn't aggressive. I never tried to horn in on things. I think that was his nature or he liked that nature. Nobody's the same. I certainly am not as much as an introvert as he was, but on the other hand I'm not a strong extrovert.

Saliga: Probably you were also able to work with him without having ego clashes.

Summers: None whatsoever.

Saliga: Maybe that's why it worked so well.

98 Summers: I certainly had things that I would believe in. I won't use the word argue because it was never an argument. You didn't argue with Mies, but you certainly presented a strong case and tried to sell him. I sold him on things, and I lost things, in probably equal measures. I had enough talent at least and experience to be useful to him. I think all those combinations made it so that I was helpful to him and at the same time he enjoyed it.

Saliga: Are there drawings of yours that exist, or is there material other than what you would have done that's in the Mies archive, or what you would have done that's at C.F. Murphy?

Summers: I don't have anything.

Saliga: Say someone wants to write a monograph about Gene Summers, where would they look for material?

Summers: Go to the Museum of Modern Art. I have a lot of drawings there that were done in Mies's office. I had a lot of things that I did in Murphy's office that I was really interested in and liked. I wanted to do something different than what we did in Mies's office. We always did the same kind of drawings, for a good reason. I also wanted to be able to do it so that other people could work on these things, and yet they would all end up looking the same, which is the way this whole conté crayon-type drawing in Mies's office worked. If you learned to do that the right way you could never tell who did which drawing, unless you happened to know. I thought that was great. The way we made ink drawings in the office, nobody can really tell unless they really did it and knew that they did it. So, I was going to try to do that at Murphy's, and did do it. I used a process of silkscreening. I'd take drawings, and you could take collages, you could take mainly ink drawings, and you would silkscreen them. You would put those either on paper, or we put them a lot on colored plastics. I remember on one of the Skil jobs where I used a color like your sweater there, believe it or not, and then printed a gray ink on it. They were quite beautiful

99 drawings. There are some that exist, but I mean we had a lot of those things. I had a cabinet built for them, and they just evaporated. After I left, people took them. They're out somewhere.

Saliga: I can't say that I've ever seen any of them.

Summers: I have three of those I think, three or four of those. When my son actually worked in Murphy's office one summer, Charlie or Helmut gave him those and sent them back to me in California. I had called Charlie and had said, "Charlie, I'd buy the drawings from you. I'd like to buy them." They were my drawings, and I knew Helmut wouldn't necessarily want them. But, I never have been able to find them. When they went to look they were sort of all gone. I know a bunch of people that probably have them.

Saliga: We have a really beautiful drawing in our collection. I think it was Carter Manny who gave it to us when he was still at Murphy. It's of McCormick Place, but it's more of a collage and it's all very delicately cut out and applied onto the background. Do you know it?

Summers: I worked with that, but Tom Beeby worked on that too. There were two Toms, Tom Burke and Tom Beeby, and I think it was Beeby that worked on it. Do you remember whether it had ivy on the wall? But I know Tom Beeby worked with me on a number of those because he and I were both really enthused and interested in kind of developing this technique. We did them for Skil, we did them for McCormick, we did them for Westside College, and we did them for several other projects.

Saliga: They were silkscreened on film you say?

Summers: No, on heavy plexiglass. What you might have is original art work. I don't know whether you have one of the prints. I'd kept all the screens and the things. That would have made an interesting show actually because we had

100 enough of them to put them together as a group, and they kind of held together as a group. They were different colors.

Saliga: You have to check those people who worked at Murphy and find out where they went. Didn't you use professional renderers sometimes too?

Summers: Yes, I never did like to do that. We did it on McCormick Place to make renderings for brochures to send out to the users. We used Helmut Jacoby to do that. Somehow they're not art. They're not what I consider art.

Saliga: No, and you know that they're not of the architect's own hand, which is unfortunate.

Summers: We were more or less forced to do that in Mies's office too. You see the renderings we did there we practically did for ourselves. They were not something the client could understand. They were not glamorous color.

Saliga: Did you include those in exhibitions though? Were there a lot of exhibitions of drawings?

Summers: Not at all, but certainly way back before my time, when they did the Museum of Modern Art show, they had some. When Speyer put the one together which had a lot of Mies's furniture in it, he had a number of those renderings. Those were done more for ourselves than anything else. And later we found that for the client, the model was a more effective tool because they could see it, they understood it more. So we didn't make so many collages. But most of the collages in Mies's office we made for ourselves. We'd show them to a client, but they didn't quite understand it. I made two actually for Bacardi. I remember showing it to Bosch, and he understood it. We had a photograph outside the window of the actual landscape, but it's not as clear as that model was.

101 Saliga: When you look back on your whole career—not that it's over with yet by any means—but up to this point, for what would you most like to be remembered?

Summers: Modesty. I don't know.

Saliga: Is there a project that stands out, or would it be your collaborations with Mies?

Summers: No. My personality certainly ties into my leaving Murphy's office at the time that I left it. I have an ego, sure, but if I had an ego as strong as some people have egos I never would have left Murphy's office. I was in a situation where I had for ten years at least been immediately next to Mies, one of the greatest masters of architecture of the twentieth century, if not the greatest. I had been present when he had gotten letters that gave him the Knight Commander's Cross of the German Order of Merit, the highest order that Germany presents, the Medal of Freedom of the United States, the British Architects highest award.

Saliga: The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) award.

Summers: And the AIA's highest award, all these things. A person could not have achieved more. I was there, and I felt part of the whole thing, and yet I saw still just a human being. I didn't have this driving necessity burning inside myself that said, "I've got to be there. I'm going to be in that position. ' Whether that was good sense or just my character I don't totally know. I don't even think that a person can, even if they have that character of wanting to be number one. The time has a lot to do with it. I didn't have any problems with my own attitude of saying, "No, I don't have to be another Mies or another Wright or somebody like that. I've enjoyed what I've done and I'm going to enjoy what I'm going to do." I feel quite comfortable with what I have done. That's the way it is.

Saliga: Do you think we should stop here?

102 Summers: Yes, unless you have more questions.

Saliga: You mentioned that the Murphy firm was well-connected politically. I always wondered what the real story was with Daley and Murphy Sr. Was it true that they went to high school together?

Summers: That's how I understand it. My experience there actually surprised me, the fact that I thought that you could get people paying money under the table, and here they got all of the big jobs. I couldn't believe it. They had O'Hare, they had the filtration plant, they had McCormick Place. I could just see money going under the table. I thought I was going to be seeing that. It didn't happen that way. I'll tell you a story that I'm not ashamed of putting absolutely on the record. I had heard that they got all these jobs, and I kept thinking these things. On one occasion, as I was very close to Charlie Jr., Charlie Sr. was absolutely not involved in the office at that time, he just simply wasn't. He would come in occasionally, but he wasn't part of it; he didn't get jobs. Charlie Murphy is the one that would deal with clients at certain times, and he would deal with the mayor at certain times because he knew him.

Saliga: You're talking about Junior or Senior?

Summers: Junior. I would go with Charlie to see the mayor nearly every time, because when we went there it had to do with a job. One day Charlie called me into the office, and he said, "Gene, we've got to give something for the Democratic Party's next election, to the mayor. The mayor is going to run again." This is strictly legal, absolutely legal to donate to a cause. He said, "What do you think we should give? Like five thousand dollars?" I said, "Charlie, five thousand dollars! To me I would think that would be embarrassing, that's so little." I consider that little. Here you've got fees that are in the millions of dollars. I said, "At least twenty thousand dollars." He said, "All right." He ended up giving a proper check to the mayor. He gave him this check at a hockey game, and I saw it happen. The mayor said, "I'll give it to the party

103 tomorrow." He didn't even look. The next morning Charlie calls me into the office. The mayor had just called him. He said, "Charlie, I just looked at that check when I got home and that's way too much." This is the truth, I swear. Here all this time I thought that they were in a position of shoving money in it. There is no doubt in my mind, absolutely no doubt in my mind, that the reason they got all this work is the mayor felt comfortable with dealing with Murphy Sr. He felt comfortable working with the firm thereafter. He never really had any trouble working with them. That's my experience. If there was something else going on, I didn't see it.

Saliga: Did you ever work with Carter Manny on projects at Murphy?

Summers: We sat practically two doors from one another, and I saw him a lot. He was more like a project administrator on things like the First National Bank, which I was not involved in. That was well-underway when I got in, and the FBI building. He was sort of a troubleshooter in that way. He never got involved in design in any case, no.

Saliga: But he is an architect.

Summers: Oh, yes.

Saliga: I guess you would have to be to really understand the project management.

Summers: Yes. He never, to my knowledge, got involved in design in the office. He certainly didn't while I was there.

Saliga: You never taught, did you?

Summers: No, except when you work with people that's like teaching too. But not formally, no. I never really had a desire to. I was offered the chance of being considered as head of IIT at one time, of the architecture department. I didn't want to do it. It was not my ambition.

104 Saliga: You weren't interested in teaching?

Summers: No.

Saliga: That makes sense. George Danforth did a good job of continuing.

Summers: He wasn't really there at the time that I was asked. It was in one of these fluxes that changes. I might have thought a lot more about it if it had happened at the right time.

Saliga: But you were so busy in Mies's office.

Summers: It wasn't in Mies's office that that happened. I think it was when I was in Murphy's office. It was either then or it was at the time I was in Ridgeway in California. It was one of those times. I don't even remember because I didn't take it seriously at all. I didn't even think about it. I said, "No, I'm not interested." I just wasn't.

Saliga: When I was looking at your resume there was a whole section on the resume of all of the organizations that you're affiliated with. At one time you were on a committee here for the Art Institute. Was it the Prints and Drawing Committee?

Summers: Yes, I was on that, and I was also on the Young Men's Advisory Counsel, or something like that.

Saliga: At the Art Institute?

Summers: Yes. I knew Harold Joachim really well. I like prints and drawings. I like anything to do with the arts.

105 Saliga: But you collect prints and drawings too? As well as paintings and sculpture? Across the board.

Summers: Yes. I haven't done a lot of collecting lately simply because it's gotten out of control. I have stuff in France, and I've still got a warehouse in California that's full of stuff. Not full, but I've probably got two hundred and fifty prints that I can't even put on my walls. That's ridiculous. I tell myself it's ridiculous because what am I going to do with this stuff.

Saliga: What kind of art do you collect?

Summers: It's mainly modern art. I'm a very vertical collector. I have a collection that's very strong with Dine. I have a very strong Leon Golub collection. You remember Leon Golub? I'm surprised that you remember him. He's gotten more known lately. I collected him early.

Saliga: Really? So you have a lot of his smaller work.

Summers: Yes, and still some of his big stuff. I have four or five paintings of his. One of them is rolled up on a roll in California because I can't hang it, it's too big.

Saliga: So you were an early supporter of his.

Summers: Yes. I had about fourteen Giacomettis at one time. I had those for a long time. I bought them for about one hundred and fifty dollars a piece, seventy-five dollars for some of the drawings. I actually ended up trading those. I got really interested, in California, in Navajo Indian textiles. I traded a number of those.

Saliga: That's a wonderful trade.

Summers: Some people would probably argue with that. The way I figured it is, I had some of Giacometti's really good drawings, but still it wasn't the very best thing that he himself had ever done. The sculpture is probably in that category,

106 or a great painting of his. The textiles that I was trading for were the best, the best. I traded those twelve drawings for what was equivalent of four hundred thousand dollars in four blankets, first phase chief's blanket and a poncho in a second phase, and a woman's wearing blanket. The classical phase Navajo blankets. Those were the best. My reasoning is I had lived with Giacomettis already for ten or twelve years and I enjoyed them. I still enjoy his work, but this is another experience. It's no different than when I changed that job from one to the other. It's another experience.

Saliga: Right, and one is as valid as the other.

Summers: As they say, life is not a rehearsal.

Saliga: That's a wonderful philosophy. Did you collect work by other Chicago artists?

Summers: No. I have really only one other artist who I just started. When I left California I bought a number of his things, a man who I think is going to be a good man. His name is Therian. He's probably about thirty-five years old. He does work somewhere between sculpture and painting. They're sort of objects that are painted. Those are the only three. I have a Hugo Weber portrait of Mies. He had done those when I was in the office, so it was kind of for sentimental reasons more than for the art work, although it's nice. Those are the main ones. I have a lot of Dines, and a lot of Golubs, too many. I have actually Rothko too. I have a couple of pretty major Rothkos.

Saliga: And those are all in France?

Summers: Yes.

Saliga: The French art museums will be glad to know you are there.

Summers: I hope not.

107 Saliga: We'll seal this portion of the tape, right?

Summers: Please.

Saliga: Thank you very much for your time.

108 SELECTED REFERENCES

Achilles, Rolf, ed., with Kevin Harrington and Charlotte Myhrum. Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator. Chicago: Illinois Institute of Technology, 1986. "The Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, USA, by Gene Summers." Space Design 229 (October 1983): 80. Blaser, Werner. Mies van der Rohe: Continuing the Chicago School of Architecture. Basel, Boston and Stuttgart: Birkhauser Verlag, 1981. _____. After Mies: Mies van der Rohe, Teaching and Principles. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977. Carr, Rebecca. "IIT Architect Dean May Bring Less Mies, More From Today." Crain's Chicago Business 31 (July 1989). "Canadians Build an Office Complex by Mies van der Rohe in Toronto." Architectural Record 149 (March 1971): 105-114. Chang, Pao-Chi and Alfred Swenson. Architectural Education at IIT, 1938-1978. Chicago: Illinois Institute of Technology, 1980. "Chicago International Trade Fair." Interiors 120 (July 1961): 86-89. Creighton, Thomas H. "Seagram House Re-reassessed." Progressive Architecture 40 (June 1959): 140-145. Drexler, Arthur. "The Seagram Building." The Architectural Record 123 (July 1958): 33-34. Du Bois, Macy. "Toronto-Dominion Centre: A Critique." The Canadian Architect 12 (November 1967): 33-34. "Germany: Mies' Roof in Berlin." Arena/Interbuild 83/14 (December 1967): 32-35. "Graceful Solution to Controversy: McCormick Place, Chicago." Architectural Forum 135 (November 1971): 36-39. "Interiors for the Federal Government." Progressive Architecture 46 (July 1965): 170-176. Jordy, William. "Seagram Assessed." The Architectural Review 124 (December 1958): 374-382. "McCormick Place, Chicago." Architectural Review 151 (April 1972): 211-215. "McCormick Place On-the-Lake." American Institute of Architects Journal 57 (May 1972): 36. McQuade, W. "Less is Still More." Connoisseur 210 (June 1982): 80-87. "Mies Designs Federal Center in Chicago." Architectural Record 137 (March 1965): 125-134. "Mies Dominion: Toronto Dominion Centre." Architectural Review 151 (January 1972): 48-57.

109 "Mies in Berlin: New National Gallery, Berlin." Architectural Review 145 (December 1968): 408-414. "A Mies Moment." Progressive Architecture 49 (November 1968): 108-113. "Mies van der Rohe's Last Work: The Toronto Dominion Centre." Interiors 132 (September 1972): 116-123. "Mies a Houston: Nuova ala al Museo." Domus 498 (May 1971): 10-11. Mumford, Lewis. "The Lessons of the Master." American Institute of Architects Journal 31 (January 1959): 19-23. Newman, M.W. "The Colossus of 23rd Street and What May Come Next." Inland Architect 14 (November 1970): 12-17. "The New National Gallery in Berlin." Architectural Forum 129 (October 1968): 34-47. "The New National Gallery in Berlin by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe." Architectural Record 144 (November 1968): 115-122. "Public Building: A 22 Page Portfolio of Facilities For Assembly, Exhibition and Information." Architectural Forum 135 (November 1971): 36-57. Ross, M.F. "Comeback with Kudos: The Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles." Progressive Architecture 59 (November 1978): 66-71. Saliga, Pauline, ed., with Jane H. Clarke and John Zukowsky. The Sky's the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1990. Schmertz, M.F. "Design in the Miesian Tradition: The Current Work of C.F. Murphy Associates." Architectural Record 149 (May 1971): 95-106. Schulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. "Seagram's Bronze Tower." Architectural Forum 109 (July 1958): 166-177. Serengi, Peter. "Spinoza, Hegel and Mies: The Meaning of the New National Gallery in Berlin." SAH Journal 30 (October 1971): 240. "Southern California Chapter AIA: 1978 Design Awards." LA Architect 4/10 (November 1978): no pagination. Speyer, James. Mies van der Rohe. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1968. Summers, Gene. "A Letter to Son." Architecture and Urbanism 124 (January 1981): 182. _____. "Exhibition of Work by Members of the Chicago Architecture Club." The Chicago Architectural Journal 1 (1981): 76-92.

110 _____. "Toward the Education of an Architect." Inland Architect 34 (September/October 1990): 66-69. Viladas, P. "Basic Black With Pearls: Ridgway Ltd. Offices, Newport Beach, California." Progressive Architecture 62 (September 1982): 186-189. Winter, John. "McCormick Place, Chicago." Architectural Review 151 (April 1972): 211-215. Yee, Paul. "Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles." Interiors 136 (July 1977): 60-65. Zukowsky, John, with Pauline Saliga and Rebecca Rubin. Chicago Architects Design: A Century of Architectural Drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago and New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Rizzoli International Publications, 1982. Zukowsky, John, ed. Mies Reconsidered: His Career, Legacy and Disciples. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1986.

111 GENE R. SUMMERS, F.A.I.A.

Birth Date: 31 July 1928, San Antonio, Texas

Education: Texas A&M University, Bachelor of Architecture, 1949 Illinois Institute of Technology, Master of Science in Architecture, 1951

Work Experience: Project Architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1950-1966 Partner in Charge of Design, C.F. Murphy Associates, 1967-1973 President, Ridgway Ltd., 1974-1985 Chairman/Owner, Five One Five Ltd., 1976-1985 Chairman/Owner, Eleven Zero Seven Ltd., 1981-1985 Dean, College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1989- 1993

Selected Projects: Seagram Building, New York City, New York, 1956 Bacardi Building, Mexico City, Mexico, 1958 Museum of Art, Berlin, Germany 1960 U.S. Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 1960 Toronto Dominion Centre, Toronto, Canada1960 Social Service Building, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 1961 Houston Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas 1966 Skil Corporation Manufacturing Center, Chicago, Illinois 1966 Malcolm X Junior College, Chicago, Illinois 1969 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois1970 Audy Home, Chicago, Illinois 1970 Kemper Arena, Kansas City, Missouri 1973 Convention Hall, Kansas City, Missouri 1973 Rehabilitation Center of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 1973 Canada Business Center, El Toro, California 1975-1978 Restoration of the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, California 1976-1978 Cerritos Industrial Park, Cerritos, California 1978-1979

112 Restoration of the Newporter Resort Hotel, Newport Beach, California 1982-1984

113 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Allen, William 4, 12 Canadian Centre for Architecture, Arie Crown Theater, Chicago, Illinois 80- Montreal, Canada 91 83 Carter, Peter 69, 74 Arts Club, Chicago, Illinois 28, 77 Castro, Fidel 54, 55, 56 Audy Home, Chicago, Illinois 86 Caudill, William 4, 6 Caudill, Rowlette & Scott 4 Bacardi Building (project), Santiago, Cobur, Leo 76 Cuba 50-56, 59, 60, 62, 65, 101 Conterato, Bruno 33-34, 74, 75 Bacardi Building, Mexico City, Mexico Convention Center, Kansas City, 55 Missouri 94, 96 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 47, Convention Hall (project), Chicago, 60 Illinois 78 Barr, Alfred 43 Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, Bauhaus, Germany 67 Michigan 6-7 Beckmann, Max 68 Crown, Henry 59, 81-83 Beeby, Thomas 87, 88, 94, 100 Cullinan Hall, Houston Museum of Art, Bonnet, Felix 21, 24 Houston, Texas 38, 64-65 Bosch, José 50-51, 53, 54-55, 61, 101 Cushman Wakefield 44 Bowman, Jack 74 Brancusi, Constantin 64 Danforth, George 7, 10, 28, 105 Braque, Georges 66 Dedmond, Emmett 79, 82 Bronfman, Edgar 39, 45-46 Dine, James 84, 106, 107 Brownson, Jacques 20, 87, 94 Dirksen, Everett 72, 73 Bunshaft, Gordon 42, 46, 49 Drexler, Arthur 27 Burke, Thomas 100 Duckett, Edward 20-21, 22, 27, 36, 38 Dunlap, William 21 Caine House (project) 21 Calder, Alexander 74 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Caldwell, Alfred 14, 57, 88 Chicago, Illinois 22, 67 Epstein, A., and Sons 70-71, 81 Hunter, Lyn 70 Epstein, Raymond 71 Illinois Center, Chicago, Illinois 97 Farnsworth, Edith 37 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Farnsworth, Edith (house), Plano, Illinois 7, 8-11, 14, 25, 32 Illinois 22-23, 25-26, 37 Illinois Institute of Technology, Robert F. Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 69-74, Carr Memorial Chapel, Chicago, 81 Illinois 20, 32-36 Ferris, James 9 Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown Fifty-by-Fifty House (project) 52-53 Hall, Chicago, Illinois 50, 51, 54, 58, Freund, Karl 22 59, 62 Fujikawa, Joseph 21-22, 49-50, 51, 66, 69, 70, 71, 75 Jacoby, Helmut 101 Fuller Construction Company 46, 48 Jahn, Helmut 94-95, 96, 97, 100 Johnson, Philip 38-41, 43 Genther, Charles (Skip) 70 Giacometti, Alberto 42, 106, 107 Kahn & Jacobs 38 Giedion, Sigfried 17 Kanazawa, Henry 38 Goldsmith, Myron 21, 22, 52 Kandinsky, Wassily 66, 67 Golub, Leon 106, 107 Kelly, Richard 39 Graves, Michael 96 Kemper Arena, Kansas City, Missouri Greenwald, Herbert 51 94, 96 Griffith, Gerald 35, 36 Klee, Paul 66-67 Gropius, Walter 4, 6, 7, 12, 52 Kornacker, Frank 53 Guggenheim, Solomon 64 Krupp Administration building, Essen, Germany 63 Haid, David 38 Hannaford, R. Ogden 21 Lambert, Phyllis Bronfman 28, 42-44, Harrison [Wallace K.] & Abramovitz 46, 47, 53, 76, 89, 90-92 [Max] 6 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jenerret Hartmann, William 57 20, 52, 105 Hedrich-Blessing Photographers 29 Lee, Edward (Ed) 79-81, 83-84 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 11, 13 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 67

115 Lever House, New York City, New York Novack, John M. 94, 96 45, 48 Lohan, Dirk 60-61, 74 PACE Associates 70 Palladio, Andrea 18 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 20, Peterhans, Walter 11, 13 59, 76-86, 88, 94, 100, 101 Picasso, Pablo 66 Maillol, Aristide 28 Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy 17 Malcolm X Junior College, Chicago, Promontory Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 86-87 112 Illinois 22 Manny, Carter 74, 100, 104 Martin Luther King Memorial Library, Rockefeller, Nelson 39 Washington, D.C. 69, 74 Rothko, Mark 107 Marx, Lora 20, 67, 68, 70 Maxwell, Donald 79, 82-83 Saarinen, Eliel 6, 7, 43 Mayfield, William 6 Saenz, Cancio & Martin 53 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 6, 7, 10-29, Schaefer, Georg 60-61 32-52, 56-63, 65-79, 82, 85, 95-96, Schaefer Museum (project), Schweinfurt, 98-99, 102 Germany 60-61, 69 Murphy, C.F., Associates 70, 74, 76, 77, Schesling, Ray 80, 82 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 103, Schmidt, Garden & Erikson 70-71 104 Schulze, Franz 14, 49, 65, 68 Murphy, Charles Francis, Jr. 78, 80-81, Seagram Building, New York City, New 82-83, 89, 94, 95, 100 York 16, 28, 29, 38-50, 73, 89, 98 Murphy, Charles Francis, Sr. 81-82, 103, Silk Exhibition, Exposition de la Mode, 104 1927, Berlin, Germany 47 Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 42, 46, 57, New York 12, 26, 42, 43, 99, 101 58 Skil Manufacturing Corporation Center, National Gallery (Berlin Museum), Berlin, Chicago, Illinois 86, 87, 99, 100 Germany 26, 52, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, Speyer, James 26, 101 65, 74 State of Illinois Center, Chicago, Illinois Neumann, Hans 76-77, 79 97 Nolde, Emil 66 Stonorov, Oscar 6

116 Sweeney, James Johnson 64-65

Tamminga, David 9 Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 1-5, 6, 14, 29, 32 Toronto Dominion Center, Toronto, Canada 54, 68-69, 74, 76

United Airlines Terminal, O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, Illinois 97

Viollet le Duc, Eugene Emmanuel 17

Weber, Hugo 107 Weissbourd, Barney 51 Wirtz, Arthur 82 World Trade Center, New York City, New York 50, 75 Wright, Frank Lloyd 6, 23-24, 43, 102

117