INTERVIEW WITH PAUL DURBIN McCURRY

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1988 Revised Edition Copyright © 2005 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv Preface to the Revised Edition vi Outline of Topics vii Oral History 1 Selected References 150 Curriculum Vitae 151 Index of Names and Buildings 152

iii PREFACE

On January 23, 24, and 25, 1987, I met with Paul McCurry in his home in Lake Forest, Illinois, where we recorded his memoirs. During Paul's long career in architecture he has witnessed events and changes of prime importance in the history of architecture in Chicago of the past fifty years, and he has known and worked with colleagues, now deceased, of major interest and significance. Paul retains memories dating back to the 1920s which give his recollections and judgments special authority. Moreover, he speaks as both an architect and an educator.

Our recording sessions were taped on four 90-minute cassettes that have been transcribed, edited and reviewed for clarity and accuracy. This transcription has been minimally edited in order to maintain the flow, spirit and tone of Paul's original thought. Both the tape recording and transcript are available for research in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Paul generously offered his first-hand recollections with candor and in detail. For this, future researchers and scholars will thank him. For his cooperation throughout this endeavor, I thank him. My appreciation is extended to Mrs. McCurry for her moral support for this endeavor.

A selection of Paul's architectural drawings is in the collection of the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute and may be consulted by appointment. Selected published, as well as unpublished, references that I found helpful in preparation of this oral history are appended to this document.

Paul McCurry's oral history was sponsored by Stanley Tigerman, Paul's son-in-law, who himself is a Chicago architect with a scholarly as well as a personal interest in documenting Chicago's recent architectural past. Stanley deserves our appreciation for his special support for this oral history and for his ongoing support for the entire oral history project o document Chicago's architects. For their contribution in processing this document, thanks go to Wilma McGrew, our transcriber, whose work has been conducted with intelligence

iv throughout the transcript, and to Sarah Mollman, our editor, whose thoughtful and careful attention to detail brought this document to completion.

Betty J. Blum November 1988

v PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Since 1988, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission of data have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness and demand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collection have vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Library's commitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readily accessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is now available on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available for study at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication, reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expanded the biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text has been reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronic conversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie van Roessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped the breadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would be greatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oral history in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernon and Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & Catherine Haveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and David Logan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepest gratitude for facilitating this endeavor.

Betty J. Blum February 2005

vi OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Education That Led to an Interest in Architecture 1 Work with Arthur Jacobs, Architect of the City of Chicago 5 Study at Armour Institute of Technology 7 Work with Thomas Eddy Tallmadge 11 Second-and Third-Year Projects at Armour 12 Chicago Architectural Sketch Club 23 Work with Andrew Rebori 25 Louis Sullivan Remembered 26 Description of Chicago in the 1920s 32 Sullivan’s Funeral 35 Traveling in Europe 37 Rebori’s Office 60 Work in the Office of D.H. Burnham on the Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933-1934 63 Working in the Office of the Architect of the State of Illinois 67 Saugatuck Artists Community 69 The Century of Progress International Exposition and Its Aftermath 72 Teaching in Chicago Public Schools 77 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Comes to the Illinois Institute of Technology—Impressions of the Welcoming Ceremony and Feelings About Mies as a Teacher 83 Entering the Office of Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, 1946 89 Veterans Administration Hospital, Chicago, and Other Health Care Facilities 93 Educational Facilities 101 Partner at Schmidt, Garden and Erikson 109 The American Institute of Architects and Some Issues 112 Serving on the Illinois State Board of Examiners 120 The Architectural Establishment 126 Impact of Career on Family 128 Designing the McCurry Family Home in Lake Forest, Illinois 134 Membership in the Cliff Dwellers Club 137 Research Material 145

vii Paul Durbin McCurry

Blum: Today is January 23, 1987, and I am with Paul McCurry at his house in Lake Forest. Paul, how is it that you became an architect? Please begin at the beginning as you remember it.

McCurry: I became an architect, or I started to study architecture, because my mother suggested that this would be a good career. She had two boys and being a mother that felt that all members of the family should work diligently. She had examined my brother and myself and decided that I had the capabilities to be an architect. I don't know how she came to this conclusion, but she did. She had decided that my brother should be a lawyer, and he has been a successful lawyer, and I have enjoyed my career in architecture enormously. In pursuing her goal, she encouraged me to be interested in craftwork, and to read extensively. I had that opportunity, I presume, to some degree, because I was born in an exciting period of time—December 3, 1903, which had its feet pretty firmly in the late Victorian period, but was beginning to look at new horizons. New political and economic situations were beginning to arrive. I attended the Lewis Champlin Elementary School, which was on 62nd and Princeton Avenue, in a rather middle-class neighborhood—mostly old frame Victorian houses that all had yards, the streets were still paved with dirt, the curbstones were really big stones and not concrete curbs. I started out in first grade with a first grade teacher by the name of Mary Weibert, who happened to be a neighbor of ours. She taught us to read and the elements of arithmetic very rapidly. I enjoyed going to school, which was about eight blocks away, so I had a good morning's walk. My second grade teacher still stands out in my memory as being an outstanding person. Her name was Miss McChesney. She was a slender woman and each day she wore a different apron, which always intrigued me because it was of an impelling and interesting design. She believed in keeping all kinds of artifacts around her room, and she had a great big, old square room in an old red brick

1 schoolhouse that happened to face to the south. She had a room filled with specimens of stone and coal and leaves and twigs and other pieces of wood. Very soon, she began to relate the things she had in her room to our everyday lives. We all waited for Friday afternoon because if we had been good children, in her judgment, she showed us stereopticon slides, which involved bringing up the janitor to put a contraption into the window, which faced to the south and reflected the sunlight into the camera, and she showed us pictures of her journey around this country and through the world. This was my first real lesson in geography. She was a remarkable gal and I have never forgotten her. My other teachers were also helpful and I found them interesting. In third grade I had a Miss Pickney. In fourth grade, a Mrs. Caswell. In the fifth grade, which was 1914—the beginning of the war—we had a teacher who was teaching us German, who was of German extraction, and who was very much upset by this conflict between France and England and Germany. She was teaching us German—that had to stop, of course, because everyone got super-patriotic—but she was also teaching us health care, which had to do with the bad effects of excessive alcohol and abusing your body and so forth. In sixth grade, there was a Miss Wagner, who introduced me to Poe's marvelous stories, because every Friday afternoon, in the same fashion, if we had been good children, she read us the story of the Gold Bug or some other of Poe's wonderful narratives. In seventh grade, I met Mrs. Watts, who was a music teacher. This not being one of my special skills or talents, she struggled manfully to get me to learn how to sing, which I never could do. In eighth grade, I had a Miss Stoddard, who was determined that we all become geniuses in mathematics, and in later life I certainly appreciated the work she did in drumming some of the rudiments of mathematical systems in my head. We also had shop work at this time, starting in the sixth grade. This was my introduction to woodworking tools, and for the use of wood, the machinery that formed its shape, and I was delighted with this experience. At this time, my mother finally came to the conclusion that I should try Lane Technical High School. In her research and her judgment, this was the best technical high school in the city, as it may be still today.

2 Blum: Let me ask you to step back for one minute, in terms of your elementary education. At what point along the way from first through eighth grade did your mother make the decision that you were best suited for architecture? At what point did you start to draw and become interested in things related to architecture, such as the woodworking?

McCurry: I suppose it started with the local library, actually.

Blum: When you were in first through eighth grade?

McCurry: Yes. As soon as I could walk over to the library, I went and began to pick up books. As soon as I could read, I was fascinated with what was going on.

Blum: How do you think your mother came to the conclusion that you were well suited for architecture?

McCurry: She had watched me bring books home that had to do with crafting things, like making a scooter, or helping her build a cabin in the back yard, or making rifles or digging trenches during the war period. She felt that I had the abilities to make an analysis of a problem and to find a solution to it. These were not obvious to myself at all, but she seemed to come to this conclusion. So, in eighth grade, she had started to look around to find a school that she thought was appropriate. She decided on Lane Technical High School, which was on the North Side of Chicago at Sedgwick and Division streets, which is now a playground for the Cabrini Green housing development. And she received permission from the Board of Education to send me there, which was across the city. Fortunately, the elevated ran close to our house and delivered me at Sedgwick and Division with no particular difficulty. I regretted leaving my friends in Englewood, but I did enjoy the work that I did at Lane High School.

Blum: What was your father's work?

3 McCurry: He had been in the railroad. My father was associated with a lumber business. He was superintendent of a dry kiln on old 22nd Street, which is now Cermak Road.

Blum: What is a dry kiln?

McCurry: This was along the old south branch of the river. This is where all the sailing ships came and brought the lumber from Michigan. All the white pine from Michigan came to Chicago and was distributed through the lumber district that was around Racine and 22nd Street, where the south slip of the Chicago River passed by. I used to go down occasionally and visit him and watch the men pile the lumber up and also watch it go in a dry kiln, where the moisture was removed, and became somewhat interested in the whole procedure of building.

Blum: Could it be your interest in crafting wood was somehow connected to this early exposure to your father's work?

McCurry: Yes. And to the fact that I had some basic skills, too, that she had observed.

Blum: Did you have any friends that shared this interest with you?

McCurry: I was the only southsider going to Lane High School, or one of the few southsiders going to Lane High School, so I had to make my friends among people who lived on the north side of the city. This was a high school for boys, and while I suppose I missed the companionship of the girls, there were a lot of them around my neighborhood. My brother went to Englewood High School and always seemed to have a lot of female friends, so that I didn't suffer particularly in that respect. But I did enjoy the combination of shop work and drawing and an academic curriculum at Lane High School. They were not concerned in those days about overworking their students in any way whatsoever, so we carried a full load. Doing an extra drawing or shop class and getting out of a study hall was always an adventure that I enjoyed. When I got to be a junior, I encountered a man by the name of Curt

4 Valentine, who was a reformed carpenter and teaching architectural drawing. He was well aware of the curriculum at Armour Institute at that time and I often thought in later years that one of his chief objectives was to form a junior Armour Institute at the high school level. This most of his students deeply resented, because it meant an enormous amount of work for us. But we became familiar with the history of architecture at an early age and probably we made drawings of all of the historic buildings for our history of architecture courses. I can still recall doing sketches from Frank Lloyd Wright's wonderful German book of that period and finding it very difficult to do because they were of such an irregular nature.

Blum: Mr. Valentine's approach was to ask you to copy from a book, or did you copy the work of other architects?

McCurry: Well, this was one of his ways of teaching, of course, to have you examine the plans and the buildings. We spent a good deal of time at the Art Institute at the Burnham Library and a considerable amount of time in the old reading room of the Chicago Public Library, which were rich sources of the architecture of the past.

Blum: What were you doing there? Examining periodicals?

McCurry: Not periodicals as much as histories. We used Hamlin's history of architecture, which was also a college text at that time. It was not the easiest thing for a high school youngster to read, but we managed. I learned how to make perspectives and how to do rendering, and one of my last projects was a perspective of the Parthenon.

Blum: This was in high school?

McCurry: Yes. When I graduated from high school there was an inquiry that came to Mr. Valentine from an architect for the City of Chicago by the name of Arthur Jacobs, who wanted a beginning draftsman, so Valentine sent me downtown to talk to Mr. Jacobs, who immediately hired me at $15.00 a week, and I

5 started to work to learn how to design twenty-four apartment buildings on minimal size lots.

Blum: What year was this?

McCurry: This was 1922. I was a February child and my birthday is in December, so I went to school in February and I graduated in February. But, of course, the colleges wouldn't accept you until the following September. I had about eight months to work. This was an interesting occupation for me because I had become a reasonably good draftsman. I soon found out that in these minimal lots, in which our Swedish contractors wanted a maximum amount of apartments, you had to design the perimeter according to the ordinances and then fill in all the rooms. So it became a delightful game of checkers to organize all of the spaces according to the city ordinances and to the usage of the room and still stay within the setback and requirements of the City of Chicago. I learned how to go over to the City of Chicago Building Department and acquire information and lost my fear of bureaucracies and found myself able to cope with the tasks that I had before me. This encouraged me in the decision that I had already made to attend Armour Institute in the following September. Mr. Jacobs tried to dissuade me from attending school, feeling that I could be very useful to him and I was making excellent progress and he could teach me just as well as the professors at Armour Institute.

Blum: Paul, was he a developer or an architect?

McCurry: He was an architect. He was doing a lot of relatively small bungalows all over the west side of the city and the north side of the city in 1922. A lot of these areas were in Chatham and Beverly Hills on the South Side. Around Oak Park there was a lot of building going on. A lot of it was contractors who had saved a little money—they were carpenters or masons by trade and they decided to earn a little extra money by being entrepreneurs and building houses for sale.

6 Blum: You know, it occurs to me that 1922 was a very important year in Chicago. It was for you, of course, with your career with Mr. Jacobs, but it was also the year of the Tribune competition.

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: Do you have any recollections of that?

McCurry: I entered Armour Institute in due time. I had made some very good friends at Lane Technical High School and three of them came with me, so it was very good to have some old friends around in a new environment. One of them was Vincent Viscerello.

Blum: Did he work subsequently at Schmidt, Garden with you?

McCurry: Yes. Viscerello had spent a couple of years being a bricklayer and decided the practice of architecture was more rewarding and finished his education and saved enough money to enter college. There was also Charles Schonne, who later became a partner of Sam Marx.

Blum: You said there were three.

McCurry: We also numbered among our group Frank Fuchs, who was probably as close to a mathematical genius as I ever came. He had won a scholarship to the University of Chicago in the Department of Mathematics and had spent six months there enjoying mathematics, but not particularly liking the academic life at the University of Chicago. He sort of hungered for the practice of architecture and his old friends. Fortunately he came back to Armour Institute in his second semester and we welcomed him because he was an enormous help to us in understanding the higher realms of mathematics and the intricacies of physics.

Blum: Paul, why did you decide to go to Armour?

7 McCurry: Well, it was here in the city. We had limited resources and its reputation was very good in terms of training people to be successful architects.

Blum: Did you consider any other school, such as the University of Illinois?

McCurry: I considered the University of Illinois, but that meant living out of the city and this was a more economical way of doing it. I also liked the environment of the Art Institute. Our school day was divided into morning sessions at 33rd and Federal, at the old Armour Institute, where we had all of our academic work, and the afternoons were spent on the fourth floor of the Art Institute underneath the skylights, where we started to learn about drawing and architecture and freehand drawing and history of architecture. Most of the work in the freshman year was in rendering the classic symbols of great architecture—windows from the Farnese Palace, the great Greek and Roman temples, learning carefully the classic orders and becoming skillful draftsmen and skillful renderers. Toward the end of the year we began to branch into some compositions which were known as analytiques. which meant the assembled bits of architecture and the composition. So, we were learning composition as well as learning something about the character and form and quality of these antiquities. We also had a good deal of freehand drawing by a very remarkable man by the name of Albert Krehbiel, who was a painter and teacher at the Art Institute. He seemed to have a knack of explaining the compositions of all of these great pieces of sculpture that at that time were in the Blackstone Gallery of the Art Institute and in all of the documents in the wonderful Burnham Library. An architect by the name of William McCaughey was our teacher, who was also a very successful architect.

Blum: At that time in 1922, it seems to me that what you are describing is a Beaux- Arts system of organization. Was there any thought among students or faculty that perhaps there was a newer, more modern, approach to either building or training for an architect? Was news of the Bauhaus available in Chicago yet?

McCurry: Just beginning to wiggle a bit. This was only a few years after the war.

8 Blum: Was there any thought among the students of being, say, more modern?

McCurry: Oh, yes. But not at that early stage.

Blum: It was not?

McCurry: We were doing pretty much what we were told.

Blum: How did your second year differ from your first?

McCurry: I suppose in our second year we were getting more knowledgeable. We were thoroughly familiar with the Burnham Library, which contained rich sources of information from all over the world. All of the architectural journals were collected there and many of the new avant-garde magazines were coming from Germany and France. Architecture d’aujourd’hui being one of them—I remember that came from France—which was a spectacular magazine. I don't remember the names of the German magazines. There were three or four of them. We were familiar with the beginning of the Bauhaus. We, of course, watched very carefully the other schools who were in the Beaux-Arts system, such as the University of Illinois, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute, and particularly Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, to some extent, Harvard and Yale and Princeton, who were also members of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. The head of the Department of Architecture at Armour Institute was Edmund Campbell, and I first became familiar with the skills of Edmund Campbell and also McCaughey, my freshman teacher, because they both entered the Tribune competition in that period. They were making the drawings in the atelier, that is the drafting rooms of the institute, and a good many of the senior students, who were more experienced than we were, were working on these projects, but that didn't stop us from peeking.

Blum: What were their designs like?

9 McCurry: Well, they are in that big Tribune competition. I think they were satisfactory, tall buildings, but were not outstanding. There weren't too many outstanding ones. I would think that, in our eyes at that period of time, while the replica of the Tour de Bourges by [Ralph] Walker was certainly good, we all preferred the Saarinen design as being a much more interesting kind of a building, and regretted very much the decision of the jury in only awarding it second place and not building it.

Blum: Is McCaughey the architect who is well known for some of his work in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Park Ridge?

McCurry: Yes, he did a number of houses out there. He also did a movie theater out there that is quite nice.

Blum: In the art deco style?

McCurry: Yes, in art deco.

Blum: Is that the way his 1922 Tribune competition entry looked?

McCurry: Pretty much, yes. This was a period of time when the French and German and particularly the Austrian schools were beginning to suggest the forms of what then became known as the art deco style. In our sophomore year, we had another practicing architect by the name of Lautz, and we continued the analysis of relatively simple programs like libraries and gymnasiums and small memorial temples and other things that sophomore experience could comprehend. These were mostly four- and five-week projects, which required an esquisse—that is an original concept of what you propose to do, from which you could not deviate in basic principle. This was to stop you from copying what the teacher told you to do, or copying what one of the more fortuitous classmates had done, so that you found it necessary to develop your own particular design concept, whether it was good or bad. The theory being that you learned a great deal from having to develop a bad project. Our freehand drawing continued and so did our engineering studies

10 and we began to coalesce as a student body. We began to become more familiar with the outdoor world. In my freshman year, I had been particularly fortunate in managing to go to sleep in my history of architecture class, which came at four o'clock in the afternoon in a little cramped room under the skylights of the Art Institute. It was taught by Tom Tallmadge, a distinguished architect of the city of Chicago. At the conclusion of the class, Tom Tallmadge came thundering down the aisle and grabbed me and took me up to the student who was running the lantern and asked that my name be entered in the book there under the distinctive heading that he sleeps in class. He ordered me to report to him the following Friday morning at ten o'clock in his office. Thinking that this was the end of a promising career, the following Monday I went over to see Tom at ten o'clock and he welcomed me very warmly and he showed me his office. We talked about various and sundry things, and finally he inquired as to why I had come over there, so I felt compelled to remind him of why I was there. He laughed about this and immediately offered me a job.

Blum: Oh, my goodness, what a surprise that must have been.

McCurry: This was my freshman year.

Blum: Freshman year.

McCurry: The end of my freshman year, summertime. I spent three months working for Tom Tallmadge, which was a magnificent entree to the practical field of architecture.

Blum: What kind of work was he doing at the time?

McCurry: Doing a lot of houses and a lot of churches. One of my good friends from Armour, who had been a senior when I was a freshman, by the name of Lindsey Suter was also working there. So, the introduction was painless. I met Vernon Watson, who was Tom's partner, who, to some degree, ran the office, and was the practical influence in the office. Tom was to a considerable

11 degree the designer and somewhat less interested in the mundane aspects of putting contract documents together, but the two men complemented each other. They were both products of the D.H. Burnham office. They both were addicted to good architecture. They also believed in using cheap, intelligent help under close supervision.

Blum: Does that mean you and Lindsey Suter?

McCurry: Yes, and a couple of others, who were not quite as experienced as we were. So, this was a marvelous, marvelous learning experience. We learned how to do full-size details, which is almost a lost art now. As soon as a contract was let for a building, the trim, the doors, and windows, all the special features of the house were very carefully detailed at full size and given to the mechanics who were going to build them. And I am returning to the second year. But then at the end of the second year, I would also work for Tom during the summer period, and that was true at the end of my junior year, too. So, I had three years of very interesting architectural experience, which I would highly recommend as a real rationale. This could very shortly develop, in terms of work being done in the academic field and the practical work of an office. To return briefly to the second year—the second year of study began to introduce the student to the Beaux-Arts system of design, which was a system in which projects were given to the students that lasted about five weeks, interspersed with two other projects that were twelve-hour sketches within the five-week period. The twelve-hour sketches occurred on Saturday and this was a complete project done in twelve hours, which, in retrospect, are perfectly marvelous. They were very difficult to do, but they made you think very rapidly in terms of an analysis of the program, a concept that seemed to be satisfactory in terms of the program, in the logic of the program, and then the development of the project and a finished rendering, a sketch rendering. This rubbed off on the longer projects because you began to realize the enormous amount of work required in finishing a project. You had to learn to time yourself so that your preliminary studies and preliminary sketches, which were an analysis of the program, were finished at a suitable time. That way, time for the actual development of the spatial qualities of the

12 program would be available. Also, the aesthetics of the exterior presentation, which always had to be done as a rendering in either black-and-white or color… These were simple projects and as we progressed to the third year they became more complicated and more involved and the competition began to get more and more difficult. These were projects that were judged at Armour Institute by juries of practicing architects in the city who frequently gave critiques at the end of the program that were very useful.

Blum: Considering that everyone was working on the same project, what was the atmosphere between you and your friends? Or among students? Was it one of fierce competition? Were you competing with the persons sitting to your right and to your left?

McCurry: Everybody understood the fact that this was a competition that would ultimately be judged on the quality of the work, and that was something that everybody accepted.

Blum: Was it possible to have two winners—I mean, two first-place winners?

McCurry: Yes, I suppose so. It seldom happened, but I suppose it was. There was always some little difference that would select one as first. Usually, the jury picked out one outstanding design. There were a good many of them that received what would be called "first mentions." These were satisfactory designs that had real merit. There were "second mentions," which were perhaps somewhat less in character, and there were "crosses," which suggested that the program had not been understood and had not been solved. There was competition between the students at the junior level. Some of the students became secretive, but these were not the capable or competent students who were never particularly worried about competition, who were curious about everything that was happening. There was a certain amount of the incorporation of thoughts and ideas by your classmates, which was one of the really good things of the Beaux-Arts system. It permits a great many people to explore the same problem with benefits to everyone who is working on that project.

13 Blum: If someone took a first place at Armour, was that drawing then submitted to a larger competition among other schools in the system?

McCurry: Yes, but not at the junior level. This happened at the senior level. At the senior level everyone joined the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. This meant that at about five-week intervals you had a project, and then twice in those five-week intervals there was an esquisse. These were printed programs that were released to the ten or twelve members of the Beaux-Arts system at that time, which were the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Tech, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, and I think possibly the University of Virginia. In the Beaux- Arts competition at the senior level, after the preliminary local judgments, of which the results were not made known, all of the drawings were then sent to New York for judgment among the ten or twelve schools. This was done by the jury of architects, usually from the eastern seaboard. And, of course, most of the senior critics went down to the judgments to listen to the conversation and observe the work of their competitors. In retrospect, after teaching school myself for a long period of time and practicing architecture, I think the Beaux-Arts system of design is an extremely valid system in terms of the development of esprit de corps, a cooperative effort, an effort that extended through the entire school. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors were constantly helping seniors with their very elaborate projects and seniors and juniors, in turn, helping sophomores and freshmen to get themselves properly started in making the right judgments, in terms of their own projects. It was an exchange of experience and exchange of talent within the school, which I always thought was beneficial.

Blum: You are talking about a spirit of cooperation.

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: Is that consistent with the competitive atmosphere?

14 McCurry: Oh, yes. For any large office to function properly, it has to be able to have that spirit of cooperation in which one person will probably have charge of the project. It's his task to organize the project and to exercise some decision- making, in terms of practicality and in terms of aesthetics, over the team. And there may be fifteen or twenty people involved who have to be coordinated. If you haven't learned to cooperate you aren't going to be a very useful person in an office. So, I think the Beaux-Arts system has been excellent. Now, in this system of Beaux-Arts design you attend, normally the instructors were products of the Beaux-Arts School of Design in Paris. We were certainly conscious in our senior year—this was in 1926—of what was happening in the outside world, in terms of the Bauhaus, in terms of all of the publications that were coming in from foreign fields, the experimental work that was being done at MIT under Carlu, and at Harvard under Haffner, and Paul Cret was at the University of Pennsylvania, and Hornbostel at Carnegie Tech.

Blum: Was it through the publications at the Art Institute that you became aware...?

McCurry: Yes, I'll show you some of those, if you haven't seen them. At the conclusion of each of the projects and its judgment in New York, three or four photographs of the winners of first medalists and the second medalists were always published and distributed to all of the seniors at the various colleges, so that you could keep track of what the judgments were, what the criticisms were, and also a list of students in their mentions or their successes or failures. Within the framework of the Beaux-Arts Institute, numerous prizes were awarded, the chief one being the Paris Prize, which was won by Harry Bieg in 1924.

Blum: What did he win?

McCurry: He won the Paris Prize, which was a two-year fellowship or scholarship at the Beaux-Arts Institute in Paris, a real success story. So we were delighted with Harry Bieg's success. The following year, Vale Faro placed second in the Rome Prize, which was probably only second in importance to the Paris

15 Prize, and we were delighted to know that. For being a rather small Midwest college, we were reasonably competitive with the eastern schools.

Blum: Paul, in terms of your own drawings, what do you recall about where your drawings placed? Did you ever win a prize?

McCurry: I don't think any of our class ever won a prize. One of our best students, Noel Flint, who later became a partner of Sam Marx, went to MIT, where Carlu was teaching and it was Carlu's brilliance—he placed second in the Paris Prize, and I think won the Emerson Prize while he was there—this was his senior year. We had the talent I think, but we didn't have the instruction at that time. I'm sure that I want to make that a matter of record. We desperately needed some faculty assistance that would have gotten us over some of the roadblocks we encountered.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: Paul, I have a photograph of a memorial tablet for John Wellborn Root. What do you recall about that?

McCurry: This came near the end of the freshman year, after you had considerable experience in rendering in shapes and shadows, and you'd had an opportunity of becoming familiar with d'Espouy, the great book prepared by the French Academy that was a collection of all of the great details of classic history. So you see in this picture an Ionic column, a volute, two Greek vases, a Roman console, a Greek railing, and a classical tablet that would contain the memoriam to John Root. This was all rendered, as I recall it, in watercolors, so that it had some colorful aspects. But this was essentially a study in composition and your skill in drawing and in casting shadows and in drawing moldings and explaining them.

Blum: Was there any thought of how this might relate to Root, the person for whom the tablet was being designed?

16 McCurry: Well, John Root was a great architect in the early part of this century. One of his chief products, of course, was the Monadnock building, which was a movement away from the classic studies, but he had been trained in the Beaux-Arts system and was a very skillful architect.

Blum: And did you think this was quite appropriate for his memory?

McCurry: This was a solution to the problem, which was called an analytique. That is a collection of classic artifacts, you might say, which were put together.

Blum: Was that typical of many solutions?

McCurry: Yes, I think so. I think we were given a niche and then we were to surround this with, you might say, mementos of this great architect's past.

Blum: It's a perfectly beautiful drawing.

McCurry: This was typical of perhaps the skill that was required at the conclusion of the freshman year. If you had become a reasonably good draftsman, you are able to handle a brush and do a rendering which was in chiaroscuro, black- and-white. We were using India ink. We had to grind our own India ink. It was an interesting experience and many of the boys became very skillful.

Blum: One of the other drawings that is now in the collection of the Art Institute, which you gave to them, was for the Decatur Memorial Arch. What was that problem all about? It was a junior problem.

McCurry: Yes, this was a junior problem.

Blum: Do you remember the circumstances and how you arrived at that solution?

McCurry: You think of the great memorial arches and, of course, part of the classic curriculum of the Beaux-Arts period was to suggest research among the classic examples that had solved problems similar to that of the program that

17 you have before you. This has to be reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe in Rome, with perhaps a few Roman overtones, in the sense that it has a dome similar to the Pantheon in Rome. Otherwise, the thing is pretty much out of the Beaux-Arts School of Design, based upon the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Even the rendering of the great boulevard behind it would suggest the Champs-Elysées.

Blum: Were you thinking of the monument in context or just the monument alone?

McCurry: Oh, I think you have to think of it in context, because these were your historic antecedents. If you looked at the Roman arches, they were all put in some religious or historically significant way. You were going someplace of importance and you passed through the arch, like the Japanese torii, for instance, which marks the sacred perimeters of the temple. So, I think we were quite conscious, and, of course, the arch in Washington Square in New York had been completed by this time and we were familiar with that.

Blum: Who was Decatur?

McCurry: Decatur was a great naval hero in the war of 1812, if I remember. And, of course, in the far distance is one of the pylons that is certainly reminiscent of Egypt. The skyline looks pretty much like the gardens at Versailles.

Blum: So your inspiration really came from existing drawings and monuments that you knew. There is one absolutely wonderful drawing of yours that everyone going in and out of the museum passes every day—that's the drawing of the museum. The card, or the label right next to it, says that this was done while you were a student at Armour Institute, when Armour held some of their classes at the Art Institute. The drawing was either of the north or the south facade.

McCurry: This was very reminiscent of the Art Institute, yes.

18 Blum: And it's just perfectly wonderful. I mean, it's a marvelous representation of a museum, which is the way it's titled. Did you actually draw a portion of either the south or the north facade of the Art Institute, or was this again an idea that came out of some existing books?

McCurry: One of our favorite painting areas was the south core of the museum.

Blum: In the park area?

McCurry: Yes, where the sculpture of the Great Lakes was in front of the building at that time. So, we made innumerable watercolors of this façade, and we were familiar with it, and we were conscious of the fact that it had been done by a well-respected and talented architect. And it was a good study of the classical characteristics in proportionate buildings. Of course, our bible was Vignola. Vignola had documented all the classic moldings, motifs, you might say—the form and shape and substance of the various columns that were a part of all classic architecture—so it was probably natural that what I had seen and what I had painted would have an effect upon what I did.

Blum: You mentioned a little earlier that some of the Bauhaus material came to your awareness and to your classmates during the years 1922 to 1926, which were the years that you attended Armour.

McCurry: Well, at the end of our junior year, and with our entry into a part of the Beaux-Arts system, we began to encounter problems that were not easily soluble, in terms of classic architecture. Example: the first project that we had in our senior year was a great dam. Going down to the Burnham Library was not enormously helpful. We were familiar with a number of the dams that had been built in history and bridges over the famous rivers of Europe. We were also familiar with some of the experiments of large dams in this country, and probably the Hoover Dam was as interesting as any. But none of the Beaux-Arts, or the ancients, had ever conceived of a project of this scope, so we were a little bit lost. We began to look at the engineering journals and examine more sources, more current sources of information that

19 were available—Letarouilly and d'Espouy and all of the documents that we could refer to. The second project, as I remember it, was a great synagogue. It was to seat more than one thousand people. To my knowledge there are no great synagogues of any size comparable to that. Most of the synagogues are relatively small. They are in small communities and, it seems to me, more designed in the current vernacular of the country in which they were and they were relatively small. So, we were left pretty much dangling. We couldn't get much inspiration from Christian churches or pagan temples and we were left pretty much to develop something of our own, which was perhaps one of our real sources of frustration.

Blum: Did you all agonize over it in the same way for the same reason?

McCurry: Yes, it was a very difficult problem for us.

Blum: How did you solve, say, the synagogue problem for one thousand people? What form did your design take?

McCurry: It took the form of a great structure, and that's one of my drawings that seems to have been lost. I don't know what happened to it.

Blum: Could you describe a little of it?

McCurry: The only thing that we could really look at were great stadiums, and we had to look at some of the Renaissance churches, and some of the, you might say, very, very late Renaissance churches that were classic in origin. So, I presume the building, to some degree, had a classic sense. As I remember the satisfactory solutions that won medals, most of them were experimenting in reinforced concrete and were large structures without windows, in some shape that sort of suggested, perhaps, scrolls on either side of the great chamber. But I am not sure that any of the solutions were enormously satisfactory because, I think, primarily, we weren't really conditioned to think in a completely creative fashion. Perhaps that was the weakness of the Beaux- Arts system at that particular moment. We had two more very difficult

20 projects, in terms of classic architecture. One was a carillon tower. There weren't too many tall towers, unless you looked at the Tour de Bourges, the towers in various cathedrals of England and France, the Campanile in Florence, the great cathedral of Seville, which had been a Moslem campanile to begin with, and the Bok Tower in Florida, which had been just recently completed, and, to a lesser degree, some of Klauder's work at the University of Pittsburgh. I think the carillon towers were perhaps more successful than the synagogue, in terms of finding an adequate solution. I think our last project was the great railroad station.

Blum: Where did you turn for your inspiration for that?

McCurry: We turned to the great stations of Paris and London that were done. They developed an enormously facile technique in designing great steel arches, which were lathed arches in the vein of the Eiffel Tower and then, of course, the work that D.H. Burnham had done—the great station in Washington, D.C., and the Grand Central Station, and the Penn Station in New York, done by McKim, Mead and White. But, even at that time, we were conscious that a replica of the Baths of Caracalla was not the solution to a modern railroad station.

Blum: It seems to me that what you are describing, if I understand you correctly, is that you were a group of students caught in a transition time, in a sense, because the problems were new and you were asked to find new solutions to new problems, but you were trained to rely on old solutions.

McCurry: That's correct, we were very conscious of that.

Blum: Did you feel the conflict? Did you personally feel the conflict?

McCurry: Oh, yes. Very much so.

21 Blum: Were there students among your group that took up the cause of, say, modernism and felt that the old system was simply inadequate for today's problems?

McCurry: Oh, yes. You may remember that there weren’t many students there, maybe fifteen.

Blum: Who were some of them who became taken with modernism?

McCurry: Vincent Viscerello was one of them. Al Bacci was another.

Blum: How did their work differ? For instance, the dam solution, how did that differ from yours?

McCurry: I don’t remember too clearly.

Blum: Did it differ?

McCurry: The width of the gorge was fixed and the approximate height of the dam was fixed so, actually, what you were dealing with was the silhouette, the shape of the dam, any decoration that you might want to place upon the dam, and the park, which was below the dam. So, the park became an important part of the solution, in terms of designing it. And, of course, it was designed, or at least I designed it, in the form of Versailles, which was probably the best example of great formal gardens that we had at that moment.

Blum: Would you say that you lined up with the more conservative or the more radical group?

McCurry: I’ve always felt that I was a radical. A conservative radical.

Blum: A conservative radical. Was there any open discussion about this among students?

22 McCurry: There were innumerable discussions. What made us sad at that time is the dominance of a few eastern schools like MIT, Columbia, and Pennsylvania. We felt students there were receiving much better instruction, particularly at MIT with Carlu. He was one of the avant-garde French architects, a contemporary of Corbusier who had the skills and the knowledge, and perhaps, too, of firing up the students, in terms of exploring the future.

Blum: Being a student at Armour, how did you know that? How is it that you were dissatisfied?

McCurry: There was a wonderful underground. You're always meeting somebody that you know and, of course, my friend Noel Flint, when he came back to Chicago, was full of these adventures with Carlu. And Don Nelson was also a Chicagoan who was studying with Carlu and won the Paris Prize.

Blum: So they brought this information back firsthand?

McCurry: And, of course, the publications that you saw, the articles that you read, the innumerable conversations that you had with your contemporaries, and, of course, two years later I went to Europe and I began to look and see what was happening in the rest of the world.

Blum: You went to Europe in 19...?

McCurry: In 1928. After I finished school I went back and worked for Tom Tallmadge.

Blum: One other thing that I noticed from the list of drawings that you gave to the Art Institute, and these drawings are dated 1927, is that there are several from the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club. When did you join the Architectural Sketch Club?

McCurry: I guess we were all members of the Architectural Sketch Club as soon as we had money enough to pay the small dues. The sketch clubs in the early part of the nineteenth century were an important part in any metropolitan area.

23 They were composed of the emerging young architects and draftsmen and the patrons were usually the famous practicing architects of the city, who contributed the time and money to act as a critic, in terms of continuing the development of architects, mostly in the field of design.

Blum: Who were some of your instructors or critics at the Architectural Sketch Club?

McCurry: Well, of the people that were teaching—William Jones Smith, the well known architect, Bill O'Connor, George Conners, Rudy Nedved, Andy Rebori. And Gibbs Hall used to come around occasionally, too—he was a designer for Holabird and Root.

Blum: How do you remember Andy Rebori? I know you worked for him a little later, but how did you respond to him at that time through the Architectural Sketch Club? And how did he respond to you?

McCurry: Andy was a real fireball.

Blum: How would you describe him?

McCurry: He was energetic, enthusiastic, slightly anti-establishment, innovative and still with an extraordinary logical mind. He had the faculty for solving problems. He certainly knew how to fire people up.

Blum: Did he encourage the students at the Architectural Sketch Club? Were they encouraged to explore modern solutions or traditional ones? What was the instruction like then?

McCurry: I think certain critics were thinking in modern-day solutions and others were not. It was still a period of eclecticism.

Blum: And Rebori, what was his bent?

24 McCurry: When I went to work for Rebori, he had just discovered all these marvelous German light factory buildings, in which, apparently, according to the pictures, they were using very small metal sections. These were sort of contrary to the tradition of this country and I recall very vividly working on the Curtiss-Reynolds Airport [now Glenview Naval Air Station]. I worked at Rebori's office and worked with Herbert Anderson, who could be loosely classified as Rebori's chief designer, except that nobody did anything in that office except Rebori. We were designing a small grandstand, and in drawing up the sections for the grandstand, Rebori was constantly urging us to use smaller steel sections. Andy and I would religiously call the engineer and talk to him about reducing the size of the sections, and he would tell us that we could reduce the size of the section, but we would increase the deflection at the end of the cantilever considerably. So, we would duly convey this information to Rebori and say "These guys are absolutely crazy. Let's use the smaller section." So, during the construction period the grandstand had been practically finished and Andy went up there one day to look at it and walked down to the end of the cantilever and he nearly lost his hat. It bounced. He came back all excited and very much perturbed by the whole situation, insisted that we call the engineer and get him over there immediately, which we did. And so he came in and Andy told him what a bad engineer he was and how he didn't expect that kind of action from these steel beams. The engineer, who was a good-natured guy, listened to Andy's tirade and said, "Well, Andy, I told you that. I said you can have smaller sections but you get more deflection and it isn't going to fall down, but you may get a crick in your back when you go down to the end of it, because it's going to have a little flip to it. That has to do with deflection, it's not going to fail." Well, Andy was unhappy about this because he realized he’d made a mistake, except that he couldn't possibly admit it. Quietly he paid $2,000 out of his own pocket to strengthen the beams and this was perhaps the last time we had to fight with Andy about using too small a section. But the German periodicals of that period were most interesting in terms of using steel in significant ways, perhaps as Mies did later and many of the other German schools did, too.

25 Blum: You worked for Rebori in 1929 and a little later, too. But when he was an instructor while you were a student at the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club you didn't know him quite so well?

McCurry: No, that's right.

Blum: Where did the Architectural Sketch Club meet?

McCurry: The sketch clubs had their ups and downs, and at the time I was active in the sketch club, which was a period of two or three years, we met in the garage of the old Kimball house, which was across the street from Glessner house. This was our regular drafting room. It was also owned at that time, jointly I think, by the AIA, the Illinois Society, and one of the contractors' associations. And, of course, the continuing Depression destroyed the equity he had in the house and we couldn't keep up the payments, so that fell by the wayside. But that was an interesting place to work.

Blum: Who were some of the other students at the sketch club with you?

McCurry: I didn't really spend a great deal of time there. I worked there when I was doing the competition for the 1928 Sketch Club prize, which was a fair for Chicago, and I placed second in. I was so provoked at myself because I had done an esquisse that was not the right solution, and I was stuck with trying to make something out of it, although I realized I probably couldn't do it. I worked at it and placed second. Lou Perola was the young architect who won that particular competition. The following year, which was a great bridge, was won by Al Bacci.

Blum: Do I recall correctly—did you say at one time you were part of an atelier that had Louis Sullivan as a critic?

McCurry: I'm sorry I forgot that.

Blum: Was that earlier?

26 McCurry: This happened at the end of my freshman year. I was elected to the Scarab, which was an honorary architectural fraternity, and there were three enterprising seniors that were members: Vale Faro, Claude Steele, Harold Reynolds, and a couple of adventurous juniors—one was McCaughey and the other was Sennischall. In some fashion they had met Louis Sullivan. They were suffering from the same dissatisfaction that I later was in my senior year. They were seniors and juniors and they were beginning to encounter problems that required solutions that could not be found in classical antiquity. So they were adventurous, as I said, and they discovered Louis Sullivan, and they rented some set of rooms down close to Sullivan's living quarters on Prairie Avenue. I was never down there because I was never really involved in this. We met with Sullivan, I guess, every other week on Friday for luncheon at Carson, Pirie. I was the youngest guy in the whole outfit, so I sat at the end of the table and the others talked to Louis Sullivan. But I remember him vividly. He was a short, rather chubby man, who was enormously interested in talking to the students. He was, I think, sixty-five at that time and he had mellowed enormously. He wasn't the arrogant individual that, perhaps, his clients thought of him in earlier days. Eugene Voita was one of the Scarabs of that period, too. Sullivan was getting ready to publish Kindergarten Chats and the Scarab fraternity, in a national sense—there were only six or eight chapters in the schools of architecture—managed to gather some money together to help him with the publication of Kindergarten Chats. So he was interested in that relationship. He was also interested in talking to the older members and I only knew him for that short six-month period because he died in the spring of the year and was buried at Graceland Cemetery. That was the first time I encountered Frank Lloyd Wright, who had just returned from Japan and had come to Louis Sullivan's funeral.

Blum: What was his funeral like?

McCurry: That was an interesting series of events that I remember very well. Of course, later when I became a member of the Cliff Dwellers, I became more conscious

27 of the long tradition that Louis Sullivan had had with the Cliff Dwellers and the fact that he came up there frequently in his declining years. Somebody always bought him lunch. He was an important part of the Cliff Dwellers in the latter part of his life, which would be in the 1920s.

Blum: What kind of assistance do you recall that he gave you as a student?

McCurry: None whatsoever. I just sat around and listened.

Blum: Oh. Did you pick up anything that was useful?

McCurry: It sparked my interest in what Sullivan had done because I knew the man. And, of course, the Burnham Library has a marvelous collection of his drawings of ornament—a perfectly beautiful collection. He was a marvelous draftsman and he was graced by a number of fine artisans who were able to make molds that were cast in plaster and some in metal that were a real inspiration to everyone else because he took the flora and fauna of the Midwest and translated it into the ornamentation that became a part of the design of his buildings. And I was familiar with his bank buildings, which were done after most of his large projects had evaporated. I always thought these were remarkable small buildings. You know, anybody that's got one of those has really got something, and they've all taken very good care of them.

Blum: Having known Sullivan, and knowing that some of his really important buildings were all around Chicago, did that somehow have an influence on you in your career?

McCurry: Well, I always subscribed to his theory of "form follows function." This was a theory of his that I found extremely compatible to my own thinking. It was essential for a good architect to find a functional solution for the building and equally important that the functional solution was in such a form that it would have an aesthetic visual character. And that's a lot of hard work. That doesn't come easily because you have to be very, very conscious of developing the functional aspects, which have to meet the program

28 requirements of the user. In that development of a satisfactory functional character, you have to be thinking of the end results in terms of mass, shape, spatial arrangements, and so forth, which will produce the satisfactory aesthetic aspect. There are a certain number of people that classify themselves as designers who I think tend to ignore the functional solutions. There are people that are more interested in the functional solutions and who are never able to reconcile a good aesthetic solution with a functional solution. Whether Sullivan did or not, at least this was a guiding star of his philosophy, which I thoroughly subscribe to.

Blum: When you finished Armour in 1926 you were then prepared as a graduate architect to go out and...

McCurry: ...set the world on fire.

Blum: Well, to go out and practice your profession. What was your idea about the role of an architect? Where did you fit in the larger scheme of things?

McCurry: I was conscious of the fact that I still had to pass a three-day examination to prove to the State of Illinois that I was qualified, in terms of public safety, to design a building. So, during 1927 I attended the classes that the sketch club always had in preparation for the licensing examination, along with Al Bacci and Frank Fuchs. I think they took the exam at the same time I did, and I was successful. Then I felt as though I were reasonably secure.

Blum: Did you need any experience in between school?

McCurry: I think you had to have two years at that time, after college, which I had because of my summer work with Tom Tallmadge, so I got my license a year after I had gotten out of school.

Blum: What was your idea about the role an architect played in terms of—oh, I can think of several options, actually. Whether you filled the needs of the client, you were sort of serving them, or whether you told them what your

29 assessment was of their needs? Who decides? How strong a role did an architect play?

McCurry: As soon as you start working with clients… Fortunately, in Tallmadge and Watson's office, you had a good deal of contact with the clients normally, because of the nature of their office. They weren't jealous men and frequently they took you along to visit clients, or you had to meet them when—this happened most when Tom was off some place fulfilling one of his many engagements. He was a member of—to digress a moment—the commission that determined the shape and form of Williamsburg. That was an interesting relationship, as far as Tom was concerned. So you became conscious of the fact that it was essential to solve your client's functional and monetary needs and it was your task to help him solve them in a fashion that would be aesthetically satisfactory. And you soon learned that the gentle art of persuasion was an important tool in the vocabulary of an architect. Some way you've got to find solutions that are satisfactory to your client or you have got to persuade your client that his concepts are wrong and you've got to find an adequate answer. Some architects like Wright, and to some degree Sullivan—and there are other architects, too—just run roughshod over their clients, overawe them, and pay very little attention. Then there is a big blowup at some time or another. There are unhappy clients, there are unhappy architects. I think Wright charmed his clients. Sullivan didn't have quite that ability. He had a tendency to fight with them, I think.

Blum: I think history has perhaps identified Sullivan as being very responsive to the needs of, if not clients, certainly people at that time, whereas, say, Burnham...

McCurry: I had an extraordinarily interesting conversation on one occasion at the Cliff Dwellers. I'll see if I can remember the names involved. There were two members of the Cliff Dwellers, they were both officials of the Santa Fe Railroad. They both lived in Riverside. One of them had retired. I can't remember the name of the other one at this moment. If I look at a Cliff Dwellers' list of members, it will come back to me, but I can’t recall it at the moment. I happened to sit down at the table where they were, one of the

30 common tables—this is one of the great values of those common tables—and somehow or other the conversation got around to Louis Sullivan and the fact that Babson, who was a very wealthy man, had commissioned Sullivan to design a house for him in Riverside. He related the circumstances and his relationship with Sullivan as being very pleasant, very stimulating, and very interesting, and produced a very satisfactory house. When he died, he gave this to a Catholic order that subsequently sold it to a developer and the house was destroyed—the Babson house in Riverside. A tragedy. This was a firsthand account of a very satisfactory relationship between a client and Louis Sullivan, which I cherished.

Blum: Did that surprise you?

McCurry: I don't think I was surprised. I was just fascinated by the story.

Blum: In terms of your own ideas about how you should go about being an architect when you graduated… I realize that what you say now is tempered with years and years of experience.

McCurry: But to cast myself back in that mode, you could see all the successful architects around you. At that particular moment, I think you were looking for the key to let you in.

Blum: Did you have any idea what that key might be?

McCurry: Competence, primarily. I never had any doubt that it was competence that brought you clients and also opportunities. Opportunities come in a variety of ways. They may come through social relationships, business relationships, or through competitions, or through mutual friends.

Blum: Did you think when you graduated that you were adequately prepared for the profession?

McCurry: Oh, no. I fully realized that I had a lot of experience to gain.

31 Blum: And then having been caught in this time situation where there were old solutions that no longer applied...

McCurry: Well, I spent a year in Europe looking for solutions and there were not many of them then. There were none in England.

Blum: Before we hear about your travels in Europe, could we backtrack for a minute? While you were a student at Lane Tech and Armour—this was when you were in your teens and the twenties—what was the city like? What did it look like at that time? Do you remember?

McCurry: I started to explore the city when I went to Lane High School. I was fourteen years old. I had to take the elevated from the South Side of Chicago to the Near North Side of Chicago, and that took me through the Loop area, where I could look out of the windows and see the activity of the city. It was also convenient for me, upon finishing classes in the spring and fall of the year, from Sedgwick and Division to walk down Division Street and then continue on down Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue and to explore the lovely boulevard.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

McCurry: Lake Shore Drive was filled with townhouses and old mansions, and one of the biggest and ugliest was the old Potter Palmer mansion. And then I’d continue down Michigan Avenue, which was a tree-lined boulevard with wide sidewalks and wide parkways and some housing and apartments and a great many interesting shops and restaurants. Wabash Avenue was an interesting street, also, and so was Dearborn. And I walked down Clark Street and LaSalle Street and most of this was housing, but there were some interesting churches to see—the Church of the Ascension and a number of others—and I got a feeling for the housing. There were mostly townhouses or three-story buildings, which were put on rather small lots. Some of them were quite pretentious. But here was all the architecture of the well-known

32 architects of the early part of the twentieth century and the housing that accommodated the fairly well-to-do of the city. Then walking into the city was also a pleasure, because here were some of the buildings that we had been reading about in our history of architecture courses, there in actuality. There were also a number of newly emerging, relatively tall buildings that were built by Holabird and Root, and the old Louis Sullivan buildings—the Carson Pirie building, the old Stock Exchange, the Garrick Theater—the Monadnock building of Holabird and Root, and the newly emerging tall skyscrapers of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. It was an exciting city, and architecture became, to some degree, a reality when I could recall the books that I had read, pictures that I had seen, and actually see the building. I was conscious of the fact that in this period there was a considerable ferment which had started as the Prairie School, or really started with the World's Fair of 1893 and continued through the Prairie School, and was now beginning to change after World War I was over. A new style was beginning to emerge, which we spoke of loosely as modern, and is now described as art deco.

Blum: What building most impressed you?

McCurry: I suppose I was most impressed by the Auditorium, by its sheer size and really strong character. It was kind of a forbidding building to a young boy, and I walked into the lobby and through the bar with the greatest apprehension, feeling that I didn't really have the money to belong there. But nevertheless, I was curious. I was impressed by the Stock Exchange on LaSalle Street, and I was impressed by the buildings that were beginning to emerge—the Palmer House done by Holabird and Root, the new Board of Trade building at the end of LaSalle Street. I had seen many renderings by Gibbs Hall, who was one of the chief designers of Holabird and Root's office. There was a sculpture of Ceres on the top of it by a sculptor that I knew. Architecture began to have a reality to me, and I must, in retrospect, think that my meanderings through the city brought this reality into being.

Blum: Did your instructors encourage you to take these field trips or was it just inevitable...?

33 McCurry: During my high school days, this was not a design course. We were sort of reacting to historic architecture in learning something about it, but we weren't learning very much about the creative processes of architecture or the problem-solving that was involved in architecture. That came later when I entered Armour Institute.

Blum: You mentioned that on top of the Board of Trade there was a sculpture by a friend of yours.

McCurry: Ceres. That's right.

Blum: Who was that?

McCurry: You'll have to give me time. I can't think of the name right now. He's a friend of Arthur Deam's. They were both at the American Academy in Rome. That's how Arthur met him, but he was an emerging sculptor who became a friend of John Holabird’s and was commissioned to do the Ceres. His name is John Storrs.

Blum: Tell me, when you were a student—between 1922 and 1926—what was the most popular way in which students spent their leisure time?

McCurry: That's a laugh, because we never had any leisure.

Blum: On the weekends? In the evenings?

McCurry: There was no such thing as leisure. We spent the weekends catching up with our engineering studies. We spent the week working like dogs and, if I can jump ahead for a moment, I was damned glad to get out of school and have a little more leisure than I had ever had during my academic career.

Blum: Were these the years of, say, jazz? Jazz was new at that time.

34 McCurry: This was the postwar period when everybody was making a lot of money. Prohibition laws had been enacted during World War I. The purveyors of illicit liquor were beginning to become important figures in the news and also in the crime activities of the city, and everybody was intrigued by illegally going to a speakeasy. Our speakeasies were fairly civilized places because we never had money enough to get into any real trouble. But this evolved into celebrations after the completion of a project. We would gather together what monies we had and either go to an Italian restaurant that was down on Wabash Avenue near Congress Street, in which we could have a very reasonably priced Italian meal and we could drink so-called "dago red" from coffee cups. If we were a little more affluent, we went down to Chinatown and bought a full-course Chinese meal. The Chinese proprietor seemed to be always interested in a group of students who were coming down, without very much money, but enormous amounts of enthusiasm. We always managed to find a way of getting some rice wine to drink with our meal. These were our relaxations and celebrations. Mostly the celebrations were for the completion of a project and few moments to breathe again.

Blum: What about the jazz places? Did you frequent them?

McCurry: My first experience with jazz, as it was beginning to emerge, was with Isham Jones at the old College Inn. This was billed as tea dancing and for a price of about a dollar you could go in there in the late afternoon with your date and spend several hours of dancing and listening to the music of Isham Jones. This was a time, too, when Michigan Avenue had many small shops. Many of them were ice cream parlors and candy shops, and as long as we were going to the Art Institute, where there were a surplus of young ladies that also liked ice cream, we could find companions when we had the money to indulge ourselves.

Blum: A while ago, as you were speaking about Wright and Sullivan, you mentioned that you attended Sullivan's funeral.

McCurry: Yes.

35 Blum: Would you describe that?

McCurry: Well, all of the elite of Chicago—that is, the architectural elite of Chicago—had probably ignored Sullivan for the last ten or fifteen years, but they all came to his funeral. It was interesting to me to talk to some of our juniors and seniors, who had become more familiar with the living personalities of the architects than I had, to point out these famous men or successful architects, to see how they looked and swaggered and behaved themselves. But it was a goodly turnout on a fairly cold spring day, as I recall it. I think the most interesting thing was my encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright. Some of the people that I was with happened to know him, so I was introduced to him. He had just returned from building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and was coming back here to pick up the threads of his life again.

Blum: Who else attended that funeral that you recall?

McCurry: The people that I really knew were my classmates. They were Vale Faro, Claude Steel, Erwin Nicolai, Harold Reynolds, Lindsey Suter.

Blum: Who were the celebrities that you didn't know but that you knew of?

McCurry: These were the people from the big offices that I had met. I knew Tom Tallmadge was there, and I had met Andy Rebori and Andy Rebori was there, but I hadn't met John Holabird or John Root, and I hadn't met anyone from the Graham, Anderson organization. I had met Edward Bennett on one occasion, who was a city planner. I had seen him. It was a very impressive turnout of architects, even though I didn't know very many of them.

Blum: Did anyone speak?

McCurry: No. I don't recall any.

Blum: It must have been an impressive gathering.

36 McCurry: Yes. I don't recall any eulogy at that particular moment. We wandered around Graceland after the funeral and saw the Getty Tomb. We saw some of the work of Stanford White and a number of the other famous architects in the country who contributed monuments. This was one of the things that Tom Tallmadge did, too. He did a good many, very interesting, gravestones for his friends and people he was recommended to.

Blum: He did this while you were in his office?

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: Did you work on any yourself?

McCurry: Some of them, yes.

Blum: Could we now resume with your trip to Europe. You had said before that it was because of your dissatisfaction with feeling you were not completely trained that you elected to go to Europe, as opposed to taking a master's at an eastern school. How did you make that choice?

McCurry: I was a local boy. We hadn't had much opportunity to travel outside the city of Chicago. The automobile was a fairly new and expensive creature and I had been around, to some degree, the Midwest, but I had never been to the large major population centers. I had been to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia by train, but I was interested in New York and the great cities of this country that I hadn't seen. And I was also fascinated by the architecture of Europe and there were slowly emerging publications from Europe that suggested that there was considerable activity that had been triggered to some degree by the 1925 Paris exposition and the proposed exhibit that was to occur in Barcelona in 1929. We were seeing some records and hearing from former students who had made the grand trek of the emerging, modern German architecture, the emergence of the Bauhaus as a force in the development of architecture. And also in the period of years I worked for Tom

37 Tallmadge—that amounted to perhaps at least three years or so, counting the summers—I was fascinated by the Gothic architecture of Europe, because we were redoing a great many, or using the Gothic idiom, in many of the buildings that I had worked on for Tallmadge. One of them particularly was the reredos at St. Luke's, which is a great big screen behind the altar. There isn't too much documentation of these great reredos. One for St. Thomas in New York by Goodhue was a fine example of a redone Gothic building, and some of these done by Cram also were fine pieces of architecture. But looking at the English sources, a great many of the reredos, which were filled with the sculpture of the saints and the heroes of the church, had been badly damaged during the Cromwell regime, as were the stained-glass windows. This was my background in Gothic architecture. Tallmadge was also interested in Georgian architecture. I had studied Georgian architecture in school and observed it in the magazines and recalled it from reading the literature of England. It was exciting to me as an interesting social and political time, but also interesting in terms of architecture, because at that time England was perhaps the wealthiest nation in the world. So I was anxious to go to Europe and see for myself what was going on. My friend Ted Rich felt much the same way. He had graduated a couple of years before from the University of Michigan and was fired by his knowledge of the history of architecture and his desire to go adventuring. So, in August of 1928 we gathered our resources together and started out. Rich wanted to stop and see his family in Lansing and we had planned to sail from Montreal, so that we would have a chance to have a look at Montreal. We were going to land in Liverpool. When we got to Montreal, we had allowed ourselves an extra day to look around Montreal. We started out and suddenly we were comparing our passports, because we had passports but we had to have visas to enter the United Kingdom, and I observed that Ted didn't have a visa for England. He had thought he could get a visa in Montreal. So we started out to try to get a visa. We soon learned after going to various and sundry government buildings that the visa service was not performed within the country in which you were asking for a visa. We went to the American consul in desperation. There was a distinguished-looking gentleman who bawled us out for being college graduates and not understanding the intricacies of

38 foreign policy and diplomacy. After he got through chastising us, he figured out a way that we could get a visa. There was a plane flying to New York that evening and he said he would send our passport back to New York and it would be returned by an early morning flight. Our boat was leaving at twelve o’clock and he felt reasonably certain that we would receive the visa prior to our departure. Thereupon he took us to lunch. So, we continued to explore the city. This was the first time we were able to have a legitimate glass of wine, the first time in our lives. So we had a good time and the following morning we prepared to bring our luggage down to the ship and embark. By the time we got down to the ship, to the Canadian Pacific offices, we were dumfounded to find that Rich's passport had not been returned. Finally, we decided that we would meet in Liverpool in a week's time when the next sailing occurred, and I most reluctantly got on the ship and sort of resigned myself to a lonesome voyage and a lonesome week in England. I was standing by the rail wondering what was going to happen next. An Anglican clergyman was standing next to me who was just returning from South Africa for a year's furlough in England. He invited me to play deck tennis with him. Well, I thought, anything to take my mind off this problem. We went up on deck and started to play deck tennis. We had a vigorous game and at the conclusion of the game he said, "I feel as though I ought to have a little refreshment. How about a drink?" I was absolutely horrified. I didn't have the slightest idea of what you did when you got into a bar. I had never been in a bar in my life. So, we went down to the bar and he said, "What would you like to drink?" I said, "I don't know. What is a good drink for an occasion like this?" He said, "Well, I'm going to have a dog's nose." I didn't have the slightest idea what a "dog's nose" was so I said I would have one, too. In due course of time this drink came, which was a pint of bitter British beer with a jigger of gin—a most formidable drink, I found. Then I began to recall the fact that my father had talked about a drink that some of the workmen used to drink, what was called a "boilermaker," which was a pint of beer and a liberal portion of bourbon, so I felt that I was beginning to arrive. And then the surprise of my life occurred—in walked Ted Rich, who at the very last moment had received his passport and visa. This was an

39 enormous pleasure and satisfaction to find that my companion was going with me.

Blum: How pleasant it became from an inauspicious beginning.

McCurry: Right.

Blum: For how long were you on the ship?

McCurry: It was about a week's voyage. And we were somewhat disillusioned. We were excited about the ship and, of course, this first day we spent climbing all over it. This was a cabin-class ship, so you were free to go over the entire ship. We had one interesting day going out the St. Lawrence River and then we encountered the grim Atlantic, where it was cold and windy and foggy and it was completely disagreeable. We used to take our morning stroll around the ship, but the photographs that we were familiar with, in terms of the choice of an ocean voyage, were not fulfilled on this passage. Then we reached Ireland and went around the north coast of Ireland and we saw Belfast from a distance and landed in Liverpool. We came in during the early morning and we checked our luggage. What we both wanted to see was the new cathedral that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was building in Liverpool, and we wanted to see St. George's Hall, which was a highly acclaimed classic building in Liverpool. Liverpool was just about as dirty as I remember Pittsburgh to be—and most of the English cities were that burned soft coal in 1928. We saw the cathedral and we saw St. George's Hall, and we saw some of the confusion and congestion and squalor of Liverpool and then crossed the Mercy River to Chester. This was our first experience with one of the great Gothic cathedrals and it had an enormous impact. It was brown sandstone. We arrived on a Saturday and the following morning we went to church in this magnificent cathedral and we were off and running on our big adventure. Chester is an old Roman town, so we walked around the old Roman remains and wandered through the city. We got familiar with the board and room concepts of the pensions and began to understand that we were living in a somewhat different kind of society. One of my first

40 adventures—with breakfast—was coming down a little bit early in the morning and being seated at the head of the table. There was the teapot, an enormous loaf of bread, and a great big butcher knife. The nice little maid suggested to me that I was to pour tea for the oncoming guests and cut them a great big slice of bread, both of which I proved almost incapable of doing. I didn't understand the techniques of keeping the tea leaves out of the teapot, and I certainly didn't know how to cut a great big loaf of bread without putting it down on some kind of a counter. So I never made the mistake of coming early to breakfast after that. From Chester we went across England to York and then started down along the coast visiting York, which is an enormous building, again a Roman town and a famous town in the medieval period. We went to Lincoln, Peterborough, and we finally got to Ely, which was a most interesting adventure. Ely has the collegiate school and the collegiate church, a great cathedral. Well, I'll tell you my adventures there. We were feeling a little bit lonely after being in England for about ten days or two weeks, so we decided to do something typically American and most un- English. We bought a bottle of sherry when we left Peterborough and decided to drink it on the train, which no civilized Englishman would do. We accomplished our mission and got to Ely and checked our luggage and decided to explore the town, which was a very small town. But after that much sherry we were not extremely cooperative, so we each went in different directions and I ended up in the cathedral in the late afternoon. And after having walked around the town quite a bit, I sat in the back of the church. It was a very comfortable place and I apparently fell asleep. I woke up to the sound of heavenly music and slowly raised my head above the pew. Under the octagon there was an evening prayer service going on. I looked at my watch and it was a little before five o'clock. At the conclusion of the service, I quietly got up and walked down to see the rest of the cathedral, and I ran into the dean of the cathedral. As soon as I opened my mouth, he realized I was an American and wanted to know who I was. When I told him I was an architect, he took me into the cathedral garden and we had tea together—a most delightful kind of introduction to Ely. He said that there was an Episcopalian clergyman there from Boston who was a distant relative, or belonged to, the Washington clan and wanted to see some of the Washington

41 coats of arms that were around in this area. He wanted to know if the following morning I wanted to go with one of the canons of the church and explore the attic. I told him that I was traveling with a friend, that if I could bring him since we were both architects, we would be delighted to do this. We said goodbye and I suddenly decided that I'd better find Rich. I went back into the cathedral and, lo and behold, there was Rich wandering around the cathedral. So, we were reunited and we walked out into the square and wondered where we would stay. Directly across from the cathedral was a small pub called the Fountain Inn. We walked over there, thinking this was a convenient place. We encountered an absolutely delightful Welsh gal and she was glad to have us. We had a very pleasant room and she was serving dinner that night and it was Yorkshire pudding and we couldn't do any better. So we had dinner that night and at the conclusion of dinner she invited us back to her kitchen/living room, where her husband was having his after-dinner pint. He was a great big burly guy who drove a beer truck for one of the breweries in town. We sat down and drank several pints and we were curious as to what he was doing. He told us that he had been in the war and then he told us his whole life story. Their name was Jones—Mr. and Mrs. Jones. The following morning Mrs. Jones told us that she had never heard these stories before in her life and she was absolutely delighted that we had been there, because it was such a convivial atmosphere that her husband felt like speaking. When the war broke out he was sixteen years old, a great big husky boy that had never particularly enjoyed school. He was restless and wanted something to do. His two brothers had signed up. His father refused to sign an agreement by which he could join the army at age sixteen, but he joined anyway. His father hauled him home, but finally came to the conclusion that there wasn't anything he could do with him, so he joined the army at sixteen and was sent overseas almost immediately after a certain amount of training. He participated in the battle of Somme and fought at Ypres, and told us about the confusion and mobility of the battle around Ypres when the British troops were desperately trying to deny the Germans the channel ports. He told us of his company retreating, or they were going in what they thought was the direction of the rear, feeling that they were terribly disorganized and were not doing anything effective. They ran into a

42 colonel at a crossroads who said, "I'm sorry boys. It's a tough deal but that's the way back." And he said this was not the road back but the road up front, and this guy got a medal for sending them back into combat again. He said, "We were so tired when we came back and encountered the Germans that we just sat down and stayed there. This was the high point of the battle on the Ypres River." Then he continued to talk about the war and the difficulty of staying alive, the hardships of fighting in the trenches, and ended this amazing story telling us about after he had served for about three years and still was alive. He had become a sergeant and his great friend was a sergeant major and they had finally been furloughed back to a small town not far outside of Paris. They had a year's salary coming and had two weeks leave, and they drew new uniforms and got themselves all scrubbed up and decked up in their new uniforms, with their pockets stuffed with British pounds, and were ready to start off for Paris. They encountered the sergeant major of the regiment. The British sergeant major really runs a regiment. They didn't like each other—the two sergeants and the sergeant major—so he said "Where are you blokes going?" They said "We're on our way to Paris." And he said, "Oh, no, you're not. I've got some special duty for you." So he said, "My buddy and I looked at each other, we picked this guy up and dropped him head first off the bridge, and went on our way to Paris." He said, "We came back two weeks later and were immediately arrested because this guy had died. He had stuck in the mud and couldn't extricate himself."

Blum: Oh, my, what a terrible thing.

McCurry: He said they both denied complicity. The court martial could not prove that they had committed murder, but they were both sent back to the front with the stipulation they would never be given leave again. So, shortly thereafter, he was all shot up and returned to a base hospital and then invalided at home. But he survived this horrible catastrophe. We didn't go to bed until about two o'clock in the morning. We were so excited and so thrilled to hear this firsthand account of one of the major battles of World War I that we had read about as children and had heard this marvelous tale. We were also conscious of being in Ely, and we were—at least Ted was—conscious of the

43 fact that Dorothy Sayers had written a magnificent book called The Nine Tailors, which had laid around the fen country. We continued on to Oxford and so on down to London, where we spent a month getting familiar with London and its environs, and we got down to the southern part of England and saw the great cathedrals of Winchester and Wells and Salisbury and Stonehenge and we came back. I wanted to go to Holland. Before we leave England, let me say that it was an enormous pleasure to me and a great satisfaction to see the magnificent Gothic architecture of England and to see the beautiful Georgian architecture of the city of London. But it was a disappointment that we hadn't seen anything that resembled anything that we might call modern or contemporary architecture.

Blum: Were you sketching along the way? Were you sketching all of this, recording it in some way?

McCurry: We both tried to make sketches, but we found that it was so time-consuming that we began to rely on my camera to record the places that we had been. Going on a sketching tour, we found, you have to spend almost a day, or a half a day anyway, making sketches or watercolors. It is difficult, very difficult. You are carrying all of this paraphernalia around. We got to London and Ted decided that he wasn't terribly interested in Holland, but he would go to Belgium, where he would polish up his French in Belgium and we would meet in Brussels. So he went off to Brussels and I decided to stay a couple more days in London. Just before I had left Chicago, I had gone to the horse races with my friend John Halimah, who was a classmate of mine, and later became the architect for the Johnson Wax Company—he became the custodian of the great Frank Lloyd Wright office building for the Johnson Company and also the family house that he had built for Johnson near Racine.

Blum: Is that Wingspread?

McCurry: Yes. John Halimah, strangely for an architect, was an inveterate gambler. So we went to the horse races and I won $75.00 by sheer good fortune. I

44 immediately went out and bought an alligator bag that looked to me adequate in size to carry all of my luggage. But due to my inexperience, when fully loaded, I could scarcely lift it. I lugged this thing around the northern part of England and decided I was not going to carry the bag any longer. I took it down to the Paddington Station and shipped it in care of the Gare St. Lazare in Paris and decided I would pick it up about a month later. I went off to Holland—I decided that I had never flown in an airplane and even at that early time, it was so much more convenient to fly in a plane across the Channel than to spend a day and a night taking the railroad and then the Channel crossing, and then getting down to Amsterdam—so, with some trepidation, I went out to Croyden, looked at this little cloth and wooden creation, crawled into it with about ten other people, and flew across the Channel. We flew at a relatively low altitude. This was an old Fokker. We flew across the Channel and, of course, the whole of the southeast of England was a wonderful green carpet. It was just absolutely delightful to watch this unfolding landscape. We flew across the Channel. Then we flew along the sandy beaches of Belgium, Flanders, and Holland, and this was a most interesting and delightful way of getting an overview of the so-called Low Country.

Blum: Was this your first ride in a plane?

McCurry: Yes. Much against my mother's instructions, you understand. I landed in Amsterdam, which was so different than London, and I stayed at a hotel called the Krasnapolsky. It was right on the Dam. I couldn't have found a better place or more convenient place to stay and I had an absolutely delightful time in Holland. Some of my mother's friends were of Dutch origin and they had asked me to look up some of their relatives who lived in Bussum. So, I felt as though to some degree I had a little foothold in Holland. After I arrived in Amsterdam, I dropped them a note and told them I was going to be there for a week and where I was staying. The following day I received an invitation to Sunday dinner and they told me exactly how to get out there. I would take the train out to Bussum, which is a suburb of Amsterdam. They had a son who was about my age who would, together

45 with his girlfriend, squire me around and show me some of the work that was being done there. There were a number of architects whose work I wanted to see, names that I had become familiar with—one was Dudok and another one was Oud—who had done many of the housing projects that were relatively new in Amsterdam. This was a kind of breath of fresh air, because here was a city that was ancient in the sense that it was built in the Renaissance period—this was the old part of the city around all of the canals and with the Dam as the center—but on the outskirts, around the new stadium that had been built for the 1928 Olympics, was a tremendous amount of new workingmen's homes in varieties of red brick, most of them four stories in height, built fairly close to the lot lines and relatively small. They were reached by strange winding stairways and serviced by great big beams that stuck out of the fourth floor attic space, which had a hoist on them, and everybody brought their furniture in through the front windows. They would hoist it above the street, because it was impossible to bring furniture up these winding stairways. I had rented a bicycle, thinking that this was the best means of transportation and of seeing the city of Amsterdam. The city of Amsterdam at that time was certainly half the size it is now, and this proved to be very satisfactory. I simply followed one of the streetcars going to the outskirts of the city and then started to ride around the periphery of the city. I was having a wonderful time and about noon I began to get hungry. I stopped in a cafe and I had already discovered that most everybody spoke English. I found out later that four years of English was obligatory at the secondary school level, but this particular barmaid didn't speak English, so by the sign language she decided that I needed a pint of beer. This was my first experience with Pilsner beer, which is really a formidable beer, and a great big slab of bread and some delicious Dutch cheese. So after consuming that and drinking the Pilsner, I found it a little difficult to steer properly on the bicycle for an hour or so, until the effects of this strong beer had worn off. But then I continued my journey and saw the stadium and was absolutely thrilled by what I had seen. I rode back to the center of the city and visited the Rijksmuseum.

46 [Tape 2: Side 2]

McCurry: Now, Amsterdam was an area of high excitement to me. I went to the usual places around Amsterdam and saw all the historic sites, watched the tubby brown-sailed boats go out fishing. I went out to Bussum and met my friends and rode the bicycle around Bussum and saw a good deal of the work of Dudok. Then I want on to Amsterdam and The Hague. The Hague is a genteel seat of government not far from Oostende, the ocean, and I walked out there and enjoyed it very much. It has a first-class museum. Amsterdam was a busy, bustling place and this concluded my two most interesting weeks in Holland. I went on to Belgium and duly met Ted.

Blum: Before you move on, what was there about the architecture in Holland that impressed you? You were in search of new solutions. Did you find any?

McCurry: I was very much interested in the development of new apartments done in brick. I was very much interested in the new forms and shapes that had moved away from classic concepts and were dependent more upon solids and voids and texture and color to create a favorable aesthetic impression. I was also interested in the fact that they were endeavoring to solve housing in a congested area and give it a particular character, and interested in the development that continued to the streets, the sidewalks, and the plantings in the parks that went with the whole complex.

Blum: Were these new concepts, new ideas?

McCurry: Yes. They were new ideas and I, to some degree, had seen them in journals, but to see them in actuality was a great, great pleasure and a great stimulus. One of the sad things is coming back to the United States in 1929 and finding that, due to the Depression, architecture in the United States had come to a standstill.

Blum: You were on your way to Belgium before I interrupted you.

47 McCurry: Belgium. I had an opportunity to try out the French that I thought I had fairly well mastered, which proved not to be true. But it was a pleasure to be back with Ted and have companionship again. We managed to get around Brussels and we saw the great museums. We had a great deal of fun walking around the city. We got to the outskirts of Brussels and saw this building by the Viennese architect, which I think is the Stoclet house, which has a white skin and was one of the first houses of the so-called International Style that I had seen. I was enormously pleased to have been able to see this building. In fact, it was the only building that seemed to have any kinship with the International Style of that particular time in Belgium.

Blum: And your idea of the International Style was what you had already seen published in journals—German journals? Is that where it came from?

McCurry: Yes. The International Style was a desire to move away from ornament, and to depend on silhouette and shape and textures that were derived mostly from manufactured products, rather than handcrafted products.

Blum: And that's what you saw in this house?

McCurry: That's right.

Blum: This was a private home?

McCurry: Yes, a private home. I would guess that it would be classified as a townhouse, with a walled garden. Of course, we didn't get inside the house. I understand now it's open to inspection. It's not a private house any longer. But then we visited some of the interesting historic places in Belgium—Bruges, which I saw on a rainy day. Rain has its own charm, but I am sure it is far different than seeing it on a sunny day. I listened to the bells going off at fifteen-minute intervals, the carillons which seemed to create a sense of warmth. Other people being around when the streets were mostly deserted because of the heavy rain and fog… But I remember Bruges with

48 great pleasure, with picturesque canals, lovely churches, and the fine work of Hans Memling. Then we continued on to France, and we found that there is a difference between the way the French and the Belgians pronounce their mutual language. We arrived in Amiens and we were absolutely stunned by the magnificence of the cathedral in Amiens. We decided to celebrate our arrival on French soil. We went to an interesting restaurant, became completely bogged down in trying to read a French menu, which was hectographed. Do you remember...? Probably you don't remember. The hectograph—the purple ink is soluble in water and starts to bleed. We tried out our schoolbook French on the menu without too much success. I had remembered that veau was veal. I had forgotten what tête meant and so I ordered a tête du veau, which seemed to please the waiter enormously, but it certainly didn't please me when it arrived.

Blum: What is tête du veau?

McCurry: It was the dead head of small calf, which I couldn't possibly eat, and the waiter was so concerned. By that time I had forgotten what little French I knew. And all he could conclude was that all Americans were crazy. But we spent a good whole day looking all over the cathedral at Amiens and walking around the city, which in the area around the cathedral is quite medieval in character. And so, on to Paris. Paris was a most interesting experience. Of course, a great metropolitan city. The first task we had was to recover our luggage from the Gare St. Lazare, which proved to be much more of a task than I ever thought it would be. But I finally did recover this enormous bag, heavily covered with dust and dirt, having been there for a whole month. We found a small hotel on the rue des Faculties called the Hotel des Faculties. It was close to the Sorbonne on the Right Bank and so we settled down to inspect Paris to some degree at our leisure. We had a great deal of excitement in getting around Paris, recalling its great architecture, seeing it and exploring the newer shops, and seeing for the first time the work of Le Corbusier.

Blum: How did you respond to that?

49 McCurry: Well, we were very excited about seeing Corbusier's work.

Blum: Did you have an opportunity when you were in France to speak with French architects, or did you try to visit Corbusier's studio?

McCurry: No. We didn't try, this was foolish of us. We didn't try to visit Corbusier's studio, in which a good many Americans worked, but we were really more interested in seeing... We were charmed by everything that was happening in France. The ambience of this great capital, its great museums, wonderful architecture, and the vitality and activity of the whole city. So we dutifully walked all over Paris. One of the interesting things that I remember particularly was going down in the region of the Bastille, Port St. Denis, which was the red light district of Paris, and we had plenty of difficulty with the denizens down there. We were particularly interested in seeing the Marais quarter, which is splendid architecture of the early French Renaissance period, where the cream of French society at one time lived and frequented the courts of the Louises. It was in disreputable shape and I understand now it has been completely restored. It must be purely delightful. But we also explored the Halles and this became a stopping place for breakfast in the morning and a late-night snack in the evenings. It is the site now of the Pompidou Center. I don't know whether that is an improvement or not, because I haven't seen it. We got out to the suburbs of Paris. We were enormously impressed by Versailles, the wonderful gardens of Le Nôtre, the unbelievable architecture and magnificence of the life of the Sun King. We got to Fontainebleau, and then started, after a month in Paris, southward, stopping at Chartres. Seeing Chartres was perhaps as high a point of aesthetic impact as we enjoyed in all of France. A magnificent cathedral and magnificent glass, beautifully sited. We traveled through the Loire Valley, starting at Tours and going to Blois. We saw Azay-le-Rideau, Chenonceaux. I remember a delightful afternoon spent making a watercolor of the bridge and having a conversation with an old Frenchman who explained to me the intricacies of greetings. When he had come past me, he stopped to look at what I was doing. I had wished him "bonjour," and he corrected me, saying it

50 was late in the afternoon and "bonjour" was not appropriate. If it was a little before evening, you would say "bonsoir," and I don't remember what the late afternoon expression is now. But it was a learned lecture and duly noted by me. But it didn't help my watercolor, which I never was able to finish because at four o'clock in the afternoon in November in France, it's dark. This was one of the banes of our existence—what to do from four o'clock until 7:30 when you could find something to eat. We were staying in small pensions, which usually boasted of at least a forty-watt light in the center of the room and normally without heat. So, we did what all the Frenchmen did—we went to the local cafes and bought several glasses of beer at a nickel a glass. We read our guidebooks, and what was even more important, we started to read French newspapers, which improved our vernacular considerably. I did a watercolor of several of the chateaux and was enormously impressed by the quality of the architecture, the skill of the craftsmen, the grand life that the architecture suggested was lived by these wealthy nobles in the Loire Valley. We continued on southward. We stopped at Chinon, which was one of the great medieval fortifications built by Richard III. We stopped at Poitiers and finally got to Bordeaux in the midst of the worst rainstorm that I had ever experienced. This reminded me of the tales that my older friends had told me when I was in high school—they had just gotten out of high school and gone into the Army, and most of them had eventually ended up in Bordeaux, which was the receiving point and shipping point for the American army. Some of them were stationed there during that horrible winter, prior to the end of the war, where they practically lived in the rain, and the two days that we spent there we lived in the midst of a rainstorm. This suggested to us that maybe we had seen enough of the northern part of France and we should get busy and get down to the southern part. So we didn't try to explore the environs of Bordeaux because of the horrible weather.

Blum: I can see from what you are saying that you were charmed by the romance of the wonderful buildings of earlier days, but had you given up your quest for looking for new architecture?

McCurry: Oh, there wasn't any.

51 Blum: You were just enjoying what you were seeing?

McCurry: We went to Carcassone, which is one of the most wonderful medieval fortifications in France. We decided to go adventuring, so we went to Perpignan, right on the Spanish border. One of the reasons for going there, this was the birthplace of Pablo Casals. The second was that we were a little bit hungry to see the Pyrenees that we had never seen and wanted to see. The following day, we walked up to the foothills of the Pyrenees, thinking we would climb up and improve our vista of the whole area, but it proved to be mostly goat tracks, and we spent all day climbing up. We finally woke up to the fact that, in view of the fact that it got dark at four o'clock, we'd better start down. Not being mountain climbers, we didn't realize it was much more difficult to climb down than to climb up. We didn't get down until well into the evening, long after the dinner hour. By the time we got back to the roads, it was pitch dark and we were having a great deal of difficulty finding our way. We finally encountered a two-wheeled cart and managed to convey the idea to the man who was driving that we wanted to go back to the town. So he finally let us nestle down among the hay in the back of the cart and we promptly went to sleep and woke up in town. We got back to our pension and the good lady treated us as if we had risen from the dead. We were really in trouble because she wasn't going to feed us because we had been too dumb and stupid. This was kind of hard to gather from her rapid French, but we realized we were in the doghouse. But we enjoyed the adventure and went on to Arles and Nîmes and Avignon, which were absolutely delightful places.

Blum: Were there lessons that you were absorbing architecturally, even though it wasn't modern art?

McCurry: Well, the beauty of the French landscape in Provence and the change in the climate—it was much warmer and far better to get around—and the ambience of the place. The fact that they were old medieval towns with their roots in the Roman period—the amphitheaters, the old temples, the Palais

52 des Papes, which scream with history. You can't help but think back to the Roman occupation of Gaul. You can't escape from thinking about the troubadours, the wonderful ballads that were born there, the concept of romantic love, the whole idea of chivalry, and the horrible Hundred Years War that occurred, which was probably one of greatest slaughters in French history.

Blum: Were you still looking for modern architecture? Or had you given that up?

McCurry: We abandoned our quest because there wasn't any.

Blum: Well, not in France.

McCurry: Not in that part of France. So we continued on and got down to Nice. Nice was a lively place, so we played boules in the casino at Nice, looked around to see how the wealthy Frenchmen lived, went over to Monte Carlo. We had a ride on the grand Corniche, the route of Napoleon and all the Romans had used going from Italy to France or southern France, very much impressed by the whole seascape and the history of the area. Terribly unimpressed by the casino at Nice. It was filled with ancient men and women, shabbily dressed, dutifully following some plan of operation that they had dreamed up to beat the bank. We lost a few francs and departed. Then we went into Italy. We went from Nice to Pisa. We felt that we would go as far south as we conveniently could, to see if we couldn't improve the weather. By this time it was mid-December and getting pretty chilly. We got to Pisa on a perfectly beautiful, sunshiny December day, enormously impressed by the change in architectural character. The white marble buildings were glorious and the sunset and the change in style of architecture from the medieval and the French Renaissance to the Italian Renaissance was profound.

Blum: Did this confirm previous ideas you had from having looked at photos of these buildings in books?

53 McCurry: Well, looking at the Italian buildings... Of course, in those days there wasn't much color photography, so most of the pictures that you were conscious of examining were black and white. Of course, the contrast between a black- and-white photograph and the richness and variety of color of the actual buildings in an Italian setting were really startling, because it is so much warmer. Perhaps the architecture of Pisa seems in black-and-white rather harsh, but, in actuality, the land around it, the brilliant sunlight, the wonderful shadows that are a part of the effect of the architecture brought it to life and gave it a reality and a human scale that you didn't realize from photographs. Then on to Florence. Florence is absolutely remarkable in many ways. One of my good friends, Ted Hoffmeister, who had gone on this grand tour a year or several years before I was following his footsteps, had told me by all means to stay at the Casa Annalena, which is opposite the Boboli Gardens. So we followed our usual procedure of checking our luggage at the local railroad station and meandering across the city to find the Pitti Palace, stopping at every corner to look at the marbles that we were seeing. It took us a long time to walk over to the Pitti Palace, but we finally found the Pitti Palace. We found the entrance to it, we found the Casa Annalena, and were almost unwilling to go exploring—it looked like such an elaborate palace and so private in character, but we finally got our courage together and walked up to the second floor, where we understood the Casa Annalena was. We pushed the bell and were welcomed by an absolutely delightful woman, Señora Colastra. This turned out to be a magnificent choice. The Casa Annalena was filled with American architects, derelicts from the American Academy in Rome who were up there on their Christmas holiday. There were sculptors and musicians and painters, and it was like an absolute homecoming. All managed by a marvelous Italian family by the name of Colastra.

Blum: Did you meet anyone that you knew, or was there anyone there from Chicago?

McCurry: Oh, there were a whole flock of architects, absolutely delightful people. I can't remember all their names. Several young men from... I'm sorry, I should

54 have looked up these names long ago but I can't remember them... There were two young men from the University of Illinois—one was an architect and the other was a landscape architect. A man by the name of Richards was on the Stuart Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania, who later practiced architecture in Toledo, Ohio, and eventually became the mayor of Toledo, Ohio. Some schoolteachers who were finishing a tour of northern Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, who contributed invaluable information in terms of places to stay, and so forth and so on.

Blum: Were you able to exchange ideas with the architects who were there? Were you able to tell them that you were seeking some modern architecture?

McCurry: We were primarily after adventure. Our goals were universal, in a sense. We were interested in exploring the country, we were interested in seeing the art of the country, we were interested in seeing the architecture of the country. We were interested in the history of the country, we were interested in the people, and we were interested in being a part of the life of the country. So, we were easily diverted.

Blum: Originally, you said that this was your choice, as opposed to taking a master's at an eastern school. Was it a wise choice?

McCurry: I think so.

Blum: Did you go on to Germany, where there were new buildings?

McCurry: Oh, yes. First, we fell in love with Italy. We were enchanted by the robust quality of the Italian food. We were delighted with the friendliness of the people. We were amazed at the fact that we were able to pick up pieces of the Italian language far easier than we were to become conversant in French. We were pleased that the Italians would stop and listen to our halting Italian, while the French would fluff us off as being stupid. We were enchanted by the landscape, the rugged character of the land, and the exuberance of the architecture. And, of course, you can't help but be just fascinated by the

55 Italian painting and sculpture. So this was an enormously rich experience. We stayed there for a month and spent Christmas in Florence. We had a great time—an absolutely marvelous time. We soon fell into the ways of Florence. We would have a roll and coffee or chocolate early in the morning and start out about 11:30. We were due back at the pension at twelve o'clock for lunch. We had discovered a wine shop on the banks of the Arno, usually on our way back to the pension that served a glass of wine and two absolutely magnificent doughnuts for a lira or something like that. It was impossible to pass that wine shop without stopping, sampling their wares. We went around the outskirts of Florence. We met a number of English and American gals that were wintering in Florence, which was pretty typical of a lot of the English gals. Most of them were widows or spinsters who had left England, in some respect to escape some of the income taxes, but also to find a warmer climate. They found that they were subject to pneumonia and many of them died down there, because a lot of the Italian buildings are not very well heated. We found ourselves wearing all the clothes we possessed, including our pajamas to keep warm. We hadn't succumbed to buying woolen underwear, as all Italians protect themselves with. Then we went through the hill towns. Italy was one terrific surprise after another, in terms of the differences of the architecture, the difference in the terrain, the difference in the character of the towns. The hill towns are, perhaps, a case in point, because they are so different from the rather sophisticated atmosphere of Florence. You come to these very rugged, dramatic, exciting hill towns that reek with history, that reek with the wars, the family wars that had haunted Italy during the Renaissance period. You're not very far from the Roman days and you're caught up in an amazing complex story of history, religion, and art, and human activities. The hill towns were enormously interesting. We finally got to Rome right after New Year's. Ted had a friend, a former teacher at the University of Michigan by the name of Saunders, who was teaching at the American Academy. We promptly went out there and Ted renewed his friendship with Saunders, who was there with his wife and daughter. It was a great pleasure to see the American Academy and to meet some of the people, and have a little relationship with somebody from home. However, through the Colastra family in Florence we had gotten a complete

56 list of pensions that were loosely related to them, and these all proved to be extraordinarily interesting places frequented by the same American students that we had known in Florence. So we went through Italy constantly running into people that we had already met, or going to places which American architects and painters and sculptors frequented. So we stayed at the Pension Juliana in Rome, which is close to the Quirinale Palace, not far from the Spanish Steps. We found a most interesting metropolitan city, very different than Florence, a great metropolitan city that had seen countless civilizations, countless political regimes come and go and was blasé. One fly in the ointment was that Mr. Mussolini was there and we had been warned by the Colastra family. The Colastras had a daughter, Juliana, who fortunately came to Rome with her mother, so we had the pleasure of escorting Senora Colastra and her daughter Juliana around. They, of course, knew everything. And that was a great pleasure. We ran into some people that had a little Citroën, so it was fun to drive around in that.

Blum: What was the feeling in Italy towards Mussolini at that time? This is 1928.

McCurry: It was a tense political feeling. This was at the time that Italy had invaded Abyssinia. They were on the outs with England, in a political sense. Mussolini was feeling his oats and was constantly making speeches. Il Duce, the Piazza Venezia, the place was filled with black-shirted fascists. You felt a certain tension, because we were not accustomed to a military presence. Oppressive. We were warned by Juliana to be very careful about talking to the young Italian students. Some of them were fascists. Many of them couldn't tell the difference between an American and an Englishman, and they were down on the English at the moment because the English were slapping their wrist because they had gone into Abyssinia.

Blum: Paul, did your trip also take you to Germany where new architecture was indeed being built?

McCurry: I had almost abandoned my search for something that we described as the modern movement, that is, some breakaway from the Renaissance

57 architecture of Europe, or the redone Renaissance. Germany was one of the few countries that was exploring the future. So, I came back through France and went to Strasbourg and crossed the river to Cologne. Of course, Cologne was recovering from the war. The cathedral in Cologne was marvelous, a great example of Gothic architecture. From Cologne, I went to Heidelberg. Heidelberg is still, to some degree, a medieval city, and its affairs revolve around the great University of Heidelberg and the historic buildings that are there—a very picturesque, very interesting town.

Blum: Paul, did you see any example of modern architecture like the Bauhaus proposed?

McCurry: My first adventure in modern architecture in Germany was in Stuttgart, which was an enterprising city and had some very interesting department stores with curved glass fronts that were exciting to me. But perhaps the most interesting thing I saw in Stuttgart were several churches by Böhm that were innovative and indicated a new thinking of the liturgy and the relationship between the congregation and the clergy and were dealing with new and innovative ways to handle light. This particular church that I recall was done very simply in brick and plaster, and on the south side it had diagonal windows that brought in a great deal of light, but a soft quality of reflective light that did not interfere with the congregation. The whole concept was quite refreshing to me and very, very different than the Renaissance and medieval churches that were so common in Europe. Then I went on to Nürnberg and Rotenberg, which are both most interesting towns, in the sense of their pictorial quality, and finally terminated my visit to Germany in Munich. The outdoor life of the city was revolving around the beer gardens, which was interesting and a revelation. The museums were wonderful and I remember seeing Carmen sung in German, which I thought was very funny.

Blum: Did you at any time consider going to Dessau?

McCurry: I had reserved that for a later date, a subsequent trip to Germany.

58 Blum: So, in retrospect, as you described your trip, it sounds like you did come across some examples of new solutions, one in Germany and in Holland.

McCurry: A little bit in France. In two respects—one was the reinforced concrete work that was done by the Perret brothers. The church that I saw was in Le Raincy, which is a church entirely of reinforced concrete. The second manifestation I saw of what was happening, in terms of a modern movement, was in the work of the Lalique glass people, and the rub-off from the 1925 exhibition, in terms of new storefronts and interior decor in the commercial world. Otherwise, not much had happened, other than the few houses and other work of Corbusier that I saw.

Blum: So you were seeing examples of new solutions?

McCurry: Well, France and Germany, and to a degree England, were still recovering from the war. This was only ten years after the enormous effort and the drain on resources. So, I think it is understandable that they were fairly slow in recovering and developing the capital means by which they could make progress.

Blum: How do you think that your trip, the better part of a year, influenced you subsequently as an architect?

McCurry: I learned an enormous amount about the style and character of buildings and how closely the buildings were actually related to the political, religious, and financial climate of the period in which they were built. An example of that would be the so-called Imperial style of Napoleon, who instructed his architects to create a style of architecture, which they did after a fashion and it lasted all of ten years. And without the continuing physical, intellectual, and financial stimulation, what we speak of as a style has a tendency to die. It can't be artificially willed. It happens due to the environment in which the creative work is done. But you also learn in a trip through Europe that the great architects and the talented architects, the creative people, the people

59 who are skillful in the manipulation of aesthetics, create great buildings in any period of architecture.

Blum: When you came back to the United States, you went back to work for Tallmadge and Watson?

McCurry: No. Tallmadge had written to me and asked me to return. When I got back in September of 1929, the business climate was already beginning to turn sour and much of the work that Tom had anticipated had not come through. So he suggested that I go over and see Andy Rebori, who was busy on the LaSalle- Wacker building and several other projects. So I went over to talk to Andy and he gave me a job. I started to work on the Curtiss Reynolds Airport and this was pretty much inspired by many of the current books that originated in Germany that had to do with lightweight steel construction. Andy was fascinated by this. But a good deal of the time that I spent working for Andy was detailing the stonework on the LaSalle-Wacker building. An example of how much fun it was to work for Andy is to describe a typical stone detail that occurred up on the fortieth floor of the building On the working drawings were a couple of pencil marks that marked that this piece of ornament would have to be modeled. So it was my task to interpret these pencil marks, in terms of some kind of ornament. Oh, of course, at that period of time a great deal of the ornamentation of buildings or skyscrapers were influenced greatly by the 1925 Paris exposition. With that as a starter, Andy would normally breeze into the office and have a look at it and say, "Where did you learn to draw?" and pick up an eraser and make a few changes and corrections and then say, "That's fine, it's just what it needed." We'd send it out and about two weeks later you'd receive a call from the modeler saying that the model was finished. You relay the information to Andy. Andy would take you along and you'd go over to the modeling shop…

[Tape 3: Side 1]

60 McCurry: …and he would borrow some of their tools and climb up on their scaffolding, make a few adjustments in the model, stand back, and then tell them how good they were. Then we all went to the local bar and had a drink and came back home. A very successful afternoon.

Blum: Sounds like you had his system well understood.

McCurry: Well, a good many architects followed this same...

Blum: How large was his office? This was almost the Depression.

McCurry: This was an office that Andy had carefully put together. The office was Rebori, Dewey, Wentworth, and McCormick. John Dewey was the son of an extraordinarily successful real estate operator and a promoter and real-estate man himself. Albert Wentworth was the grandson of a mayor of the city of Chicago. Leander McCormick was one of the heirs to the McCormick fortune. These three men were well connected and for a period of six or seven years, during the early part of the twenties, the firm was very successful in building a number of delightful apartments along Lakeview, in building the chapel at Loyola, doing a wonderful apartment building on North State Street, and building the riding academy on the Near North Side, which later became the CBS studios. And then the joint venture of the LaSalle-Wacker building with Holabird and Root. Probably without the terrible Depression, this combination would have continued to flourish. The Depression destroyed the financial ability of this firm to function and that ended my career at Rebori's office.

Blum: There were the four principals and how many other people, besides you?

McCurry: There was Herb (Andy) Anderson.

Blum: What did he do?

61 McCurry: He was Andy's right-hand man and probably chief designer. I was Herb's assistant. I presume there were about ten draftsmen in the office.

Blum: That was a good-sized office, then.

McCurry: Yes. The mechanical work was done by consultants, as was the structural work.

Blum: As a draftsman—that's what you were—in that office, what did you learn from Andy Rebori, or from the total experience of working for his office?

McCurry: I don't know that it changed any of the fundamental knowledge I had. It was interesting to watch Andy operate. He was a talented architect who was very quick to grasp problems and very able at finding solutions and making suggestions that were appropriate to the design of the building. He was inventive and he had a very strong feeling, in terms of aesthetics, that is, the visual impact of the building. This is a matter of visual judgment. He was eloquent and able and determined to do it the way he understood it and saw it and thought that it should be done.

Blum: Was 1928, when you returned to the States, the year you took your exam for your license?

McCurry: No, I took the licensing exam prior to my departure for Europe.

Blum: What was that experience like?

McCurry: Any three-day examination as far-ranging as the architectural licensing exam… It is an examination with two days spent in taking examinations that indicate your competence in design of steel structure, in the design of concrete structures, in the design of mechanical systems, in certain knowledge of the history of architecture, the history of materials. And a twelve-hour examination, which was a test of your ability to analyze, assimilate, and prepare a satisfactory response or answer to the main basic

62 concepts of the program, and indicate the visual characteristics of the design. Now, putting this together in three days time, and preparing for it, is an arduous program. I, like most young architects, attended the refresher courses given by the Architectural Sketch Club, in which various senior members of the community lectured for several evenings on what we might expect in each of these various and sundry examinations. So, in retrospect, I would say it was a comprehensive examination based upon the things that you should have learned in either long experience in active practice or in a four-year college program.

Blum: How long did you work for the Rebori office?

McCurry: It must have been four or five months.

Blum: Then this was still 1929. What then?

McCurry: In 1929 the Depression—November 1929—practically ended the Rebori office. It was most unfortunate because Andy never really recovered from this drastic curtailment of their work, which was to a considerable degree speculative.

Blum: And what did you do?

McCurry: I went over to see my friends at D.H. Burnham's office, which I understood was becoming involved in the 1933 fair. Hubert Burnham was kind enough to give me a job.

Blum: Doing what?

McCurry: The recommendation for the job came from George Robard, who was his chief designer and an old friend of mine.

Blum: And what were you hired to do?

63 McCurry: I started to work on the 1933 fair. At that time the architects had been chosen for the fair. This was the Burnham brothers, Hubert and Daniel Burnham; Edward Bennett of Bennett, Parsons and Frost; John Holabird of Holabird and Root; Walker of New York; Corbett of New York; and Brown of San Francisco.

Blum: And what were you doing in the Burnham office?

McCurry: All of the architects had been given a segment of the fair. It had been determined by the architects involved that they would divide the work into certain segments in which each of them would take a part to do. Then they would try to put together a comprehensive scheme, and when that occurred then they would set up a Department of Public Works and arrange a staff to carry on the work of the fair. So, Arthur Deam, who had just joined Burnham's office also, having just returned from two and a half years he had spent on the Prix de Rome, and I were chosen to work on the 23rd Street entrance. We had no sooner gotten started on this than we began to receive all the sketches, the fragmented sketches, from the other architects. In a conference with Hubert Burnham, we suggested to him that it would be an enormous task for us to translate these preliminary sketches into a comprehensive drawing of the total fair. We suggested that he make a plasticine model of the total fair, which would be easy to change and, we thought, would probably not require as much work. Hubert and Daniel agreed and we started out. I scrounged around at home and brought some of my modeling tools down, and we got three pieces of four-by-eight plywood and started with the 23rd Street entrance. We were not making much progress when George Robard came in to see what was happening. George looked around, and sat down and suggested that we were not making much progress, which we didn't take as being very helpful. Then, in his own way, he said, "But I have an idea. It involves two compatriots of mine who just came to call on me this morning. They brought their tools with them. These two men are sculptors who were working on a fellowship traveling around the United States, but they are not above making a little extra money." He said, "I suggest that we employ these two sculptors, together with their kits

64 and tools, and put them to work." Arthur and I looked at each other and said, "My God, what a wonderful thing."

Blum: That saved the day for you.

McCurry: These two Frenchmen came and joined us and we interpreted the drawings and they, being skillful sculptors and having all of the proper tools, put this thing together. By the time we finished, it was twenty-four feet long and four feet wide.

Blum: Oh, my.

McCurry: One of the very interesting experiences to me was assembling these architects. Arthur and I were delighted to meet these distinguished men.

Blum: What were the two Burnham brothers like? It was Hubert and was it Daniel, Jr.?

McCurry: Hubert was a first-class gentleman. He had been educated at Annapolis and had been a captain in the Navy. He was very interested in architecture, but not terribly skillful. Daniel had been very well educated, too, but Hubert, by nature, was the promoter, whose interest was in the construction of buildings. When I wasn't working on the fair I was doing square-foot and cubic analysis for Hubert Burnham for potential sites in the Loop.

Blum: Was that for Hubert or Daniel?

McCurry: Daniel.

Blum: Say that again. You were doing what kind of studies?

McCurry: These were area and cubage diagrams for proposed buildings, usually within the Loop area. These were analyses that would determine the square footage of the building and the volume of the building, so that we could project the

65 possible space that would be available for rentals and the approximate cost of the buildings.

Blum: Was that what their business was geared to at that point?

McCurry: No. Well, every architect, when they are involved in promotional work, their talents are utilized to do studies of this nature, which are helpful in determining whether an area can be purchased successfully and a building built and becomes a usable piece of merchandise. After the fair models were completed, this gave the assembled architects an opportunity of coming to some conclusions. They decided they had gone far enough in the, you might say, schematic development of the site to feel confident that they should establish the Department of Works. They proceeded to do that, and selected Skidmore, Louis Skidmore, who had just returned from having won the Roche Scholarship from MIT, and his brother-in-law, Owings. Skidmore had just married Owings’s sister and Owings was to meet the Otis gal here in Chicago and marry her. So the architects decided to employ these two men to set up an office. This was in the heart of the Depression period, and they set a standard of compensation for employment in this Office of the Works that was far below the compensation that Arthur Deam and I were getting at Burnham's office. But finally, when it came time to leave Burnham's office, Arthur could teach at the University of Illinois in Champaign and I went to work for Eric Hall, who was the county architect. I worked on the nurses' home for Eric Hall. Hammett was his chief designer at that moment, who had been teaching at the University of Michigan. But architecture of that time only lasted for one job, so at the completion of the nurses' residence, or completion of the working drawings of the nurses' residence, the whole staff departed. I went up to see Holabird and Root and they gave me a job, which was a temporary job, to do much of the Gothic detailing on the International House for the University of Chicago. That lasted for three or four months and then that job terminated. A lot of the staff left the office. When I was leaving the office, I was walking down Michigan Boulevard, wondering to myself what I should do next. And I encountered an old friend of mine from Lane High School by the name of Bowersfelt, who had been the assistant principal

66 at Lane High School. I had known him then and he had recently been appointed head of the Department of Technical Studies for the city of Chicago. In this same period of time, the former principal of Lane High School, William Bogan, had become superintendent of Chicago schools. In answer to his query of what are you going to do, I said I wished that I knew what I was going to do. He said, "Why don't you come and teach school?" I said, "My God, Mr. Bowersfelt, I just got out of school. I don't want to teach school." He said, "You would be doing an enormous favor to a lot of sixteen-, seventeen- and eighteen-year olds who haven't had the experience that you’ve had, who are confused by this whole peculiar financial problem of the Depression, who are back in school again. You, with your experience, could be of great help to them in continuing their learning process, in terms of advanced drawing." He said, "Why don't you take the examinations?" I said, "What qualifications do I need?" Well, he said, "You'll have to pass some tests in regard to the techniques of teaching, but this is something you have observed yourself for a long period of time. I can give you some books that will help you in this matter and your technical competence is without question." I said, "Well, what have I got to lose?" So, I went up to his office. He gave me an armful of books. I took them home and started to read them and practically gave up then because the educational jargon is a language all of its own. But, with the aid of the family dictionary, in about a week's time I had acquired the current educational vocabulary and in due course of time I passed the examinations. But, in the meantime, I had gone back to see Tom Tallmadge again. Tom had suggested that I have a chat with Herrick Hammond, who I had met some time before when he was a critic at one of the seminars at Armour Institute. Tom said Herrick had recently been appointed State Architect and they may be building up their office. So I went to see Herrick Hammond, who had joined forces with Chatten and with Dwight Perkins, who had left his original organization, so it was Perkins, Chatten and Hammond. After several conversations with Hammond, he decided I could join him in Springfield. So I went down to Springfield to work in the state office. I was assigned a task together with a man by the name of Detrich, who had been working as a designer for Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. Our task was the renovation of the dome of the

67 Capitol building, which is a redone French Renaissance building of 1870 or something of that time. This was an interesting experience to me, because I had to go over and sort of measure up the porticos and examine the structure of the dome and make some judgments as to what its deficiencies were. At this moment in the history of the State House, most of the guards were from southern Illinois—they were Republicans of long standing and they weren't about to be told what to do by a young man from the State Architect's office. Finally we got some long ladders and I climbed up to look at the soffits and the entablatures and the Corinthian capitals of the porticos, which were originally made of zinc. From the ground and from the floor of the porticos, they looked to be in terribly poor shape. When I got up close to them, I observed that they were full of holes—they looked like colanders. These porticos were the favorite haunts of pigeons and we were soon able to figure out that these guards had been bringing their shotguns with them and shooting the pigeons and having what was a traditional southern dish, pigeon pie. They had absolutely ruined all of the sheet-metal work.

Blum: Oh, my goodness.

McCurry: We weren't very popular over there. We interfered with their favorite pastime of shooting pigeons. We did all the working drawings for the dome and it was gradually restored. After that, and it took a considerable amount of time, I started to work on the restoration of the village of Salem on the banks of the Sangamon River. This was a very interesting experience, because we had to recreate the village as it was at the time of Lincoln. It had been abandoned fifteen or twenty years after Lincoln was a clerk there and it had gradually fallen apart. But in making a careful survey of the site and employing some soil mechanical engineers, we were able to discover and measure the location of the postholes, which were the supporting members for the log cabins that were there. We were able to determine the position of the cabins and the size of the cabins from the postholes, and through intensive research at the Centennial Library we found documents that were written by people who either remembered Salem or who had relatives there. We were able, from these various and sundry letters and reports and

68 accounts and so forth, to piece together the buildings that were there. Then we figured out how to put them together. We used round logs, much the same size as the original ones were, except they were all treated to protect them against fungi. We gradually started to build the Salem Village. It looked pretty raw and awful at the time of its completion, but when I visited it maybe ten or fifteen years ago it was completely integrated into the landscape and now looks almost like its historic prototype. My experience in the Department of Architecture in Springfield had two side effects. I had never lived in a small town before and I found it rather difficult to accustom myself to the fact that there was only one movie house, a few bowling alleys, a couple of golf courses, and there was practically no place to eat. I had never paid much attention to fraternal societies, but I soon found that if you didn't belong to the Elks or the KCs or the Masons or some similar organization, there was no place to have any fun and there was no place to eat luncheon. All of these fraternal establishments maintained luncheon restaurants. So I joined the Elks Club.

Blum: Exactly what year was this when you were living in Springfield?

McCurry: This was, I think, the latter part of 1931 to 1933. I was there for two years approximately.

Blum: Could we for a moment shift back to some of your activities during, say, 1931, such as Saugatuck? I understand you went to Saugatuck. It was a place that many architects, along with artists went, especially for the summer.

McCurry: That's right. After I had taken the teachers' examination, and prior to my going to Springfield—I was scheduled to appear in Springfield in the month of September—I had two months to find something to do. I had practically given up on finding any architectural work in the city. All my friends and acquaintances were in exactly the same position. My old friend from Armour Institute, Albert Krehbiel, who taught painting and drawing, was teaching in Saugatuck. Tom Tallmadge had a cottage there and John Norton was up there, who was teaching at the Art Institute. I had the pleasure of meeting

69 Norton when I was doing the reredos for Tom Tallmadge, because Tallmadge had commissioned Norton to do the cartoons for all the sculptured figures on the reredos, which were later executed in Milwaukee by stone carvers. So, I decided to go up to Saugatuck and enroll in the school of painting, and at least spend the summer brushing up my drawing and painting capabilities.

Blum: How do you remember John Norton?

McCurry: I got to know John Norton's family better than I knew John Norton because John Norton would come up on the weekends and Tom Tallmadge would come up on the weekends and they were great friends. I knew Madge Norton, John's wife, and his daughter Nancy and his son John. Nancy was a capable artist in her own right and a delightful gal. It was great fun being in Saugatuck. I enjoyed working with Krehbiel and Fursman, and I enjoyed a good many of the people that were up there who were frustrated, young artists.

Blum: How would you describe Saugatuck?

McCurry: Saugatuck… The Oxbow Inn at Saugatuck is based upon the geographical fact that some years ago the Kalamazoo River changed its course with a slight amount of help from the government engineers. It made a long sweeping curve as it approached Lake Michigan and created a shape similar to an oxbow, which had the facility, due to its shape, of silting up. Therefore, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to affect a direct channel to the lake, and the old Oxbow bend of the Kalamazoo River became, in fact, a lagoon. The lagoon was clear water surrounded by sand dunes and heavy vegetation. It seemed to be an ideal place for a number of painters, many of them teachers at the Art Institute, who wanted a place to spend their summers, who wanted to establish a school of painting so that they would have some income during the summer, and also to set up an operation which might be somewhat parallel to the many schools of painting that had been established in Provincetown, where it was a pleasant place to spend your summers, and if

70 you were interested in painting you could continue painting or continue your education.

Blum: Earl Reed is an architect whose name comes up in much of the early literature, in terms of exhibiting with artists and exhibitions. He was also connected to Oxbow.

McCurry: Oh, Earl Reed. When Edmund Campbell left the Department of Architecture at IIT in 1923, Earl Reed was appointed head of the department. Earl Reed practiced architecture in Chicago. He was a friend of Tom Tallmadge and Al Shaw and John Norton, and he used to frequently visit Saugatuck. Al Shaw, who was the chief designer for Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, used to come up frequently and was a good friend of Tom Tallmadge. Then Arthur Deam became very fond of Saugatuck and spent the summers with his family and eventually purchased the old lighthouse. Frances Chapin used to like to come up there and paint.

Blum: I think he taught there as well.

McCurry: Yes, he taught there.

Blum: Now, did you go there to paint?

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: Watercolors? Oils? What was your preference?

McCurry: I always like to paint in watercolors. There was less paraphernalia to carry around. It was a kind of medium in which you could work fairly rapidly. It also required you to document your first impressions rather quickly and accurately and with considerable skill. Of course, architects were far more prone to render or prepare their perspectives by using watercolors than they were using other media. So, I was interested in developing more skill in watercolor techniques and I enjoyed painting.

71 Blum: Did you go back to Saugatuck frequently?

McCurry: That was my first visit up there, 1933, I believe.

Blum: This was before you went to Europe.

McCurry: No, after I went to Europe. The following year, I managed to go back once again, and I met Mrs. Olive Williams, who had a home there, and had three children who taught in the elementary schools in Chicago, and painted in the class. The second year I went up there, I encountered her daughter, Alice Williams, and with Alice Williams was Irene Tippler, and they had just returned from a master's program at Columbia University. Subsequently Irene and I were married.

Blum: In 1933?

McCurry: We were married in 1935.

Blum: But in 1933 the Century of Progress Exposition took place in Chicago. You had worked on preliminary plans in the Burnham office. Did you go to the fair at all?

McCurry: Oh, yes.

Blum: How do you remember that fair?

McCurry: It was very exciting. The activities that had been built into the fair were centered around a trio of enterprising architects—Andy Rebori, John Root, and Gibbs Hall—who created the Streets of Paris and had the foresight to employ Sally Rand, who had developed the technique and art of bubble dancing.

Blum: Sally Rand is what many people remember. What about the architecture?

72 McCurry: It was an excellent site with vast lagoons. The grandeur of the place, to a considerable degree, dwarfed the architecture, which was mostly one- and two-story buildings.

Blum: Do you think the fair had any impact on subsequent architecture? Would you take its influence seriously, in terms of the flow of architecture?

McCurry: It had a profound effect upon Colonel McCormick, who enjoyed being there. The fair ran for two years, 1933 and 1934. In 1934, it began to run out of steam. That is, it became pretty well understood and was not as popular as it had been. The succeeding year, they utilized many of the older buildings for a railroad fair, which was the story of the development of the railroad engine in the United States. By this time Colonel McCormick was convinced that there should be a permanent exhibition building built on this land and hence McCormick Place. A bad idea.

Blum: I didn't realize it began as far back as that.

McCurry: It never would have survived without the Tribune. Everybody was against building a building there.

Blum: I didn't realize that the fair was actually the inception of that idea.

McCurry: It happened ten years later, or something like that.

Blum: Is this a conclusion you are drawing, or this was actually something that happened?

McCurry: What do you mean, conclusion?

Blum: To say that Colonel McCormick selected that site.

73 McCurry: That I know. It was named after him. The Tribune defended it with might and mane.

Blum: And it stemmed from the location of the Century of Progress?

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: As an architect how did you respond to the, say, the homes section that was built. The Keck houses: the [Crystal] House, and the House of Tomorrow.

McCurry: There were some very, very interesting things that were relatively small in scale. Many of the architects in the city, such as George Fred Keck, Andy Rebori, I don't remember the names of the other homes...

Blum: Grunsfeld did one.

McCurry: Grunsfeld did the Lumber House.

Blum: Holsman did one.

McCurry: Holsman, yes. And even Hugh Garden got involved in designing the Spanish Village, which was a takeoff of the Streets of Paris.

Blum: Did you think there was any merit to the homes? Did they propose new solutions?

McCurry: Yes. The Keck house was a very interesting house, and so was Andy Rebori’s house. The Holsman house suggested a new form of brickwork in terms of the load-bearing brickwork. He later used this in the development of a number of apartments in the city of Chicago, and, unhappily came a cropper, too, with it in some lawsuits and things like that. Holsman was a rather inventive architect. He was a member of the Cliff Dwellers for many years, and I used to meet with him up there.

74 Blum: Many people have dismissed the 1933 Century of Progress as a political farce and having no architectural influence. How do you respond to that?

McCurry: If you compared the fair to the 1893 fair, there was little architectural rub-off, you might say, from the 1933 fair, in contrast to the classic blunder of the 1893 fair, which had a profound effect on a lot of classic architecture that was then built in the city of Chicago.

Blum: Well, do you think that perhaps one of the reasons that it didn't take place, or one of the reasons that this influence didn't manifest itself, is because we were just coming out of, or we were in, the Depression? As you said, architecture stood still.

McCurry: That certainly is a factor. There was no great volume of building. The experimental houses were interesting and a number of the exhibits were interesting. But it is very difficult to create extraordinarily interesting architecture on a temporary basis. All of these buildings were to be destroyed. None of them were of a permanent nature. I don't think that this kind of an atmosphere lends itself to the development of any really serious architecture. If you continued this to the succeeding fair in New York...

Blum: In 1939?

McCurry: ...in 1939, there were some interesting buildings there, but they were small things like the Swedish Pavilion, the Russian Pavilion, which had small and intimate effects but no major, major change. I think the Barcelona Fair of 1929, while some of the so-called colonial buildings remained, which were the remnants of Spanish architecture, the fame of the 1929 fair was based upon one building, which was Mies's pavilion. But now that it is rebuilt it may lose much of its glamour.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

75 McCurry: An interesting contrast is the fair that I saw last year, 1986, in Vancouver, which really had no significant buildings. The buildings were built using pipe rails and plastic roofing, sheet-metal siding, which created interesting spaces—spaces that were adequate shelter—and interesting relationships between the buildings, but could not be suggested as being permanent buildings in any sense of the word. And perhaps the fairs of the future are going to have to find techniques that leave a lasting effect upon a city or a city cannot find itself justifying the financial expenditures that are required to develop a fair.

Blum: Wasn't that one of the issues in Chicago?

McCurry: It was an issue that was never really emphasized. I think what we should have done in Chicago—and nobody asked my opinion—would have been to redevelop the whole south side of the Chinatown area, the old yards of the New York Central Railroad and the old Rock Island Railroad. This should have been redeveloped in terms of some permanent development. I think the architects were ready to do this, but the city was certainly not ready to take advantage of the design talent available and develop a street pattern and the concept of what should be there. What is desperately needed, in my judgment, is some kind of ongoing transportation system that would connect these points of great interest in the city. If we have any kind of a fair operation, certainly the great museums, the great galleries, the great amusement halls, the great athletic areas of the city and cultural institutions in the city should be easily linked to the fair, so that this becomes an integral part of the fair and becomes a fair of the city, not something imposed upon the city. I think the Vancouver fair managed to do this to some degree because they had a transportation system, which was both by boat and by light rails. I think the fair in Montreal left more of an impact than many of the other fairs in terms of the habitat and the development of the land around there. Also on the development of their transportation system, which was an elevated railroad that went from the center of Montreal out to this place.

76 Blum: It seems to be a more encompassing concept of a fair and its residual value to its site, but the 1933 fair, as you suggest, was temporary.

McCurry: That's right.

Blum: Does the fact that a fair is temporary permit architects and designers and planners to, perhaps, experiment more freely, knowing that it won't be permanent?

McCurry: It permits them to explore, perhaps in terms of stage sets, not necessarily in terms of permanent buildings. It is very difficult to approximate a permanent building on a temporary basis, except on a very small scale.

Blum: You mentioned before that you acquainted yourself with the educational vocabulary. Did you subsequently start teaching?

McCurry: When the State of Illinois appropriations ran out, or the projects were completed, like the restoration of the dome of the Capitol and the development of Old Salem, a lot of the work of the department was terminated and I came back to Chicago. Fortunately, I had an assignment waiting for me in Chicago to teach at Tilden High School, so thus began my career as a teacher. So, in September, I dutifully reported to a branch of Tilden and there encountered the assistant principal by the name of Laura Wright...

Blum: This is what year? 1933?

McCurry: ...who I would describe as a remnant of the schoolmarms that I knew in my youth. She was a graduate of the University of Chicago, a wonderful education, she had a world of practical experience. She was a bright, alert, determined personality. I think that without her I might have walked out of the establishment after my first experiences there. It was a habit of the Chicago Board of Education and a habit of school administrations to place the young teacher in the least desirable of classes and the least desirable

77 classrooms. Seniority being what it was, all of the senior teachers rejected these situations, so I ended up in sole charge of a portable school room, the product of World War I. This is a simple structure of minimal size, made up of wood and plasterboard and heated by a hot-air furnace. So, I inherited a drawing class, an IB drawing class. My task, I thought, was to teach drawing, but after my first day there I found out that the first thing I had to teach was mathematics and good old-fashioned English, because it was almost impossible to communicate with these children. They had no idea what the number systems were, and they had very little idea of the decimal system, or what a fraction was, and they had no concept of how important measurements were in the manufacturing process. I also found out there were some deficiencies in the environment. The first class I had, which was to some degree unruly, I went to the door to open the door to let the class out and turned around and the class had disappeared. This being a one-story building, they had all left by the windows. This portable was situated on the playground of an adjoining elementary school and I found out that the younger kids took great delight in baiting the older freshmen because they were restricted to a classroom. The natural combative instincts of these fourteen-year-olds was to step through the window and beat up these irritating little kids. So the second day I was there, at the completion of the school day, I walked over to the local hardware store and bought a hammer and a handful of nails and a can of paint and a brush. The first thing I did was nail down the lower sash so that they couldn't leave the room except by the door. I painted the lower sash so that they were isolated from the playground. So it was amusing the next day. The kids came in and tried to lift the windows, they didn't go up. They couldn't see out. So at least I learned one valuable lesson. Some control over the environment is desirable in any classroom.

Blum: That was a creative solution.

McCurry: The funny thing was, Laura Wright didn't bother me for the first week. Apparently she had gotten reports, and I don't know what the janitors told her or anything, but I had violated every rule the Board of Education had

78 already, so Laura Wright came in to see me one day. She looked around and things were relatively peaceful. And as she walked out she patted me on the shoulder and said, "I see there've been some changes made."

Blum: From such an inauspicious beginning, you taught for thirteen years, or you were associated with the school system for thirteen years. Were you always an instructor of drawing?

McCurry: No. For about ten of these years I was a teacher and the branch school continued in operation for four or five years until the real crunch of the Depression was over.

Blum: You began to teach in 1933, so it was into the very late 1930s that you are talking about? In your opinion, what was it important for your students to learn?

McCurry: I soon came to the conclusion that I had better start teaching the tools of the English language and the tools of the mathematic systems, or I would never be able to teach them any drawing. The textbooks were written for college use. The language was way beyond the capability of the freshmen. It was a technical jargon, to some degree. It had to do with the geometry of space, that is, the third dimension, depth. It was a technique based on precise and exact measurements. Drawing was a means by which you were able to develop a visual documentation of the shape, characteristics, of whatever object you were drawing. For that you needed a number system to define the size of the object that you were recording. And this meant having a good fundamental knowledge of language, a good fundamental knowledge of mathematics. So I just stopped teaching this first class I had for a couple of weeks and taught them the simple English of the book that they had to read. Then I taught them the simple relationships between our practical number system and our decimal number system and the system of fractions as being parts of a whole.

Blum: But you were really teaching them skills.

79 McCurry: I was teaching them the tools they needed.

Blum: Yes, skills.

McCurry: Really, it's far more than skill. These are concepts. I mean, you have to have a concept of the language. You have to have an understanding of the abstract characters that represent the language, like words, the description of the words, the meaning of the words. In the same fashion, the number system is an abstraction. A lot of funny, squiggly lines that represent space and these concepts seemed to be completely lacking, at least with the freshmen that I had at that time. In subsequent classes in the years that I continued to teach, I always made a practice of carefully reviewing the words, the definitions, the language of the drawing books with my freshmen classes. So, before they even embarked on the graphics of drawing, the techniques of drawing, they could have some basic understanding of the language of the book, to be able to read it with some degree of understanding. They had some knowledge of using a number system, in terms of measuring.

Blum: Once you felt comfortable that they had digested these tools or skills and you were actually able to proceed and teach them drawing, how did you approach presenting the drawing skills to them? Was it by way of copying, was it by way of problem-solving, where they had to find solutions? How did you handle this?

McCurry: Most of the beginning drawing had to do with simply learning the skills of recording shape and size and defining that graphically and defining it in terms of the numerical system. This technique of drawing, mechanical drawing, actually, known as orthographic projection, which is a word that would frighten them to death to begin with, is a form of geometry in which you are drawing what may be considered a front view, an end view, and a top view. Or, in architecture, it would be a plan and elevations and sections. And this is a technique used in most engineering, particularly mechanical engineering, to define objects that are going to be made. When you are thinking of machine tool work, you are thinking of perhaps steel pieces. They

80 are going to be manufactured to suit a certain part of whatever machine they go into, but somebody has to do the engineering work in a preliminary sense, in terms of the total requirement of whatever the machinery is. Somebody has to define very accurately that piece of material that has to be manufactured, and that means an accurate, concise space description.

Blum: You stayed with the educational system for thirteen years. Did you find teaching satisfying?

McCurry: Yes, I would say yes. When I started to teach, I decided that if I was going to teach, I better learn something about educational procedures, so I enrolled at the University of Chicago in their evening school and started to work on a master's degree in education, which was a hard process to take, because it is filled with gobbledygook, and the technique of teaching is communication, really.

Blum: I realize this was 1933 and there wasn't any work. Had you given up the idea of practicing architecture?

McCurry: I had never given up the idea of returning to the practice of architecture.

Blum: In a small way, you were practicing architecture for yourself. In 1935 you built your own family home.

McCurry: That's right.

Blum: And from pictures of that home it was very much in the International Style.

McCurry: That's correct.

Blum: How did you arrive at that solution for your own personal use?

McCurry: At first it was suggested by the site Irene and I purchased. We were looking for a place on the South Side of Chicago to live. Irene had grown up, to some

81 degree, in Beverly Hills and there was a large portion of Beverly Hills that was undeveloped at that moment. We found a normal fifty-foot-by-one- hundred-twenty-five-foot lot that was on sale for a price we felt we could afford, so we bought the lot. We were both teaching school at that moment when we started to develop the house. On a fifty-foot lot it is very difficult to develop much in the way of side yards so we conceived the idea of facing the house to the street and facing it to the garden and neglecting the side-lot exposures. We did this so this house was, to some degree, a townhouse and a private garden. Unfortunately, to some degree, it faced to the west and I began to understand the problems of a west exposure.

Blum: Such as?

McCurry: We were interested in a very light, bright house. We were conscious of the fact that the windows of that period were not particularly tight windows, that is, the manufactured windows, and they didn't have much in terms of a storm type of glazing. We used a good deal of glass brick to create not only a sense of light but also a sense of privacy. I was interested in the emerging architecture that was loosely classified as the International Style. This consisted mostly of really very simple shapes, practically without ornament, very much functional in character, and functional aspects of the house determining, to some degree, the character of the exterior, the visual aspect of the exterior.

Blum: Were there other houses in that style in the Chicago area that you knew about?

McCurry: I don't recall any.

Blum: You built your house in 1935.

McCurry: Yes.

82 Blum: And it was only in 1932 that the Museum of Modern Art held the exhibition that labeled that style the International Style. Were you aware of that exhibition?

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: How did you learn about it?

McCurry: Through publications.

Blum: And it seems to have influenced you, if you weren't already persuaded. Did you see the 1931 show of Bauhaus work at the Arts Club in Chicago?

McCurry: I remember seeing that and, of course, we were much influenced by the work and the philosophy of Gropius. Corbu, too, for that matter.

Blum: In 1937, while you were teaching, Moholy came to Chicago as head of the Chicago Bauhaus. How did you respond to that?

McCurry: I was very much interested. I didn't attend any classes, but I went down to see the school and I was very familiar with the work that they were doing. To a considerable degree, I subscribed to it in terms of doing things that had more than just visual character, that they had textural quality, that they were designed primarily to be machine crafted, in most cases. I was familiar with the work of Kepes, who taught there and had published a book, too, on graphic design.

Blum: Being an educator, did that approach—this multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to the training of a designer—did that have any impact on you?

McCurry: I think in the educational world I became more and more conscious of the absolute necessity of a child or pupil mastering the tools of education, which to me are language and mathematics. With a reasonable degree of expertise

83 in language and number systems you can learn almost anything. The libraries of the world are rich in documentation of many, many things that have happened, which can be explained in terms of a reasonable mastery of language and a reasonable mastery of numbering systems.

Blum: It seems that right from the beginning in the late 1930s, the Chicago Bauhaus, or the Institute of Design, held exhibitions, art exhibitions, photography exhibitions. Did you attend any of those?

McCurry: Oh, yes. I would say this was their greatest skill—publicity. They were master publicists.

Blum: Did you know Moholy?

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: What was he like?

McCurry: He was very energetic, tense—a tense person. His wife, too, for that matter. He was dedicated to promoting his concept of design. Basically, it had to do with excellence. This was another factor that was obvious in education, where the educational systems have a tendency to fall over backwards in terms of treating every student equally. It was very obvious to me that excellence and equality were conflicting achievements. That is, if you were going to push for excellence, you couldn't have equality unless you construe equality in a limited way as an opportunity. I still think this is a major problem of our society.

Blum: The year after Moholy came, Mies came to head the Architecture Department of Armour Institute then, now IIT. What did you think of his appointment?

McCurry: I was very much interested in Mies's appointment and I attended the dinner they had of welcome, which a great many architects of the city attended.

84 Blum: Where was that held?

McCurry: I think it was at the Palmer House, if I remember.

Blum: And what was that event like?

McCurry: All the prima donnas in the city were there. Saarinen had come in from Michigan, Cranbrook—that is, the elder Saarinen. Woltersdorf, who was an architect in the city and a member of the Cliff Dwellers and fancied himself an expert in Germanic affairs, was selected to interpret for Mies and to introduce Mies and to translate for Mies. Frank Lloyd Wright was invited. Oh, all of the architects of the city, young and old alike, were there. Everybody arrived in good time and it was a jovial and interesting gathering. Frank Lloyd Wright was not there yet, but the program started and Woltersdorf was not really equal to the problem of translating for Mies. He had been in this country too long to be fluent in German and this was sort of a fiasco, but they got through the preliminary introductions. Loebl was quite interested in this affair, as was John Holabird. I think the two of them were fairly influential in persuading IIT to offer an invitation to Mies to come here.

Blum: Did either speak that night—Jerrold Loebl or John Holabird?

McCurry: Yes. And Saarinen made a very interesting and welcoming kind of address. Then Frank Lloyd Wright walked in with his disciples. There were about six of them. They were all dressed like Frank, with his big slouch black hat, big black cape, and they swished their way in to a reserved table for themselves and sat down. After they settled, I think it was Loebl that was running the meeting and who asked Wright to speak. So Wright delivered a tirade against the stupidity of the educational systems in the schools of architecture, particularly about importing modern architecture from Germany. He wanted it started in Chicago.

Blum: He was talking about himself?

85 McCurry: Also, he spent the rest of the time telling us what a great man he was and the silence just got deafening. Finally he finished and stalked out. Everybody was shocked. It was utter rudeness to Mies. So then Mies made a rather humble address which was finally translated by one of his associates. I forgot which one. It was one of his close associates.

Blum: Was it Helmuth Bartsch?

McCurry: Who?

Blum: Helmuth Bartsch?

McCurry: No, not Bartsch. I can't think right now. So then everybody tried to make Mies as welcome as possible.

Blum: What did those of you who were either intimately, or at a distance connected to the architectural community, what were your expectations for his arrival, for his accomplishments?

McCurry: I don't think we had any particular idea of what Mies would do, except that he represented a very different approach to architectural teaching from the traditional Beaux-Arts type of thing that had been common in most of the schools of architecture. But I think Mies's basic problem was not being a good teacher or a bad teacher, but the fact that he had come to the conclusions that he wanted to work in the idiom of steel and glass. He had adopted the concept that this was an age in which the machine was going to play an enormous part. He was going to use the byproducts of the machine age and he had developed, I would say, a vocabulary of these idioms that he found satisfactory, which he was able to apply to a variety of buildings. And he was so skillful and so successful and he possessed the basic qualities of an architect, which was enormous visual sensitivity to form. I think the thing that makes him a great architect is his extraordinary sensitivity to proportion and textures. This type of skill is timeless, ageless, and can be applied to any building that was ever built. It has to be visually a delight to look at.

86 Everyone makes a visual inspection of a building and proportions, the massing, the textures, the color, the relations between solids and voids. These are all of the tools that an architect can use to create a satisfactory sensory perception. To me aesthetics is visual and also has to do with hearing, a sense of smell, a sense of being like the difference between density and freedom. I think Arthur Edwards has tried to describe the proximity in the book that he wrote, Architectural Style (1926)]. I think Steen Rasmussen wrote an interesting book, too, about the visual aspects of architecture [Experiencing Architecture (1959)] and this is an area I am tremendously interested in.

Blum: In your opinion, was Mies effective?

McCurry: As a teacher?

Blum: At transmitting those qualities educationally to others?

McCurry: Mies became a master, a figurehead. I don't think he taught architecture.

Blum: What did he teach?

McCurry: He taught his particular concepts, how buildings should be done. It becomes a master and a disciple situation. Now Wright had the same problem. Wright was not a good teacher. Not that he wasn't eloquent, but he had this highly personal style.

Blum: And you reject that kind of an idea?

McCurry: As far as being a teacher, yes. I have no problem with an individual restricting his talents, you might say, in terms of the development of a particular kind of building, but you can't ever assume that this is the beginning and ending. Because architecture is a continuous parade of buildings, all of which had been based upon the environment, the materials available, the skill of the craftsmen, the imagination of the people that designed them, the ability to marshal the resources to do it. These are all

87 conditioning factors. The limitation of material to me has an enormously important effect. Initial habitations for caves. They discovered that you could use wood. They discovered you could use stone. The architecture of the Greeks was based upon the ability to use marble and stone in terms of spans, to carve it, to use it, to make it stable. The Romans went a little farther with their engineering because they developed the arch, the ability to use mortar—I mean cement—and the development of the dome, but these were all slowly evolving—both skills and techniques in handling materials—into the Gothic period, which I think was one of the most magnificent adventures of all. They combined what we would describe as engineering, which was perhaps to them real craft skill of being a master builder, but through a lot of trial and error, had perhaps pressure from erudite clerics who were trying to create a palace for God on earth. They realized to some extent that this deity deserved the very best that they could possibly build. I think some estimates have been made in terms of what a medieval town would spend on construction of a cathedral or a city would spend on the construction of a cathedral, which was as much as one third of their total gross national product, you might say.

Blum: You are talking about the continuum of the contribution that each group or time made to the development of architecture. Where does Mies stand in all of this?

McCurry: I think I'm really talking about the continuing basic knowledge and skill that all architects possess. They have been restricted by time and space and material, so we have what is useful to architectural historian as periods of architecture. Actually, it is a continuous sweep in which things change depending on the state of our knowledge. I think Mies made an enormous contribution in terms of the exploration of the use of steel and glass; in terms of his ability to reduce the spatial requirements of buildings to relatively simple geometric shapes.

Blum: And educationally?

88 McCurry: I gave you that article that Mies wrote, which you should read. I think educationally Mies was a well-informed, well-trained, well-developed person, and a good problem solver. I think he suffered as do all people of great ability, from the fact that the people that surround them tend to copy them instead of understanding the basic knowledge and skills that they possess. Now, if you take glass and steel as a point of departure perhaps no one has handled it better than Mies.

Blum: I think what I was asking about was the way he revised the approach to teaching students architecture. You complained about, or you said you were frankly dissatisfied with your own training at Armour.

McCurry: Well, I would have been dissatisfied with Mies's approach, too, for that matter, which was very limiting. I mean I was caught within a classic envelope. The people that went through IIT during the time Mies was there were caught within his concept of a building and that's probably why geniuses should not teach.

Blum: Paul, you remained with the Chicago Board of Education in one capacity or another until 1946, and in 1946 you went to Schmidt, Garden and Erikson. How did that change occur?

McCurry: Rethinking it, just in terms of date, after the war in the spring of 1945 I was having luncheon with Vale Faro in the Cliff Dwellers on one occasion. I was still in the Department of Curriculum, although Irene had resigned from the Department of Curriculum and was taking care of our children. In 1945 Schmidt, Garden and Erikson was beginning to expand rapidly and they badly needed people of perhaps my background and training and age to become their project architects, to manage the firm.

Blum: What type of architecture were they doing then for the most part?

McCurry: Well, Erikson had become an expert in the design of hospitals. The background of the firm, to some degree, based upon Richard Schmidt's

89 relationship with his family to the family of doctors, had pushed him into a good many lucrative hospital commissions. Erikson was a nationally recognized expert in the field of hospital design. At the conclusion of the war and at the conclusion of ten years of the Depression, the backlog of medical facilities was enormous. Suddenly a firm as competent as Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, and as well known, needed to increase their staff enormously. They needed to increase, you might say, the middle management—people that could handle the workload and meet with clients and be of assistance in the design and production of drawings. So Vale suggested that I talk to Erikson and he was very much interested. Of course, I had tenure as a teacher. Teachers were paid minuscule salaries at that moment. I realized that if I was going to continue in the field of education, I needed a master's degree in education and a doctorate. The thought of going through this educational jungle would have bored me to death. Not that I disliked teaching ever, but I certainly disliked the professional educator and his extremely limited view of the world. I had practiced architecture while I was teaching, so I felt that I had not lost my skills and knowledge, so I agreed to come and work one summer for Schmidt, Garden and Erikson. In the fall we would decide whether they wanted me to stay with them, or if Carl Erikson wanted me to continue as an associate of his.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

McCurry: At the conclusion of the summer's work, Erikson was well satisfied with what I could do and I was pleased to be back in the field of architecture again, so I resigned from the school system and started to work on a full-time basis with Schmidt, Garden and Erikson in the fall of 1945.

Blum: Would you describe the makeup of the firm at that time? There were Schmidt, Garden, and Erikson. Were all three principals active at that time?

McCurry: Erikson was the dominant partner and was responsible for 90 percent of the business that came into the office. Richard Schmidt was well into his seventies, his late seventies. Hugh Garden was almost as old. They were both

90 semi-retired. Richard Schmidt lived at the University Club and always managed to get to the office by at least seven o'clock in the morning and open the mail, deposit the checks that came in, and this was his life. He enjoyed it. His family was grown and gone. His wife was dead, so the office and the University Club and the Cliff Dwellers were his habitat. Hugh Garden was a dedicated architect. Even though he was inactive in the operation of the firm, he loved to come down and go around the office and talk to everybody. Some people were slightly put out by his interest in the firm.

Blum: Why is that?

McCurry: They thought he was kind of a busybody and was interfering with what they were doing. But I always enjoyed him enormously.

Blum: How do you remember his personality?

McCurry: Hugh Garden was an interesting storyteller. He had done some very, very fine buildings. He was caustic and usually frank and sometimes offensive to people who did not share his competence. Richard Schmidt was a very interesting, benign man at that time, who would tell you tall tales until you felt you were wasting the firm's money. Carl Erikson was an enormously competent organizer and job-getter, knowledgeable in the design or the organization of hospitals, an able administrator. He was well qualified to be the titular head of a large organization.

Blum: And who were the people in the middle-management group?

McCurry: Our chief engineer at that moment was Detcher, who was sort of a sub- partner. Gerald Dittman, who was a mechanical engineer and Detcher's successor, was active both in the solicitation of work and in terms of mechanical systems. Our brilliant engineer had resigned from the firm years ago. Charles Mayer was our chief structural engineer. Vale Faro had the classification of being chief designer, although the very nature of our work and the complexity of our work made it difficult for one individual to control

91 the superficial aspects of any building. The firm began to develop in size when I joined the organization. Al Bacci came back as the lieutenant colonel of engineers and joined the organization. Bob, Robert Hazelhuhn, who had worked for Anderson of Lake Forest and had some experience in hospital architecture, became a member of the organization. Arvid Tessing joined the organization.

Blum: Was there an effort known to you at the time that Schmidt, Garden was gearing up to continue to be a hospital specialist firm?

McCurry: We all recognized the fact that this is a fatal flaw.

Blum: Was that known to you at the time?

McCurry: Oh, yes. Putting all your eggs in one basket. And one reason Erikson was interested in me was because I had considerable contact in the field of education. Subsequently, we did do a great deal of educational work. Al Bacci, of course, had worked for Sears, Roebuck in the Depression period in the development of their fabricated housing, which was an interesting experiment but never became fruitful. He was an able administrator, as evidenced by the fact that he was a lieutenant colonel of engineers. Two or three of the men had grown up in the organization. Erikson's son, who had gone to the University of Pennsylvania, where his father had graduated from many years before and was a member of the Board of Directors of the University of Pennsylvania, and a heavy contributor to the university—it was with his assistance that his son, Carl Erikson, Jr., finally graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Then it was obvious that his heart was not in the practice of architecture. His great interest was centered in the wonderful mountains of Arizona and Colorado and he was essentially a cowboy. Peter Fairbairn had started as an office boy and had become a useful and knowledgeable individual in terms of medical facilities. And Raymond Garbe, who I think had worked for Murphy's office, joined the organization.

Blum: So the organization was really a pretty sizeable one as you were joining?

92 McCurry: When I joined the organization, I presume there were about ninety people involved in it. About half of them were engineers, because we had traditionally been a firm that did all of the work involved in the development of the job. Hospitals are built around piping systems, so it's essential that this engineering experience be part of the design effort in terms of many complex medical buildings. It fairly rapidly expanded. I would say by the time I became involved in the development of the Veterans Administration Hospital, which was to be built on Northwestern campus, which was a five hundred bed hospital of perhaps 600,000 square feet, would cost twelve or fifteen million dollars in the currency of the 1950s. I had a staff of seventy- five people working under my direction. The whole firm had expanded. I had at least half of the people at that moment. But the firm had expanded to 150 by 1950 and it expanded to 250 by the 1970s.

Blum: You mentioned the Veterans Administration Hospital. There was an article about that hospital in Architectural Record of June 1951 in which they called the hospital an example of bold architectural planning and one that should be studied with interest. It is a very complex facility. How did you arrive at the solution that you did for its site and use?

McCurry: First, perhaps I should say that this was not a normal Veterans Administration Hospital. The head of the Veterans Administration at that moment, his name I will have to try to remember, was an orthopedic surgeon at Northwestern University who had brilliantly performed in the war period in the Army, and was a friend of General Bradley. He was also a great friend and admirer of Carl Erikson. When he became director of the medical services at the Veterans Administration at the conclusion of the war, and it became his task to staff the fast-emerging veterans hospitals all over the country, he reversed completely the traditional method that the U.S. government had followed of locating their hospitals in relatively rural areas on tracts of land that were at least two hundred acres, on the basis of the fact that nowadays it was impossible to staff these hospitals with nurses or with doctors or technicians. Nurses, doctors, and technicians were educated at the

93 great medical institutions in the cities and this was where they lived. So this was a radical change in policy at that particular moment in which the veterans hospitals were to be henceforth attached to the great medical centers of the cities. This gave the doctor and his staff and the architects he chose a considerable freedom that they had not enjoyed before in re-examining the function and purpose and objectives of the veterans medical services, former military personnel. This particular hospital was designated as a research hospital and they envisioned that it would do specialized research in connection with the medical school of Northwestern University. It would take care of highly specialized afflictions and ailments and be organized to handle exotic research work. Contrary to most of the veterans hospitals, it was not composed of large wards or pavilions where, in the past, the personnel to operate these large wards had always been available. This hospital was designated for a great number of private rooms, which was contrary to normal procedures, so this gave us an opportunity of rethinking the objectives of the hospital and suggesting new solutions. At that time, air conditioning for private rooms was considered a luxury by the Veterans Administration, so that the rooms had to be adequately ventilated with windows. A window was required in every room that was used for habitation, that is, for private patients, and the surgeries and laboratories and x-ray departments were far larger than they were in the conventional hospital. Northwestern had supplied a relatively limited site. Also, the veterans hospitals has normally worked with nursing units, which were forty patients staffed by nurses, but frequently combined into eighty-bed units to make common use of central facilities, so this suggested the cruciform plan that the veterans hospital eventually took. The diagonal courts became light areas in what was obviously going to be a high-density area. It also made the nurses' travel relatively short. It brought the nurses' stations, the controlling point in the development of any nursing service close to the bank of elevators, it routed close to the recreational rooms of the patients. The veterans' hospitals are different than private hospitals in the sense that patients tend to stay a considerably longer period of time. They are not released until they are able to cope with the outside world. A great many of them are ambulatory, so they need a common lounge area in which they can

94 socialize with their fellow patients. Northwestern University wished the building to be compatible with their Gothic campus, although they didn't attempt to dictate a particular style of architecture. They did request the building be of the grey limestone like the rest of the campus was. This the Veterans Administration agreed to. So, in terms of development of an efficient and fairly radical floor plan, we were able to. The fact that the private rooms were extraordinarily small—in view of the tendency for the bureaucracy to put two patients in almost any room as they could, these rooms were made so small that they could only possibly accommodate one patient. This made the wings extremely narrow. With the veterans' requirement for stairways that had to be large enough and the platforms had to be big enough to permit them to take stretchers down in case of emergency, the stairways were unusually long and large. Therefore, they were put at the ends of the building to take them out of the disruptive position they would occupy in the relatively narrow wings, and they became an architectural feature terminating the ends of the wings.

Blum: Paul, the government was a relatively new client to architectural firms in the quantity that they commissioned after the war. What were they like to deal with?

McCurry: They were always difficult clients. Every bureaucratic agency develops an agenda for procedures, a list of requirements that seem to be immutable, and an enormous reluctance and inability to deal with change. So on this basis they are difficult clients, in terms to bring into the middle twentieth century.

Blum: What was the difference between dealing with the government, say, as a client for a VA hospital and dealing with a hospital board of a private hospital?

McCurry: In some respects they were much more experienced.

Blum: The government?

95 McCurry: The government was. They were far more interested in bedpan techniques than boards of normal hospitals. But by the very nature of a bureaucracy they were slow to change their physical requirements to meet the rapidly emerging changes in the treatment of patients, the almost chaotic changes in vested research and the machines of research, the sizes and complexities of surgeries, x-ray departments and laboratories, which were increasing at an enormous, enormous rate. So they were difficult to deal with, difficult in the sense that an organization such as ours, which had been doing a great many hospitals and liked to consider itself in the avant-garde of what was happening, it was sometimes difficult to reconcile our concept of the future with their bureaucratic concept of the present.

Blum: Do you remember or recall a particular instance in which that took shape?

McCurry: Well, if I can tell a story. We were accustomed to utilizing bathrooms or toilets for every room, or certainly for every two-patient room and always for four-bed wards. The Veterans Administration in terms of its own army and navy background used conglomerate toilets, conglomerate bath facilities, and so forth. So we were able to persuade them that we should almost triple the toilet facilities in terms of this hospital, and in terms of the conventional veterans hospital. When the hospital was finished and when the administrator had been appointed, there was a dedication ceremony. General Bradley, who was a five-star general at that moment and retired from the army, had been appointed head of the Veterans Administration and he was invited to attend the hospital opening, so the director of the hospital and all of the important members of the staff, the dignitaries from Washington, and I was the architect's representative, were gathered together to meet General Bradley. We started on the fifteenth floor of the hospital and walked through the entire structure. It took about an hour's time to walk down. General Bradley walked along at a brisk pace, and said practically nothing. The director was enormously anxious to get the general's comments, so when we finally finished our inspection and came into the main lobby he couldn't restrain himself any longer, so he asked the general what he thought of the

96 hospital. The general replied, "Well, nobody is going to have any problem defecating in this building."

Blum: He certainly had noticed the change.

McCurry: Oh, yes. He was a smart man, but he wasn't going to do any chitchatting either.

Blum: This was a hospital that was built after the war. Did you, as an architect, take advantage of any of the new discoveries either with prefabrication or industrialization or new materials from the research that came out of the war and war materials? Did you take advantage of that and make use of that in the hospital in any way?

McCurry: I would say not, except in terms of equipment. The structure was a steel structure, all fireproofed, of course,. The steel structure was encased in concrete. It was built on piling in the old Streeterville area. One of the interesting things that happened when we had a survey was that about fifteen holes were drilled to determine what the soil conditions were underneath this building. It showed that it was lake, sand, and finally bedrock. We had a choice of either doing caissons or piling. If we elected to use concrete piling, with the concurrence of the Veterans Administration as the most economical way to do it, at the time the excavation started we began to encounter old ships and sunken ships and breakwaters, because this was a part of the landing area from the lake and there were slips and indentations in the lake. But the old wood underground was not much of a disadvantage. Toward the end of our pile-driving occupation, we ran into a serious problem in the sense that the compaction of the soil, due to the driving of piles, had compacted the soil so much that we couldn't drive any more piles without displacing the buildings which surrounded the hospital. So at this moment in time we had to shift to caissons.

Blum: What do you think the writers of this Architectural Record article meant when they said that it is a building that should be studied with interest?

97 McCurry: It was extremely innovative in terms of the veterans' requirements. It was interesting in the fact that it was one of the first veterans hospital to be located adjacent to a great school of medicine. It suggested that probably more and more major hospitals would be clustered around the great medical schools as a source of personnel and a source of spearheaded research, and the fact that the hospital—that is, the physical character of the plan—was a serious effort to reconcile the requirements of the Veterans Administration with modern concepts of medicine, or the delivery of health services, you might say.

Blum: In looking over a checklist of the projects that you were involved with during your career with Schmidt, Garden, it seems that you built health facilities from Florida through Texas. Did you find there were any regional differences when it came to a hospital?

McCurry: There are regional differences, yes. In the middle of the twentieth century, the art of communication was well developed. All regions were beginning to deliver essentially the same quality of medical care. The great medical schools, whether they were in Texas or Florida or New York or San Francisco or Chicago, were beginning to deliver very much the same degree of excellent care.

Blum: What about the buildings? Could you have taken one building that you felt had been developed to a high degree and plunked it down anywhere?

McCurry: The rate of change was so radical that each time a hospital was designed, even if it were two or three years later, the concepts were somewhat different. The basic desire to deliver good medical service, to reduce the time of nurses in travel, to make it convenient for the personnel to serve the patient, to try to make the patient comfortable, and give him a reasonably pleasant environment were continuing to evolve. In the last forty years there have been some radical changes in terms of the way medical facilities are now developed.

98 Blum: So you are really talking about filling the needs. Am I correct to understand that you are saying the highest priority is to fill the use, the needs of the users?

McCurry: Oh, the usage, yes. I mean, the patient is the end of the line. The services have to be delivered to the patient and this would be the profound theory. You find personnel that would design hospitals to suit their own personal preferences, which would make life easiest for them. This is something the administrator and the architect have to combat.

Blum: How much consideration was given to making it compatible with the landscape, using materials that were familiar?

McCurry: Are you talking about the veterans' hospital?

Blum: No, I am talking about any hospital in whatever area they were built, from your point of view.

McCurry: In private hospitals, the continuing cost of medical expenses has forced hospitals and patients alike to restrict their stay in a hospital to a relatively short time. So the environmental relationships of a building to the surrounding area have not been as important as perhaps some kind of medical service that is in the custodial nature and would be radically different from the ancient practices of medicine. As a contrast, we might take the medical services that were delivered at the Asclepios site in Greece, where the lovely outdoor theater still exists and is used and is famous for having the most marvelous acoustics in the world. Asclepios, the Greek god of healing, has given its name and symbol to the medical services of the armed forces and is used as a symbol of all medical knowledge, was a group of temples. If it's possible to reconstruct the operation, there were dedicated people who were religiously attached to the temple complex in which people came to this healthful area which was located on the gulf there on part of the Aegean Sea, where pure water was available, with a benign climate. I think

99 they gave them tender loving care and took them to the theater, fed them well, gave them every opportunity to heal themselves. This was a form of medical service exemplified in the Greek period. The delivery of medical services in the Egyptian period, to a considerable degree, centered around the temples. The priests and attaches of the temples were the scientists and the medical practitioners and magicians of the day, and again this revolved around certain rudimentary knowledge, but tender loving care was a factor. I gave a speech to the Department of Public Health, or all of the Departments of Public Health in the State of Illinois, and I was flabbergasted as to what I could say to a bunch of experts, so I decided to simply chide them in the design of their hospitals in terms of delivering tender loving care, because technically they knew as much as I did, but they were insufficient, in my judgment, in their relationship to the patients.

Blum: Are you suggesting that perhaps the architecture in some way could encourage that?

McCurry: Very much so. But I am saying, too, that in terms of critical hospitals, and practically all hospitals are now critical, that is critical care, you can't be very damn much interested in your environment when you hurt all over and you're going to leave the place...

Blum: Well, that's from the patient's point of view in your assessment of each individual that walks through there, but, in fact, that hospital is going to remain beyond each person's entrance and departure and be part of the environment and landscape.

McCurry: Then you do what you can to make it a good and helpful place for the personnel to work in. Some of the hospitals are getting to be like shopping malls. Presbyterian-St. Luke's is a partial example of that, and there are other hospitals now that are being published in current magazines that would suggest that there are quite radical changes occurring in terms of space. Perhaps the most important thing is the knowledge that we live in a constant state of flux in terms of technological knowledge and the flexibility in terms

100 of the use of space is absolutely critical. In our work at the University of Chicago, we would hardly finish one medical facility before we started to revise it, in terms of what was then current medical practice, so that a constant radical and expensive change seemed to be constantly occurring.

Blum: Paul, throughout your career it seems that by looking at the projects, both hospital and educational facilities, you were involved with educational facility projects on a rough ratio of two schools to one hospital.

McCurry: One of Erikson's desires, and it was the desire of the total partnership, was to diversify our work as much as possible. We all realized that in every field of endeavor, architects are proud of the technical competence that they have achieved in a particular kind of building, but, actually, building is building. Architects are competent, and by training and experience with some research, they can easily adapt themselves to a variety of buildings. And it gives them much sounder business organization to have a variety of clients and a variety of occupations rather than being classified as only an expert in one particular field. So I started promoting our involvement in educational facilities as soon as I arrived there. After the Veterans Administration Hospital was well under construction, I became involved in the design for the schools of the health profession at the University of Pittsburgh. It was a building of about equal size, which was going to be a great medical school related to the existing hospitals, which were adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh and run by the University of Pittsburgh. I had already started to design some schools on the Southwest Side of Chicago, where I had contacts with people. We did the Palos Park School about that time. We did the elementary schools for Oak Lawn, the Sward Elementary School, and we were commissioned to do a very large high school for Bloom Township in Chicago Heights. We became involved with the Chicago Board of Education.

Blum: According to the checklist that you provided me with, you have been involved with projects beginning with elementary schools through university campuses.

101 McCurry: Yes, that's right.

Blum: In urban settings as well as suburban...?

McCurry: That's correct.

Blum: ...and it seems that the smallest facility was a little over two hundred and the largest up to 3,000. In your opinion what was the most successful?

McCurry: All schools have individual character depending upon the area in which they are built, the personnel of the teachers, the faculty, the local board of education, and also the time in which they're built. Requirements for education are not quite as expensive or not quite as dramatically changed as in the field of medicine. But, nevertheless, education has been going through a constant change of the character of the rooms required for teaching.

Blum: After Crow Island, with that building's approach to accommodate a new philosophy of education, how did architects for educational facilities approach change?

McCurry: Crow Island, in which Perkins and Will and Saarinen were associate architects, was a very serious effort to surround classrooms with small gardens, to isolate them to some degree and give a sense of quietness and isolation, and to enhance the relationship between teacher and student by making the classrooms flexible and reasonably large and light and cheerful and very responsive to the delightful urban setting.

Blum: How did that influence your subsequent work? Or did it?

McCurry: I think we felt, as I think all architects and all educators felt, that Crow Island was a very successful adventure. It conditioned a good deal of the thinking of Perkins and Will in the future and of many other architects and, of course, we were well aware of the vast use of Crow Island and the good features that we could afford we certainly made use of. You have to bear in mind that Crow

102 Island was built in Winnetka, an affluent area, in which all of these niceties could be afforded. They were not recognized as essentials by the Chicago Board of Education, which had their own particular standards in terms of classroom sizes and relationships. The first school we did for the Board of Education—that was the name I wanted so I could talk about it.

Blum: What was the name of it?

McCurry: The Skinner School. This was an old school on the West Side of Chicago. I think it was about Racine and Adams, in an old residential area that had fallen apart and was now being restored. This was the first school that the Chicago Board of Education had given to a private architect in the city of Chicago in a great many years, perhaps since the time Dwight Perkins was doing schools in Chicago. The Chicago Board of Education for a great many years had maintained its own architectural department and had built stereotype schools for years and years and years.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

McCurry: So we tried very hard to breathe more life and joy and interest into the Chicago school system.

Blum: Exactly what did you do in the Skinner School? Was it an addition? Was it a remodeling? What was it?

McCurry: It was a brand new building but it was on the demolished site of an old building.

Blum: What did you do to, say, improve not only the architecture but conditions for the students?

McCurry: We immediately ran into the bureaucracy of the Board of Education. Having been a teacher for ten years, I was familiar with it. But it was very difficult to make changes.

103 Blum: What types of changes were you interested in pursuing?

McCurry: Our initial thought was make use of the fact it was a site filled with rubble, with very limited recreational areas surrounding it, although later a park was developed adjacent to the school building. We were interested in excavating the old rubble and developing a controlled play area, which would occupy the entire site and build the building above it on stilts. This was far too radical for the Chicago Board of Education, so it ended up a school not too dissimilar from many other Chicago school buildings, except that we were able to persuade them to use a glazed brick in various and sundry colors to bring some life and interest and vitality to a very depressed and tawdry neighborhood. I think the children enjoyed the school. They like the colorful glazed brick. It certainly was very durable. I'm not sure that the bureaucracy was quite as much pleased.

Blum: In approximately the same years you did Joseph Sears in Kenilworth. Was that a high school or an elementary school?

McCurry: That's an elementary school. And that was an addition, again, to a reasonably affluent school district.

Blum: Were you able to exercise certain options in that situation that you couldn't in the city school that you are describing.

McCurry: Yes, yes. This was a much more open plan. We were able to spend a little bit more money in developing the rhythms, precast architectural forms, and create open space in relationship to the lovely grounds that surround the building. And if you would contrast this to the Skinner School I'd have to say that this was a much more pleasant place for teaching and learning.

Blum: The Sears school?

McCurry: Yes.

104 Blum: The building that you were involved with that took an American Institute of Architects award was Marillac High School.

McCurry: Yes, Marillac High School was built for the Sisters of Charity on Waukegan Road near Willow Road. It was a girls' high school in its initial concept. It's since become coeducational. This was a serious effort to compete with the school system of New Trier, in the affluent Winnetka suburb, and to create a school that would attract girls who might possibly consider a religious vocation. So it was the Order's desire to develop as pleasant a building on a reasonably sized piece of property that could be accomplished and we tried very hard and I think it is a very pleasant school.

Blum: Were there any unique features about the school?

McCurry: It consists of two, or really three, groupings, an activity grouping which involved a gymnasium complex. As a girls' school it was relatively small and it contained a fairly large and pleasant lunchroom and really an excellent auditorium. I think we worked on that very diligently and I think it has been extremely successful in terms of acoustics, in terms of site lines and visibility and hearing. Its deficiency, which I think the school is very conscious of, is that it has no support facilities in terms of stage, storage, and auxiliary rooms for theatrical performances because it is an important asset to the community. The auditorium, the lunchroom, and the other meeting areas, the music rooms and the art rooms, which are part of this, and heavily used and used extensively by the community. Now there's an administrative wing which also has an interesting chapel, and an academic wing. The direction of the school is primarily in terms of academic excellence, so this contains a good library—a good-sized library, a pleasant library—surrounded by classrooms. In the core of the building are several lecture rooms, which will accommodate class sizes or multiple classes depending on the kind of lecture or visual education that might occur. I think it's a good school. I was pleased with the architecture. I was pleased with the general economics of the school in terms of its construction, of about three and a half million dollars.

105 Blum: How did you get that commission?

McCurry: We had worked for the Daughters of Charity from time to time and through many other sources, apparently, they had heard of our organization and apparently they liked us when they conducted their interview and felt that we could adequately solve their requirements.

Blum: Who were some of the other firms they interviewed? Did you have knowledge of this?

McCurry: I don't remember. Probably everybody.

Blum: Who was Schmidt, Garden's largest competitor in the hospital as well as the educational field?

McCurry: In the Chicago area everybody thinks they are an expert, so I suppose the people that competed with us in a satisfactory fashion in that time were Perkins and Will, and prior to that time it was Childs and Smith, and Ralph Millman, and Ganster and Henninghausen of Waukegan.

Blum: You did an entire college campus, all related buildings in the early 1960s. This was Marian College in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. How do you remember that work?

McCurry: That was another very pleasant experience. This was an order known as the Sisters of St. Anne, that we had done a hospital for them many, many years ago. Fortunately the hospital and the nurses' home had been satisfactory to them, so when they considered building a college in Fond du Lac, they remembered us and we were considered along with a number of other architects and finally selected to do the college. They had an interesting piece of land not far from their mother house and from the hospital, which, unfortunately, had a rather strange dormitory. We had the dormitory to deal with but we were able to plan a relatively simple college for women, which is

106 now coeducational, of course. It was composed of two- and three-story academic buildings, a library, and a chapel, and the possibility of future dormitories and physical-ed facilities and probably an auditorium. We decided that in view of the rural aspects of the campus, being on the outskirts of a very pleasant town in Wisconsin, that we could use disjointed buildings connected by walkways and arcades and give the students an opportunity of escaping from the classrooms and enjoying the lovely Wisconsin landscape. We were also much impressed by the quality of workmanship and mechanics that existed in the Fond du Lac area. A tradition of good craftsmanship—there were still good stonemasons available there, and a very, very good quarry close by. So, after we had developed the basic plans for the college, we selected the materials and decided that we would use precast concrete frames for the windows, which were also the exterior supports for the wall, together with the use of coarse Wisconsin limestone, using the rather smooth white concrete as a sharp foil for the textured interesting gray of the limestone. The chapel is particularly interesting in the sense that we had created an oval-shaped chapel to seat about three hundred people that was lighted and made spacious by the development of a circular drum that is made of diagonal members of precast concrete. The infill, as far as the windows were concerned, we hopefully felt may be stained glass, at some time, but at the time of its construction it was simply a plastic of regular surface to divert the light and give an even light illumination throughout the chapel. The sisters seemed to be delighted with the building when it was finished. I haven't seen it in many years, but I'd like to.

Blum: That was a very large total-concept commission. From the beginning, would you briefly walk us through that particular project? I presume that you were the partner-in-charge. What was your total role, and who were your support people, and what did they do for you, and how much did you rely on local people? What was the blend of all of these talents? How did it work?

McCurry: We had a resourceful staff with a variety of abilities.

Blum: Did you do the design?

107 McCurry: Mostly, yes. I had very able assistants. One of them was Henry Harrold, Joe van Risen, a very talented Chinese boy who was educated in Hong Kong by the name of Eugene Chin, I believe. Even though it is a large project, the key people were relatively small in number.

Blum: So then you were responsible for the site planning and actual design of the buildings?

McCurry: Yes, we did the whole thing. It was a very pleasant situation. There were two women in our office at that time that were working with me, Sally Garden Mitchell, the daughter of Hugh Garden, and Ruth Flax, who was doing our interiors at that moment. They were both extraordinarily helpful.

Blum: Did you do interiors for these buildings as well?

McCurry: Well, of course, the interiors are not the elaborate things that a home would be, for instance. When you're doing a classroom or a lecture room or a chapel, or a library, perhaps, the normal furniture is fairly well prescribed. You can have some influence upon it, but you don't change it radically.

Blum: Did Schmidt, Garden make an effort to have projects published?

McCurry: Yes, we did, but more or less routinely. Of course, most of the partners were so busy that this was a secondary matter. We routinely submitted work to architectural publications for consideration for awards, but I suppose in retrospect we never really made an enormous effort to do much. We were all so busy that this was not an important source of business.

Blum: This Marian College, as you describe it, was such a large, a total, project and I did not find it published.

McCurry: This was a policy of AIA and the Chicago chapter or the various chapters of not being very much interested in work outside of the area they served. Now

108 they have changed this. The Chicago chapter is now quite interested in considering work done by Chicago architects, even remotely, which was a concept I had long supported. A great deal of our work was always away from the Chicago area. One thing that Bacci and I were always interested in doing is never surrendering our base in Chicago. At the present moment our successors have unfortunately reached that position where they lost their Chicago contacts to a considerable degree.

Blum: While you were with the firm did you open offices in other parts of the country?

McCurry: No. At that time we didn't believe in this. We wanted a centralized office that could be under our control. We associated when it was desirable with our local architects and we were always willing to establish or send people for supervision or any other thing to local areas. At the time I was a partner our thinking had always been that we didn't want to involve ourselves in the extra administrative work, the jealousies that occur between rival offices, by expanding offices. Our successors got involved in this with a mixed bag of success. Usually the local organizations soon become separate. If they are successful in procuring work on their own, they are going to run their own show, sooner or later. Perhaps one of the remarkable success stories of a principal office with a variety of local offices being Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. They are unique in the sense that each of the offices operates autonomously, but they do manage to cooperate on a national basis. Now, I am sure nobody is privileged to know the endless arguments that have gone on between the various offices and I am sure that it has to do with volume of work and profitability, as well as design and business-getting skills, so it is a complicated kind of an operation.

Blum: Paul, you joined Schmidt, Garden in 1946. When were you made a full partner?

McCurry: I think it was about ten years later, about 1956. And, of course, the reason for this was that Erikson had a heart attack. His confidant and attorney had been

109 advising him for years that he should provide an orderly succession. His judgment and decisions were unhappily complicated by his inability to decide what to do with his son, who was obviously not going to be able to succeed him, but he was unwilling to dispense with him, so he had six or eight people that were important as project architects. He had a difficult task in making up his mind how to create a successor partnership, so he finally chose nine people from the office.

Blum: To become equal partners?

McCurry: To become equal partners—equal in the sense that they all had a vote, but perhaps unequal in the sense of relating their position in the partnership to the amount of work that they were able to bring into the partnership. At that time, we had such a workload that that was not a problem. But, eventually, it did become a problem.

Blum: In the earlier years, or even the later years—you were with Schmidt, Garden for over thirty years, from 1946 to 1977—how did bringing in jobs work? If you brought a job into the firm—say it was one for a residence, hypothetical example, you brought a job in for a residence—did you then work on it, or did you give it to someone who was, say, the residential expert in the firm? How did this work?

McCurry: In the solicitation of work and in the way people come to architects, it is usually a highly personal situation. Clients have a tendency to choose a professional person, an architect, with the thought in mind that they would like to work with him, or if they can tolerate him, or he can solve problems for them. And it is usually a combination of both. They find that you are an agreeable person that they can work with and they also have confidence that you can solve their problems.

Blum: So if you brought a commission in, it was yours?

110 McCurry: You cannot escape from your client. I mean, you have to continue to participate. Now, Erikson was able to do this by working very hard and very diligently and continuing to be available to his clients until they were satisfied with the development of the project and felt comfortable with the man that he had assigned to work with them. So, it's very difficult to assign clients who have chosen you for many reasons. You cannot step aside and let someone else do it. You can gradually develop a working relationship but they still want you around as a court of appeal.

Blum: This is when you have a personal connection to the client. What about jobs that…

McCurry: This happens always.

Blum: What about a job which, say, came to your firm because you were one of several architectural firms that were interviewed?

McCurry: Yes, but there are always personalities involved. I mean, people never disassociate themselves from this personal relationship with a professional individual. The performance of professional services, which is the exploration of the future, actually, and the analysis of their problem and the imaginative approach to the solution to the problem, are not things that can be packaged and sold as merchandise. This is a personal service, a personal relationship. It can only be fulfilled by the working relationship between a client and a professional who is capable of solving their problems. There is always a tendency, by the very nature of this relationship, to suggest that perhaps some partners are going to be more successful in the procurement of work than others. But it is difficult to equalize the workload.

Blum: What was the firm's policy on, say, a photographer? Was there a consensus that there was one best photographer?

McCurry: Well, that was relatively easy. Hedrich-Blessing was pretty much the accepted photographer when we were active.

111 Blum: And what about, say, landscape architects?

McCurry: My personal preference was always Franz Lipp and, well, he was well known in the Chicago area and he did do a good many of our buildings. When we were doing buildings in other areas of the country we frequently worked with professionals who were well known and respected and were known to the client. And we had many, many working relationships with other professionals in terms of providing specialized services for the buildings.

Blum: Was there a preferred contractor that Schmidt, Garden worked with?

McCurry: Most of our work was of a semi-public nature, which suggests that it's possible to make some selections but it still has to submit to public bidding. This points up the necessity for good, valid, clear-cut contract documents, which would tend to eliminate contractors that are not competent to do the job. Every architectural group, I think, would find that they would be selecting from relatively few contractors that they have found through long experience perform and are skillful artisans of the various trades that are involved. They would naturally develop confidence in them. Many private business operations are based on a favorite contractor, which involves a negotiated contract, that is, the preparation of adequate contract documents and then the personal negotiations that would take place between the architect, the contractor, and the owner in determining what was agreed upon as a fair price.

Blum: Is that the way it worked with your firm?

McCurry: Sometimes. If we were dealing with a public entity it had to be a general solicitation of bids. Dealing with a private entity, such as the business firm, they were more inclined to negotiate with people that they knew and had confidence in.

112 Blum: Can we now talk about a very closely related activity to your work as an architect, and that is the American Institute of Architects, the AIA. Why did you become a member?

McCurry: I became a member of the American Institute of Architects because it is a professional organization of architects. It is a national professional organization. Its ideals have to do with the delivery of architectural services to the highest degree a professional is capable of, which is a thought I thoroughly subscribe to. It's a professional society that is constantly interested in raising this standard of performance. It's a society that endeavors to codify information, continuously promoting an educational program that will increase the members' competence. And it is a society that through granting of mentions and selecting distinguished buildings, recognizes professional performance, and eventually recommends fellowship for its members that have demonstrated a high level of achievement in the practice of architecture.

Blum: When did you join the AIA?

McCurry: I had been sort of a member for a long time but I couldn't really be active while I was teaching. I never had the time. So I think I became a member as soon as I returned to the practice of architecture in 1945.

Blum: And when did you become a fellow?

McCurry: In 1967, I think.

Blum: You were active in the organization from 1962 on. You held various offices. And in 1966 and 1967 you were president. It is known among your colleagues that something rather unusual happened while you were president and that was unlike what the AIA was used to doing, and that was not taking stands on controversial issues. Under your direction as president you took some rather daring stands. How did you arrive at this decision to do something as courageous as that?

113 McCurry: I don't know whether it was courageous or not. Since its formation as a society of architects, the institute had from time to time spoken out in terms of proposed municipal, state, and federal activities that had to do with the quality of architecture that would be the result. So I was not completely pioneering. I was following a long tradition of a professional society being actively interested in giving advice to political entities that were considering public works.

Blum: Paul, I hope you don't think I am differing with you, but I have been told by colleagues of yours that the AIA was really a do-nothing organization and, in fact, one architect with whom I spoke resigned twice over situations where he felt the AIA should take a stand and, in fact, did nothing. So what you did was very different from what the AIA had been doing, although in theory, perhaps, they proposed to take stands.

McCurry: What you say is true and it does have to do with perhaps the personality of the officers or the total personality of the officers involved in the local chapter. It has always been the policy of the national organization to be concerned with what is happening in the public sector. So I wasn't straying as far a field as my unhappy friend was, considering the makeup of the chapter.

Blum: You are known to have been forthright and outspoken, especially on an issue of the Crosstown Expressway.

McCurry: This was a major project in the city, but I have a deep recollection of a period in time about ten years before I became president, the president at that time took a strong stand against the construction of the McCormick Place along the lakeshore and insisted strongly that the exhibition hall should have been built just south of the Loop area of the city, in the land that was becoming available from the consolidation of the Rock Island and the other railroads that were using the LaSalle Street Station. There were tremendous assembling yards there that were not being profitably used in terms of the changing activities of railroads. They didn't need the big storage yards

114 anymore. This was Sam Lichtmann who was president at that time. The chapter took a strong position that a convention center, which could have been a sports complex, too, would be better located on the edges of the Loop. There, transportation was readily available, restaurants, entertainment, parking areas and public transportation were readily available, rather than an isolated area. which would be at 22nd and the lake. This area was served by a rather pleasant boulevard along the lake, which subsequently became almost an arterial highway. This was not received favorably by the city government and McCormick Place was built in due course of time, to a considerable degree because of the interest of the Chicago Tribune in perpetuating the memory of its owner, Colonel Robert McCormick.

Blum: So you are citing this as an example of the AIA...

McCurry: I was not the first president of the Chicago chapter to take a position on a public activity. In terms of the Crosstown Expressway, I probably would not have undertaken to speak against this except that the members of the board of the chapter at this particular time, and a great many active members, were outraged by the fact that we were going to build an enormous highway which would be an elevated highway, similar to the so-called Skyway. The Skyway had destroyed the neighborhoods through which it ran, in contrast to the development of the Congress or Eisenhower Expressway, which was a depressed highway, which had a tendency to redevelop the neighborhoods through which it passed and was much more amenable to the development of a character of beauty rather than a character of ugliness. So with the strong support of the board of directors of the chapter, of the committee members at that time, I undertook the task of endeavoring to persuade the city that they had made the wrong decisions. That they should, in fact, use the tremendous sum of money that would be required to build the Crosstown Expressway, to use this money and to use this change in the environment for the total benefit of the city in terms of high-speed transportation, in terms of the redevelopment of the corridor in an area which badly needed redevelopment. We were not opposed at that moment to the construction of the Crosstown Expressway but we were unhappy that the concept was not a

115 total concept for beautifying the city and improving the character of the city. That it could not alone be a transportation system. The transportation system as an elevated highway over an already elevated railroad tracks, would make an enormous disadvantageous impact on the surrounding area. It could be used by more careful planning as a device that would improve the neighborhoods through which it went, rather than harm them. So on the basis of this theory we developed a rationale that would suggest to the city that there are ways and means of establishing another alignment. Of establishing a team of architects and engineers and city planners and landscape people, which would provide a far more attractive corridor than the one they had contemplated, with probably no greater expenditure. This whole effort was strongly supported by the chapter.

Blum: How did you go about proposing this to the city? Mayor Daley was the head of the city government at that time.

McCurry: We simply called a press conference and the press came in great numbers. They were mostly favorable to the concept that we were advocating and it generated an enormous amount of public discussion. It eventually produced excellent results. The alignment was shifted from the old railroad track to the Cicero corridor. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were employed as consulting architects, together with the engineers that were involved, the highway engineers and the city personnel. A decision was reached to create two legs to the highway, one going north and one going south and to separate them by a half-mile area, or approximately half-mile area, which would then become an industrial corridor. This was a very good concept. The project was finally defeated by the stubbornness of two political entities, one of them Mayor Daley, and the other Walker, who was governor of Illinois. It had to do with Daley's adamant desire to connect the so-called Crosstown Expressway with the Skyway and economically bail out the Skyway, which was in deep financial trouble.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

116 McCurry: The problem came when the mayor proposed that the Crosstown Expressway turn eastward at 79th Street and a 79th corridor be developed to reach the existing Skyway. There was a tremendous outcry by the people that lived on either side of 75th Street, which Walker felt was justified.

Blum: You mean the people that would be displaced by this?

McCurry: Yes. And it became a deadlock between the mayor of the city of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. Finally, the governor refused to allocate state funds to this development and the federal government then squashed the whole project. The answer in our judgment, and we were terribly disappointed by what happened, was to join the Indiana and Michigan tollways, or arterial highways, through the newly developing Route 80, which could have been reached by continuing the Cicero corridor southward.

Blum: So, in other words, after all of your thoughtful considerations, what you considered a better solution, were really defeated because of the political situation.

McCurry: That's right. The money which was coming to the city, which was I think was half a billion dollars, an enormous sum of money, was finally given to the city of Chicago when Jane Byrne was mayor. She frittered the money away patching potholes and making a start, of course, on the development of rapid transit on the Stevenson.

Blum: When you were president of the AIA you also gave an address entitled "The Architect's Image and His Education," which I presume drew on your background and experience as an educator as well as an architect. What precipitated this address?

McCurry: As architects we were facing a period of time in which practically everyone in the building industry was facing the constant and uncontrolled escalation of costs. In a political sense this was uncontrolled inflation, probably due to the liberal Democratic congress, the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, which

117 built up an enormous debt which was not paid off at the time. The debt acted so unfavorably upon the ability of architects to project the cost of future buildings that the total construction procedure was becoming chaotic and architects were being saddled with the image that they were unable to adequately control the design of buildings and control the construction procedures to maintain the established budgets.

Blum: So what did you propose?

McCurry: I proposed that architects involve themselves much more in the construction procedures and become much more interested in preparing personnel that had a variety of capabilities that could be more attuned and more capable by training in controlling the total design process and the construction process.

Blum: Were unions a problem?

McCurry: Unions were a problem in the sense that the old concept of trade unionism was beginning to collapse to a degree. Techniques were moving away from the skills of the conventional craftsmen or tradesmen into new areas that required new skills or combined skills that could not be isolated in any one craft union. There was a need for educating, both at the architectural level and the construction level, competent people who could handle the total construction of a building and alleviate the excessive financial problems of a fragmented effort. I felt that this could be accomplished to a considerable degree by enlarging the concept of the capabilities of an architect and enlarging his education. And by making legitimate practice of architecture under an umbrella that included the very special disciplines of electrical, or so-called electrical, structural and mechanical, acoustical and construction techniques.

Blum: Are you suggesting that all of these engineering or construction techniques should be part of the training of an architect.

118 McCurry: Yes. They are, to a degree, now. Architects are educated to a considerable degree as engineers, in the sense that it is necessary for them to learn the properties of various and sundry kinds of materials. They have to have an understanding of the forces of nature, such as gravity, wind, the action of water, the action of frost, heat and cold—all of the forces of nature that can bear upon a building have to be understood by an architect. Some universities have always educated what they considered architect/engineers who are quite capable of the technical aspects of designing a structural frame for a building. I was suggesting that we educate architects and if they elected a specialty in terms of architectural engineering they should be granted a degree with that kind of a specialization. If they chose to be architects that were skillful in electrical engineering they should still be considered architects but educated to be skillful engineers handling electrical problems within the context of a building. The same would be true of mechanical engineering and other forms of engineering that were involved in the building process. In terms of the general education of engineers, a relatively small number of engineers, and practically no electrical engineers, ever find their way into the building industry.

Blum: What about the architect who wants to be an architectural designer? How extensive should his engineering training be?

McCurry: I think it should be as extensive as anyone else's. If he is going to be a designer he's certainly got to understand what he is doing.

Blum: Is that still a viable solution, with the technology and the possibilities of engineering being so vast today?

McCurry: It certainly is. Architects cannot really design buildings unless they understand the structural components that they are going to work with. They may not choose to, and they may not have developed the skills to do, complex structural problems, but they could be educated if they chose to be and they can associate with people who are competent. A person who comes to mind that is capable of doing both of these and that would be Nervi, the

119 great Roman engineer and architect who was capable of designing highly innovative structures that had great aesthetic character. I don't think that the knowledge of engineering and the knowledge of aesthetics are mutually exclusive. They complement each other, they frequently are part of the same logical form of reasoning.

Blum: And you are suggesting it should be the background of every architect.

McCurry: I suggested that we should openly state that we intended to educate architects to this capability, enlarge the concept of architectural licensing in the same fashion that doctors become generalists in their principal basic education and become specialists in terms of specialties. And by their own discipline they restrict their practice to the particular specialty that they have devoted their life.

Blum: You mentioned the licensing of an architect. You were on the Illinois State Board of Examiners?

McCurry: Yes. In 1967 I was appointed to the State Board of Architectural Examiners for licensing architects.

Blum: What was that experience like?

McCurry: That was a very interesting experience. It lasted for about twelve years.

Blum: Who appointed you?

McCurry: Governor Richard Ogilvie.

Blum: I see. So this was a political appointment, or not really political appointment but made through political connections.

McCurry: I suppose this came about because I had been chairman of the AIA National Committee on Architectural Licensing prior to this time, and also I had been

120 president of the Chicago chapter so that this had apparently come to Ogilvie's attention. I enjoyed giving service to the state in the licensing of architects, which had to do with the practice of architecture in terms of public health, welfare, and safety; in terms of defining the responsibilities of architects, in terms of providing this kind of public service and protection. And, of course, all of the state licensing boards by this time had joined together in the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards in organizing and administering national examinations which, to a considerable degree, solved the problem of reciprocity between the states, a problem that has never been solved by the legal or the medical profession.

Blum: So, in other words, you are saying that if one national license is granted it's good in every state for architects.

McCurry: It has to be approved by the states but the states being members of the council practically automatically approve.

Blum: And California and places like that are not holdouts in your profession?

McCurry: They are to the extent that it's necessary for an architect to practice in California and some other states now to have a specialized knowledge of seismic forces.

Blum: So it requires a little additional training.

McCurry: Yes, which you can do at the same time you take the examination.

Blum: You said you were on the State Board of Examiners for thirteen years. Did anything happen to either change the exam or change the grading process during those years?

McCurry: Yes. The tradition in Illinois had been for a long time to depend upon a fairly rigorous architectural examination to determine the capability of individuals to practice architecture. The capability and knowledge would be best

121 exemplified by an architect who had graduated from an accredited school of architecture. Nevertheless, Illinois has always felt that this information could be included over a longer period of time by active participation in the architectural process. And that by means of study and experience candidates could acquire the knowledge that was necessary to practice architecture and that their skills and information and experience could be tested adequately by an architectural examination.

Blum: So someone could actually apply for a license if they felt they had the background by way of work experience, as opposed to college training.

McCurry: Yes. The work experience was measured by a period of years, usually ten years. And a number of architects have been licensed as practicing architects in the state of Illinois through that procedure.

Blum: Did that change during the time you were on the board?

McCurry: A good many states who had not the experience of the intensive development of architecture that the Chicago area had experienced over many years and that New York had experienced and Boston had experienced, felt that the proper criterion for judging an architect was a professional degree in architecture. There were many differences in the academic world about what the education of an architect should consist of. Preparing comprehensive architectural examinations which lasted over a three-day period was becoming such a task that the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards felt that the examinations should be simplified and should relate more to the abilities of the testing services to provide true or false examinations that were adequate for testing the competency of architects. The members of the board of the state of Illinois felt that true, false, multiple-choice examinations were no substitute for the graphic examination which, in fact, tested the ability of an architect to perform the services for which he was being licensed in a twelve-hour period and by his competency persuade the Board of Examiners that he was, in fact, capable of protecting the public safety in terms of his knowledge and skill. So

122 this became a heated argument and debate and it hinged upon the complex question of what an architect actually does and what skills and knowledge an architect should possess, in terms of being able to properly protect the public welfare and safety of the people of the fifty states. Illinois continued to be sort of a stormy petrel and I was finally appointed to a task force. There are five regions to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. Illinois is part of the central region and I was elected from the central region to represent the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, in this search for answers to these particular questions. We were instructed to interview numerous representatives of the great architectural schools of the country. We conducted a countrywide survey asking architects to define what their capabilities were in terms of skills and knowledge, and we gradually began to come to some conclusions. We employed many professors of psychology and experts in testing procedures to meet with us, and we gradually produced a report which identified aesthetic skills, artistic knowledge, as being essential characteristics to the adequate practice of architecture and the protection of the public health, welfare and safety. This was a very interesting period for me and did form and reinforce some of my strongly held concepts of how architects should be judged and how their work should be judged. Perhaps in a somewhat different fashion than many of the architectural critics or architectural historians have chosen to make judgments in the past. I became strongly convinced that the old Greek word aesthetics, which was almost synonymous with the word logic, in terms of describing the action of the human mind. Aesthetics had to do with visual perception, primarily. What you saw you made a judgment of. The judgment was based on aesthetic knowledge, or aesthetic perception, in terms of proportion, in terms of mass, in terms of the relationship between voids and solids, in the use of textures, in the use of color, the relationship of a structure to its environment. Equally important is the relationship of a structure to the natural forces of nature—the wind, the sun, the heat and cold, to the sensitivity of people to the environment that was created, in terms of congestion, in terms of density, in terms of being comfortable, in terms of heat and cold, and the whole gamut of the impact of a building on the aesthetic sensitivity of an individual, the feeling of the senses.

123 Blum: How did this then reflect itself in the licensing process?

McCurry: It did. It reflected itself in terms of aesthetic knowledge and artistic skill and creative skills, in terms of knowledge of the forces of nature.

Blum: Were testing procedures built into the exam as a result of this study that hadn't been present before?

McCurry: The testing procedures were certainly clarified and it was, I think, determined to continue with the graphic examination, which puts a candidate in the position of performing as an architect. He has to respond to the physical requirements of a written program. He has to be able to analyze and assimilate the requirements of a program and then respond to them in terms of human needs in the arrangement of an organized space. That was a victory for Illinois in that we had consistently maintained that this was the proper way of making judgments and the rest of the country accepted it, some of them reluctantly, but they did accept it. We agreed that the knowledge of history of architecture, engineering skills that were required in developing a safe structure, the engineering knowledge that was required in the development of safe electrical systems, heating and cooling systems, acoustical systems, the impact upon the environment, could be tested by multiple-choice questions, simulated situations in which the candidate had to make evaluations, a case study kind of a situation, which is a well respected and used technique in education.

Blum: Who were some of the other Chicago architects?

McCurry: On the board?

Blum: On the board with you. What year was this?

McCurry: There were a variety of Chicagoans in this, although in terms of the political inclinations of the architects of the city of Chicago, I think most of them were

124 Democrats. So the Republican administrations always had some trouble finding Republican architects.

Blum: Do you mean to say that only architects who were Republicans were elected to a board of this sort during a Republican governorship?

McCurry: I suspect this is true because there were many architects that our board recommended. We always did. They very seldom paid any attention to what we suggested.

Blum: Do you mean the AIA Board?

McCurry: No.

Blum: The licensing board?

McCurry: The Department of Registration and Education paid very little attention to our suggestions. We were always suggesting what we thought were highly competent architects in the city regardless of their political affiliations. Actually, political affiliations never meant anything, but they mean a great deal to people downstate.

Blum: Were there any other Chicago architects on the board with you?

McCurry: There had been a good many Chicago architects that had served on the board. Al Bacci...

Blum: At the same time.

McCurry: At the same time I was there?

Blum: When the study was going on. It appears they don't come to mind readily.

125 McCurry: No, they don't, because... I was just trying to remember the names. Perhaps I had better give you the names later. There were representatives and one of the state statutes requires that one of architects selected for the board should be a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana, so there has always been one architect that was a teacher.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Blum: Paul, was there an architectural establishment in Chicago?

McCurry: What do you mean by that?

Blum: Well, was there a group of architects that were movers and shakers in the architectural community.

McCurry: Oh, I think so. Always!

Blum: Who were they?

McCurry: They varied from time to time.

Blum: Who were some of them during your time?

McCurry: We could start out with D.H. Burnham, who was perhaps the granddaddy of the movers and shakers.

Blum: During the time that you were with Schmidt, Garden, say the 1940s through the 1970s?

McCurry: Starting with D.H. Burnham, then splinters from his organization became important movers and shakers, like Graham who formed the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. Graham became a mover and shaker in the city of Chicago. The well-established firm of Holabird and Roche, which was an offshoot of the D.H. Burnham firm. Both Holabird and Martin Roche and

126 John Root became movers and shakers in the City of Chicago. Edward Bennett, for a period of time in his design of Grant Park, his city planning, was a mover and shaker to a certain degree. Andy Rebori had a place in the mover-and-shaker situation. With the emergence of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Owings became a strong mover and shaker. Richard Schmidt would be characterized as a mover and shaker, and then Carl Erikson.

Blum: This reads like a list of significant architects in Chicago. Is that sort of what you are basing this on?

McCurry: These were the competent men in the city of Chicago. Al Shaw would be a member of this group and perhaps more recently it would be Larry Perkins, who is an important character, and Phil Will.

Blum: Did the architectural establishment, as you are identifying it, did it change over the years?

McCurry: In what sense?

Blum: Well, maybe you have answered the question already. That is, did the personalities change?

McCurry: Oh yes. The personalities changed, yes.

Blum: But did the underlying idea of who was a mover and shaker. Did that ever change?

McCurry: I think the ingredients are always the same. First of all, general all-around competence and the perception by the public in terms of employment as to the competency of this individual, which is measured, perhaps, by the number of commissions, the importance of the commissions that we were given, which is probably as good a judgment as any in terms of the movers and shakers. Now, when you are talking about innovators, that may be a

127 slightly different story. The innovators were Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Blum: Were they movers and shakers? Would you consider Frank Lloyd Wright part of an architectural establishment?

McCurry: He was never a mover and a shaker in the sense that he had any substantial financial or political support. He never had a major building in Chicago. Sullivan, through his partner primarily, had the Auditorium and Carson Pirie Scott, but he wouldn't have done this without his partner.

Blum: Did your profession as an architect have an impact on your family in any way?

McCurry: I think so.

Blum: How?

McCurry: My wife, Irene, was an art major, art teacher, who was interested in architecture and I've always been interested in art, so this made a compatible family arrangement. Our children were always interested in the creative processes, and at age three Margaret always went to inspect buildings with me.

Blum: And Margaret is an architect today.

McCurry: She liked the activity. Her mother was glad to get a busybody out of her hair and I enjoyed having Margaret with me. When Marian grew up a bit Marian came along also. They both have graphic abilities. They both love to draw. They both were very much interested in art classes and they had no objections to visiting museums and when Alan came along, he became a part of the trio. So when they became old enough to travel, they went with me to the architectural conventions and they went with me to visit buildings that I was interested in and had under construction. So I presume they were

128 influenced by what I was doing. I was interested in both of the girls. Margaret went to Vassar as an art major and came back to Chicago, although that was the one disagreement I, perhaps, had with Margaret. Margaret felt that there was only one city that you should live in, which was New York, and I insisted that she come back to Chicago until she had developed some skills that could permit her to support herself in whatever city she chose to live in. So she came back to Chicago reluctantly and took some secretarial courses, and she did some teaching. She finally decided that the field she wanted to work in was in interior design. So I helped her get a job with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, in which she did extremely well. Subsequently she decided to take the architectural examinations and passed them. My daughter, Marian, was always torn between the biological sciences and the field of art. I think that due to the influence of a particularly biology teacher in high school she decided to pursue a science course when she went to Vassar and was a science major there. On one occasion when she was in her junior year she called up and said, "Daddy, when are you going to come and visit me at Vassar?" You think of all kinds of things under a suggestion such as this. So I hurriedly arranged some reason for going to New York, and called on her at Vassar. We went over to the local pub and had a beer and walked around the lake and I kept wondering when the bombshell was going to drop. She finally got around to tell me that she wanted to be an architect. She explained it in a rational way. She had spent that summer, the summer of her junior year, at my suggestions, interviewing with the deans of schools of medicine that she might attend because she felt that she would like to be a doctor. They had a tendency to discourage her. They thought that she was an attractive woman and would probably not practice medicine. She would get married and raise a family. They were constantly telling her that they would have to invest $35, 000 in her and they wanted to invest that money in people they thought would be doctors. This would not be possible today but it was possible in the 1960s that a dean could act in this fashion. She had done some work in research and had found that research was not creative enough to suit her. So I said it was a little late to change her courses now, you'd better get your degree in science. But Vassar does offer a few courses in architecture. There was a very nice guy by the name of Johnson who was teaching at

129 Vassar. He was a colored man practicing in Poughkeepsie, so Marian took her courses in architecture and I helped her find her way to the University of Michigan. That summer when she came back after graduating I helped her find a job at Perkins and Will in the Department of Interiors where she became fascinated with the whole procedure and met a young man by the name of Tweedie, who subsequently became her husband. But she did spend two years at the University of Michigan and, unfortunately, her future husband was called into the armed forces and Marian felt that she had to establish a nest egg so they could get married when he returned. So she dropped out, much against my will. It wasn't altogether that, it was the fact that the schools of architecture really had no adequate program for integrating a person as well educated as Marian into the schools of architecture. I got a plaintive letter from her that explains her problem. She said, "You know, Daddy, it's kind of lonely up here because nobody in my class has an I.D. card and I can't have a glass of beer with any of my classmates." They just put her back in a sophomore program and, you know, this was kind of an emotional letdown for her. She felt that she was not moving along into the design field, which she was interested in rapidly enough. I think this is a grave defect on the part of the schools of architecture. Maybe they have rectified it by now. But they could take the smart people coming from another discipline and integrate them into a school of architecture rapidly enough. They had to go through the same old rigmarole.

Blum: But she did persevere. Is she is a licensed architect today?

McCurry: No, she isn't a licensed architect. She elected to have a family. But she finally joined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and she's a natural mother hen, so she becomes the mother hen of any organization she gets involved with. She's a natural leader and people gather around her. Whether she controls the organization or not, she's the mother confessor and so forth.

Blum: You've spoken of positive influences that architecture, stemming from you, exerted on your family. Because architecture is such a demanding, time- consuming profession, were there negative influences as well?

130 McCurry: I suppose so. Architecture is demanding in the sense that there are deadlines to meet. There are long hours to put in and frequently meetings are during the evening hours, but I don't think this ever really bothered my family. They understood the situation. One reason I joined a large organization such as Schmidt, Garden and Erikson was my experience in teaching and practicing architecture simultaneously, which left me absolutely no time for my family. I was spending every evening, every weekend, meeting with people or working and Margaret, who was a very perceptive young gal, bounced into my study area on one occasion and said, "Father, why is it that you would so much rather work than play with me?" Well, that's kind of hard to answer. But I wanted the kind of a family life that would free me to some degree over the weekends where I could spend it with my family and children and working with larger corporate clients has a tendency to conform to the workaday world in terms of meetings and activities. It's a lot simpler to meet with one, perhaps, demanding and complex client, than meeting with a dozen insecure creatures who are building a house. So I chose the life of a corporate architect in terms of my family's wellbeing rather than, perhaps, starving to death as an innovative architect.

Blum: Did you feel—do architect's feel they are adequately reimbursed?

McCurry: I don't think they ever felt they were.

Blum: Were there discussions about these...

McCurry: There were constant discussions. We constantly ran afoul of the federal regulations in terms of setting prices. We developed fee schedules.

Blum: In your firm or in the architectural community?

McCurry: The architecture profession. The firm, of course, could set its own prices. It's when you're in competition that you get into trouble with the federal government. You can't establish trade practices, control prices. I think there is

131 a general lack of understanding of the value of an architect's work. I think this is true because relatively few people come in contact with an architect during the course of their lives. The American people are conditioned, to a considerable degree, to buy things off the shelf. They are not accustomed to professional services in terms of guiding professional services and wanting the very special character, whether it be architecture, a tailor-made suit, a dress fashioned for yourself alone, or the thousands of things that used to be done on a very specialized basis. The character of architecture has changed because people are so willing to buy packaged merchandise, which is frequently styled and packaged by pulp magazines. In terms of architecture, good or bad architecture is frequently judged as to whether this is an imitation Colonial house, or an imitation this or that house, or Georgian house, or whatever it may be, instead of deciding upon the character of the house. There is a certain sameness to our domestic architecture that did not occur in the early part of this century or the latter part of the nineteenth century. Lake Forest is a good example of this. You look at the old buildings and most of the old buildings were built with a pretty knowledgeable owner. It's the woman in the house who is quite knowledgeable in what she wanted her house to do. The men were accustomed to working with individuals in terms of designing. That is, making judgments, understanding how a house should function and, of course, the results of using a variety of architects and also with a variety of people with different living requirements, produced a very rich variety of houses, which is classified loosely as Victorian or something or other. Those houses were very distinctive in character and now they are not. Very few of them are, rather.

Blum: Looking back over your career as an architect, what do you consider to have been your greatest opportunity?

McCurry: I think that I have enjoyed all of the things I've done. They've all been a challenge in their own way. You get caught up in problem solving, which I've always found interesting and rewarding. Problem solving for a client in terms of a solution is very comparable to teaching and perceiving the

132 roadblocks that are stopping the learning of a student. If you can remove the roadblocks, he will continue to make progress and be your friend for life.

Blum: It is the challenge of the process?

McCurry: It is the challenge of the process in finding answers, but it's also the joy of permitting another individual to continue to make progress, to find a way through the morass, you might say.

Blum: Is there a building or a project among those that you have done that stands out in your mind as being perhaps your most successful?

McCurry: Again, for different reasons I've always liked a variety of the buildings that I've done. I've always liked Marillac and Marian. I like the Kenwood School in Chicago, which is now Kenwood Academy. I like the Deerpath School in Lake Forest, which made a great many people and children very happy. I like the Lake Forest Club that I did many years ago.

Blum: On the other hand, is there a project that you'd like to have a chance to redo?

McCurry: That would be true of practically all of them.

Blum: You moved to Lake Forest in 1955 and as you gave community service through the AIA and the Board of Examiners, did you give community service in Lake Forest as well?

McCurry: Yes, I was interested in Lake Forest. We came here for a variety of reasons. We had left Beverly Hills for a variety of reasons. The area was getting more and more congested. There was a lack of community spirit there that I deplored. Our children were getting ready to enter high school. I had taught sufficiently in the Chicago schools to realize that for a long time they had been on a downward trend moving away from excellence and becoming more and more confused in handling educational problems. There were a few options on the South Side of Chicago in terms of secondary schools.

133 There was Morgan Park Academy and there was the Lab School at the University of Chicago, both of which were remote and both of which did not really develop any feeling of neighborliness or participation in a community activity. On the basis of this and the fact that I had a practice that was almost national in scope and it didn't make much difference where I lived, all I needed was access to the airport and railroad stations. So we started an extensive exploration of the Chicago area to decide where we would live, starting out in Beverly Hills, going to Flossmoor.

Blum: That was south. How did you select Lake Forest being it is so far north?

McCurry: We rejected Beverly Hills because of its miserable transportation system. Flossmoor because it was so far away from the Loop area and seemed to have no real connection with the Loop area but was more connected to the industrial South Side of Chicago, which had an uncertain future in my opinion. We moved to the western suburbs, I mean, we considered the western suburbs, such as Hinsdale, and we went as far as St. Charles along the river. We went to Barrington and then came up the lakeshore. We would have been satisfied with probably any of the shoreline communities but when we finally got as far north as Lake Forest, we found the land up here far more reasonable and far more open than Winnetka or Wilmette or Glencoe. We finally decided that this was a community in which the children would be relatively safe and in which they could form their own community relationships. This was a community that owed a great deal toward education because practically everyone that lived here owed their social and business position to their vocational ability or their education they had acquired. It had two colleges here—Lake Forest College and Barat College. It had a fairly active community group.

Blum: I'm sold. You sound like a spokesman for the Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce. Did you design your own home?

McCurry: Yes.

134 Blum: I have enjoyed sitting in this wonderful living room with the southern exposure on this very, very cold weekend. Would you just speak very briefly about your house and the reason you decided to take advantage of this southern exposure solar idea.

McCurry: It's a kind of an interesting story. After we had decided that we would consider Lake Forest, we looked around the area for places that we might buy land. My wife, Irene, is a city girl who never feels very comfortable far from sidewalks. The open land around Lake Forest was not exactly suitable. I felt that we had to move into an established subdivision. I wanted to acquire as much land as I could afford and we finally discovered on the southeastern portion of Lake Forest a subdivision known as the Campbell Subdivision. I had a very good friend that lived a few blocks from me in Beverly Hills whose name was Campbell whose father had been a large real estate operator. Marshall Campbell was working for the Pullman Company and his wife was running a kindergarten school, or preschool, that our three children attended and Marshall and I frequently rode down to the city on the Rock Island train. So I asked Marshall the next time I saw him I said, "My God, those Campbells really get around." He said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Well, there is a subdivision up in Lake Forest named after you. Your ancestors haven't been up there?" He said, "Strangely enough, they have. It was my father's subdivision. In the Depression he couldn't pay the taxes and I haven't been able to pay them for many years but finally I cleaned up the taxes. Do you want to buy it?" I said, "I would consider buying a part of it." He said, "Well, I would like to consider developing some houses up there. Why don't we get together?" So the consequence of this was that I designed a house for Marshall Campbell at Cherokee and Greenbay on a piece of property he felt was perhaps a little too close to Greenbay to be desirable. But he felt that if he developed that, then he could sell some of his property that was around here. There were practically no houses here. Then I made an arrangement with Campbell to buy three lots in Lake Forest. We owned this property down here. There was an acre and a half and that was what I thought a good size for us.

135 [Tape 6: Side 1]

McCurry: Helen Campbell, Marshall's wife, was very much interested in housing and some of her ideas are a part of this house I designed for general sale. When the house was nearing completion Helen came over to talk to Irene on one occasion and said, "Our daughter Marsha is just about ready to enter high school and I like that house that Paul has designed for sale up there in Lake Forest. I think we are going to sell our house in Beverly Hills and move up there," which they subsequently did. So they moved into this house. It was not for sale. And then I had agreed that I would do another house. Then we chose this location at Cherokee and Waveland to do a speculative house. Again I had a great deal of difficulty finding time to do this but I did. In the meantime, the house that I was designing for ourselves turned out to be Shangri La. It got bigger and more expensive and farther and farther away from completion. Irene was jumping up and down with frustration. Margaret was thirteen years old and so one Sunday we came up to have dinner with the Campbells, and Helen and Irene and the children disappeared and Marshall and I were reminiscing over his favorite drink which was an old- fashioned. The two women came back looking like Cheshire cats. They had decided that we could live in this house, or that Irene could live in this house which was up for sale and that I could design the other house on the larger lot in my leisure.

Blum: So this was the house. Then you did not design it for your own family?

McCurry: No. It would have been larger.

Blum: Was this southern exposure with windows a concept that you followed in the houses that you designed for this area?

McCurry: As much as possible. I haven't done many houses.

Blum: Well, the other one and this.

136 McCurry: I was glad to get out of this pressure cooker that I was in so we bought this house and the adjoining lot and held onto our other three lots. This was just a barren hunk of clay at that moment. There were no trees or anything. I got hold of Franz Lipp and together we created the gardens that you see now.

Blum: Thirty years later. Paul, there's one other topic that is not directly related to your architecture, but one that I know is important to you and important to us, and that is your membership in connection to the Cliff Dwellers. You joined the Cliff Dwellers in 1941?

McCurry: That's right.

Blum: And you were president in the early 1960s.

McCurry: Yes, 1960 and 1961, I think.

Blum: How did you decide to join in 1941?

McCurry: Irene and I were both working in the Department of Curriculum for the Chicago Board of Education. We were doing illustrations for the development of educational material. This brought downtown and this brought me in contact again with some of my old friends that I had difficulty seeing while I was teaching school. Principally Vale Faro, Nicolai, Hoffmeister, Earl Reed, and a number of other people that I had known while I had been a busy architect and had dreadfully missed in my tour of teaching. In 1941 the Cliff Dwellers were beginning to lose their original members and they were in need of newer members so one of my friends proposed me for membership.

Blum: Who was that?

McCurry: Leo Weissenborn. Leo was the representative of Hood in Chicago during the construction of the Tribune Tower and a longtime member of the Cliff

137 Dwellers. We had been friends for years. He was a friend of Travelletti, Lindsey Suter, and Earl Reed, of course.

Blum: So he proposed you? You applied and joined?

McCurry: I was accepted. So we both started to enjoy the Cliff Dwellers.

Blum: What are some of your recollections of your first few years there?

McCurry: What I think I liked most about the Cliff Dwellers is that from the very beginning of the club in the dining room along the window wall there have always been three tables that forced to their limit will seat eight people. And these were generally described in the club as the common tables in which various and sundry members of the club can always come up to the club and find luncheon companions. This is the most unique quality of the Cliff Dwellers, the fact that you can always .go up there and find someone to have lunch with and nine times out of ten they will prove to be interesting and exciting people to talk to. There is no other club I belong to at which you can do this. I would go further than this to say that there is no other club that is a club in Chicago. Most of them are luncheon establishments. This would be true of the Arts Club, University Club, perhaps to a lesser degree, the Tavern Club, which were made up mostly of Cliff Dweller members who had gotten tired of the restrictions of prohibition.

Blum: Is that why the Tavern Club was founded?

McCurry: That's not the only reason but it certainly was one of them. The fact that it was a superb location is another one. At that time the center of gravity was beginning to shift northward and it was done by John Holabird.

Blum: John Norton did the murals there. At the Tavern Club, did he not?

McCurry: Yes.

138 Blum: Did you know him?

McCurry: Edgar Miller also contributed very racy murals. Sam Marx was located in the building, and Holabird and Root, of course, took offices in the 333 Michigan building. So there were a lot of reasons why the Tavern Club began to flourish. But even so, the Tavern Club is not quite like the Cliff Dwellers in the sense it's a friendly club. I always like the mix of the people at the Cliff Dwellers. The charter requires three-fifths of the members to be from the field of the fine arts, which means architecture, art, music, literature, and two- fifths shall be lay members. When I use the word lay, this in the old- fashioned sense and they were supposed to lay, they were supposed to support the artistic members by giving them commissions.

Blum: You said that when you joined, the older members, were starting to ...

McCurry: There were still a lot of them around and they were absolutely delightful.

Blum: Who were some of them that you remember?

McCurry: Cliff Dwellers traditionally never paid much attention to a new member. You were perfectly welcome but you were simply accepted as a member and you made your own way. I was fortunate in having several friends who lunched there frequently. One of them being Vale Faro, and Al Bacci, and old Pierre Blouke was another one. There were a lot of people from the Art Institute that I knew from my time spent at the Art Institute. There was Earl Reed, of course.

Blum: How do you remember Pierre Blouke?

McCurry: Pierre Blouke was a competent architect and had done a great variety of things. He had been stationed in Washington during the Depression period and returned to Chicago, lived on the Near North Side and liked activity, gaiety. He was an interesting conversationalist. In the field of music

139 Frederick Stock used to come up frequently. The dean of the School of the Art Institute was Norman Rice. Rich was the curator of paintings.

Blum: Daniel Catton Rich?

McCurry: Daniel Catton Rich was a member.

Blum: How do you remember Daniel Catton Rich?

McCurry: As a very busy, interested person who came up to the club quite frequently, was always pleasant to talk to. Then the teachers at the school were Krehbiel, Philbrick, Emil Zettler, who taught me modeling and was an absolutely delightful sculptor, and Polasek.

Blum: They were all members?

McCurry: They were all members, yes. Polasek taught the club how to sing Zivio. He had a wonderful bass voice. When he got slightly inebriated along with Rudy Ingerle. There was a Czech and an Austrian, I guess, and a Hungarian in this group, too. And they all had great voices. All they needed were a couple of drinks and we were all singing Zivio.

Blum: At their insistence? Did you ever attend any of the Harvest Home dinners?

McCurry: Yes. And I soon, of course, met Ralph Fletcher Seymour, who was president at the time I joined the club. He seemed to be the ultimate Bohemian.

Blum: What was he like?

McCurry: An absolutely delightful man, wonderful storyteller, an etcher of considerable distinction, bookbinder. He had all four feet in the field of the arts.

Blum: Is there any one experience or any one event that stands out in your mind?

140 McCurry: With Ralph?

Blum: No, with regard to Ralph or just generally the Cliff Dwellers.

McCurry: There had been so many. One of them that I remember particularly involved the contest between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower for the presidency. One of my very good friends was John Averill, who was a distinguished commercial artist in the city, did all of these wonderful and lovely illustrations for the Cliff Dwellers. He had the habit of getting up about five o'clock in the morning and dashing out whatever work that he had to do and coming downtown and delivering the work and turning up at the Cliff Dwellers at about 11:30 ready for lunch because he had had very little breakfast. His wife wouldn't get up at that hour. And you could tell whether he'd had a good meeting with his clients or a bad meeting. He had been going through a soul searching situation in trying to decide who he would vote for. He could hardly bring himself to vote for a brass hat. He had equal difficulty in trying to convince himself to vote for an egghead. And the Cliff Dwellers never paid any attention to the requirements that the bar should be closed on election day. So everybody turned up on election day to talk about whatever election was going on and have a drink. So on this particular occasion this conversation had been going on for several days because John liked to agonize in public and he had been getting all kinds of advice. A group turned up at this particular table. There was John Averill and myself, and Vale Faro, Al Bacci, and pretty soon there were eight people. I think Fred Wise was part of this group. Everybody insisted on buying a drink, which is contrary to what usually happened. Everybody bought their own drinks and you drank as much or as little as you wanted. But on this occasion in our great interest to get John on the right track there was a considerable amount of drinking. Pretty soon the table became so loud and boisterous, instead of eight people there were about sixteen people around this table, all discussing the election. At about two o'clock when everybody started to depart, I noticed that some of my fellow Cliff Dwellers needed some assistance. So I took John downstairs, helped him climb into a taxicab and sent him off, came

141 back to see what else required attention and they had all gone. So I went back to the office and I couldn't find either Vale Faro or Al Bacci around. Pretty soon Olga Faro called me and said, "Where's Vale?" I said, "I don't know at the moment." She said, "He was going to meet me in such and such a place and I've been waiting here a half an hour. What's happened to him?" I said, "Hold your horses. Call me back in fifteen minutes. I'll look around." Then I started going ... We had four floors at that time in the Monroe building so there were lots of nooks and crannies, and he wasn't in his office, so I started looking around. Finally I started visiting the various and sundry toilets. I finally found him in one toilet, not feeling well at all. I dragged him out. Finally Al Bacci turned up and the two of us got Vale down and tucked into a cab and sent him off to meet Olga, his wife. I thought I better call up John's wife. So I called Marie up. I said, "Did John get to vote?" She said, "What the hell are you talking about. Get to vote? He's drunk as a pig and sound asleep." He never did get to vote. I realized I was unpopular in that house. This didn't happen frequently but this was so funny because John was so vehement in his opposition to the Roosevelts, for instance, and he was naturally a liberal but he didn't like eggheads and he couldn't stand the military. So he was in a real dilemma.

Blum: But all your good intentions, all you Cliff Dwellers with good intentions...

McCurry: Perfectly neutral which was typical of the Cliff Dwellers.

Blum: Did you find that your membership in the Cliff Dwellers benefited you in any way professionally?

McCurry: Only in the sense that I had a great deal of pleasure with the members that I knew. I enjoyed the musicians I knew. I enjoyed the concerts that they participated in. I enjoyed the parties at the Cliff Dwellers. It was always with spontaneity and enthusiasm, a good-natured conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed. I enjoyed the University Club for other reasons, and the Arts Club for other reasons, but none of them were quite like the Cliff Dwellers. This is a place for people that have the leisure, and it takes a little leisure to do this,

142 who liked to talk. If you don't like to talk you don't really belong there. And the conversations are far-ranging but basically they have to deal with the arts and the quality of the concert or whatever has happened, the play—a current play—that is in the Chicago area, or now television, the shows at the Art Institute or what's going on there. Of course, there’s always the political situation. We've had some politicians, like Carter Harrison was a member for many, many years.

Blum: Did you know him?

McCurry: Oh, yes.

Blum: What was he like?

McCurry: I knew him when he was well into his seventies. He was a very charming guy. I arrived at a time when a man by the name of Edgar Cameron, who was an old-time painter in Chicago, was chairman of the Art Committee. The Art Committee had charge of all the furnishings in the club. So not only did they have to keep persuading their members to supply objects of art that they could enjoy looking at, but they had to do with the furniture and the artifacts in the club. I think I had just become a member, and Cameron was chairman of the Art Committee and a great big box arrived from Africa and Carter Harrison and his boon companion, the sausage manufacturer, Oscar Mayer, had gone off to shoot animals in Africa. They either went up to Alaska or out West in the Rockies or Glacier up in British Columbia. This time they had gone to Africa. They sent this box back. They were forever, when they were hunting in the northwest, they were forever sending the toughest deer meat or moose meat that we ever had back. Our chef would cook it and it still tasted like shoe leather. Anyway, this was consigned to the Art Committee so Cameron got around to open this thing up and it turned out to be that gaur head hanging above our kitchen. He said I thought you might like to hang this up. Cameron was outraged. He called a meeting of the Art Committee and they discussed it pro and con, in not very complimentary terms. But on the day before Carter was supposed to come back they hung the damn thing

143 up. It's been there ever since. I think this so shook up the Art Committee that the next year my friend, Nicolai, became chairman of the Art Committee, which had a change in direction. He soon tired of that and then I became chairman of the Art Committee and it was a terrible job keeping good art on the walls there. This was when I had a chance to meet and talk to Carter Harrison. He had a very fine collection that has become a part of the Art Institute now. He was a purchaser of early twentieth century art. Childe Hassam, oh, these were first class painters. I think he had a Bellows, too. Anyway, he was kind enough to loan us a dozen pictures which made up a very interesting exhibit. It was delightful to meet Mrs. Harrison and visit their home. They had an apartment on, I think it was Lakeview or some place up there. The same thing happened with Paul Schultz. He was head of the Schultz Baking Company who had a very good collection of early twentieth century art. So that was an interesting experience. I was constantly desperate ...Most of our painters were not terribly good painters. They all had shown from time to time. We used to have a members' exhibit. And then I introduced architecture so we had an architectural exhibit. I met on one occasion, I was just scratching my head to see what I could do next, and I ran into Elizabeth Wells Robertson, who was director of art in the Chicago Public Schools. I had taught art enough to realize that you've got two hundred kids, you are going to have four or five that by accident are doing pretty damn interesting things, whether you had anything to do with it or not. I said, "Elizabeth, how would you like to have an exhibit of public school art at the Cliff Dwellers?" She said, "My God, I would love that, Paul. That's the most prestigious club I remember as a young woman and I would love to do that." She said, "I will send out the word." She sent a note to all the art teachers in the whole damn city. Send in two or three of your very best projects. I gave a big tea for all the art supervisors who had a picnic sorting out this work and hanging it up there. It was pretty damn good. Most of them were abstract shapes or they were fairly crude. They weren't polished works of art at all. But they were the impressions of children. Some of them are pretty profound. I came up the next day to lunch to see what was going on. There was a whole collection of artists up there, members of the club, who tackled me immediately and wanted to know who the hell this was. I said, "Don't you

144 like it? It's pretty interesting." I kidded them along for a while and they were persistent and I said, "This represents the art in the public schools of the city of Chicago." They were absolutely flabbergasted.

Blum: That must have been a surprise to them.

McCurry: It was a surprise, a real surprise.

Blum: Yes. Interesting. Paul, as you think back about your career as an architect, now that you are retired, how would you best like to be remembered by the architectural community?

McCurry: I would like to feel that I have had some effect upon public awareness of good and bad architecture. I am afraid this is a false hope. I would like to feel that the buildings that I have designed continue to serve people well. I can only say that I have enjoyed the practice of architecture. I haven't done it for any particular reasons of immortality. I thoroughly enjoyed what I've done. I've enjoyed my late blooming in doing a house for my son and my friends the Neuschels and now Michael Moore.

Blum: This oral history will be transcribed and, as you know, will be available to researchers in Ryerson Library. If a researcher is interested in more information about your career, your drawings, published material, of course, they could find, where would they go to find that?

McCurry: Hopefully, some place like the Ryerson might be interested in the various and sundry papers that I have written about the role of a professional architect in influencing public works, the way that aesthetic judgments could be made in terms of coming to a decision.

Blum: Do you have a file of papers like this?

McCurry: Yes.

145 Blum: It might be interesting to explore with them if Ryerson would like to have that on file.

McCurry: These are papers that have to do with education. I was active in trying to develop and promote the construction of a shoreline junior college, which lost by a very small margin and I think tragically, too. If we had had the courage to proceed with the development of a junior college in the North Shore communities, which might have been located halfway between Evanston and Lake Forest, preferably, in my judgment, on the North Western Railroad so the students could have access to it. Hopefully, being able to pry more train service out of the North Western on a local basis. I think this would have been a junior college that would have been one of the outstanding junior colleges or community colleges in all the country.

Blum: And what documentation do you have for this idea? Is it a paper, or what?

McCurry: Yes.

Blum: I see.

McCurry: I was chairman of a committee in Lake Forest. We came very close to a vote, except the city of Evanston would not go along and our damn educators here couldn't be sold on it. And, of course, we had the opposition—genteel opposition of Lake Forest College and Barat College and the Teachers College in Evanston, Northwestern University—from those who would not have welcomed a junior college.

Blum: So the paper dealing with this idea is one of several that you have in your files, which today is in your possession. Is that correct?

McCurry: That's right.

Blum: Are your drawings with Schmidt, Garden and Erikson?

146 McCurry: Most of the drawings... We made presentation drawings, perspectives, and things like that. I never really got much involved in that because it is a time- consuming task and other people, we always employed professionals to do this. Sometimes Vale Faro would undertake to do this, but most frequently we employed somebody to make a perspective.

Blum: I was thinking if someone from a researcher's point of view, if someone wanted more information about you.

McCurry: The working drawings allegedly have been given to the Burnham Library.

Blum: I see. And then there were also several drawings that you presented to the Burnham Library. Are there others that are in possession of your family?

McCurry: I have other student drawings and some competitions, which I eventually will give to my children.

Blum: So, between you, the Burnham Library, and Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, that would be the range of possibilities for a researcher?

McCurry: That's right. The drawings that I did for Tom Tallmadge would be in the Chicago Historical Society, I think.

Blum: Okay. Are there other places where one might go to find either information or drawings?

McCurry: I never did anything particularly significant in Rebori's office. I was never there long enough for D. H. Burnham other than the model that Art and I made for the fair, for Gibbs Hall.

Blum: Does that still exist?

147 McCurry: Oh, I don't know. I never thought to take a picture of it but I suppose there are pictures around. It was just a green clay model. It took a hell of a lot of work.

Blum: I think we've covered almost everything that I could think to ask. Is there something I've overlooked? Is there something you would like to add?

McCurry: I served on the Plan Commission in Lake Forest and was there for three years. I served on the Department of Public Works and I was chairman of the Mayor's Advisory Committee for a couple of years, too. So I have tried to make a contribution to Lake Forest. One of the interesting aspects of some of the controversies I got into was the widening of Greenbay Road. Greenbay Road is a state road, the city of Lake Forest was interested in acquiring state funds. The state wanted to make Greenbay Road twenty-eight feet wide, which is their definition of an adequate highway. The school boards, the fire department, were in favor of the state judgment. The people who lived on Greenbay Road got up and screamed at the top of their lungs about the sacrilege of chopping down wonderful trees along Greenbay Road. It was obvious that they didn't give a damn whether anything happened that would widen Greenbay Road. Our then-mayor, Michael Cudahy, was beside himself. It was necessary that we come to some conclusions and acquire some assistance from the state for the repaving of Greenbay Road and develop gutters or curbs, and I was on the Mayor's Advisory Committee so I had a chat with Mike. I said, "Mike, the parlance or political or municipal description of the development of Greenbay Road is legally described as an improvement." Mike lived on Greenbay Road. I said, "Your neighbors don't want this kind of improvement. The first suggestion I would make is for you to stop using the word improvement. They don't think it is an improvement. Let's talk about the beautification of Greenbay Road." I said, "It may be necessary to take a few trees out but you certainly should allocate a substantial sum of money to planting of trees along Greenbay Road. A good many of those old elms are gone and should be replaced so why don't you just make it twenty-two feet wide." It was about eighteen feet wide and I said, "The hell with the people that drive the school buses and the fire

148 department. Let them drive more slowly. I couldn't care less." We had already excluded trucks from Greenbay Road.

Blum: And what eventually happened?

McCurry: They did this then. It took a lot more agony but Michael stopped talking about the improvement of Greenbay Road and started talking about putting new gas lights in there, replacing the old trees, nice new curbs that they could see. And he reduced the requirement of the road from twenty-eight feet to twenty-four feet, or twenty-two feet it turned out.

Blum: Did that satisfy most of the residents?

McCurry: Well, it quieted the revolt.

Blum: Was it thought to be a reasonable compromise?

McCurry: The Greenbay Road north of Route 60 has always been well developed with elms. It looks like a cathedral of elms and that's why they are such wonderful trees. They just meet like a green arch. The south part of Greenbay Road was always kind of ratty when I first came out here. There weren't many people that lived here. Nobody cared.

Blum: It sounds like this skill at negotiating came from your years of experience as an architect.

McCurry: I suppose so, to some degree.

Blum: Well, Paul, I have enjoyed this very much.

McCurry: So have I.

Blum: Thank you very much.

149 SELECTED REFERENCES

"American Home." Daily News 1 May 1937. American Home. (January 1938):17-19. Gapp, Paul. "Crosstown Decisions—Community Service vis-à-vis Potential Expediency." Inland Architect 10, no. 1 (September 1966):11-13, 26. McCurry, Paul. "The Crosstown Expressway." Address delivered to the City Club (Chicago) on 7 February 1966. _____. "The Architect's Image and His Education." Address delivered to the Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 12 April 1966. "Veterans Administration Research Hospital." Architectural Record 109, no. 6 (June 1951):151- 157.

150 PAUL DURBIN McCURRY

Born: 1903, Chicago, Illinois, December 3 Died: 1991, July 11, Lake Forest

Education: Armour Institute of Technology, B.S. 1926 University of Chicago, M.Ed., 1934

Professional Experience: Tallmadge and Watson, 1926-1928 Rebori, Dewey, Wentworth and Smith, 1929-1930 Holabird and Root, 1930 Office of the Architect of the State of Illinois, Springfield, Illinois, 1931-1933 Teacher, Tilden High School, Chicago, Illinois 1933-1946 Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, 1946-1976 Private Practice, 1981-1983

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects 1968

Civic Service: Chairman, Architectural Licensing Committee, State of Illinois, Department of Registration and Education Chairman, Mayor's Architectural Advisory Committee, Lake Forest, Illinois President, Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1996 President, Cliff Dwellers Member Emeritus, American Institute of Architects, CC Institute, 1976 Member, Lake Forest Planning Commission Member, National Council Architectural Registration Board

151 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

333 Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois Campbell, Edmund 9, 71 138 Campbell, Helen (wife of Marshall) 135- 136 Anderson, Herbert (Andy) 25, 61, 92 Campbell, Marshall 135 American Institute of Architects 112-120 Carlu, Jacques 16, 23 Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France 18 Capitol Building, Springfield, Illinois 67- Arc de Triomphe, Rome, Italy 18 68 Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Carson, Pirie, Scott, Chicago, Illinois 33, 8, 11, 18 128 Art Institute of Chicago, Blackstone Hall, Casa Annalena, Florence, Italy 54 Chicago, Illinois 8 Century of Progress International Art Institute of Chicago, Burnham Exposition, 1933-1934, Common Brick Library, Chicago, Illinois 5, 8, 9, 19, 28 Manufacturers House, Chicago, Illinois Arts Club, Chicago, Illinois 83 74 Auditorium Building, Chicago, Illinois Century of Progress International 33, 128 Exposition, 1933-1934, Crystal House, Averill, John 141-142 Chicago, Illinois 74 Century of Progress International Babson, Henry (house), Riverside, Illinois Exposition, 1933-1934, House of 31 Tomorrow, Chicago, Illinois 74 Bacci, Alexander (Al) 22, 26, 29, 91, 92, Century of Progress International 109, 125, 139, 141, 142 Exposition, 1933-1934, Lumber House Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 75 Chicago, Illinois 74 Baths of Caracalla, Rome, Italy 21 Century of Progress International Bauhaus, (aka Institute of Design), Exposition, 1933-1934, Spanish Village, Chicago, Illinois 83-84 Chicago, Illinois 74 Bennett, Edward H. 36, 63, 126 Century of Progress International Bennett, Parsons and Frost 63 Exposition, 1933-1934, Streets of Paris, Bieg, Harry 15 Chicago, Illinois 72 Bloom Township High School, Chicago Chapin, Frances 71 Heights, Illinois 101 Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France 50 Blouke, Pierre 139 Chicago Architectural Sketch Club 23, 24, Board of Trade, Chicago, Illinois 33, 34 26, 29, 62 Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy 54 Chicago Stock Exchange, Chicago, Illinois Böhm, Dominikus 58 33 Bok Tower, Lake Wales, Florida 21 Childs and Smith 106 Bradley, Omar Nelson 96 Chin, Eugene 108 Brown, Arthur, Jr. 63 Church of Notre Dame, Raincy, France 59 Burnham, Daniel Hudson 126 Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, Illinois 27, Burnham, D.H., and Company 12, 63 28, 30, 85, 137-144 Burnham, Daniel H., Jr. 63-65 Conners, George 24 Burnham, Hubert 63-65 Corbett, Harvey W. 63 Byrne, Jane 117 Cram, Ralph Adams 38 Cret, Paul Philippe 15 Cameron, Edgar Spier 143 Crosstown Expressway (project), Chicago, Campanile, Florence, Italy 21 Illinois 115-116

152 Crow Island School, Winnetka, Illinois Haffner, Jean Jacques 15 102 Halimah, John 44 Curtiss-Reynolds Airport, (Glenview Hall, Eric 66 Naval Air Station), Glenview, Illinois Hall, Gilbert P. (Gibbs) 24, 33, 72, 147 25, 60 Hammett, Ralph 66 Hammond, C. Herrick 67 Daley, Richard J. 116 Harrison, Carter H. 143-144 Deam, Arthur 34, 64, 65, 66, 71, 147 Harrold, Henry 107 Decatur Memorial Arch, Decatur, Illinois Hazelhuhn, Robert (Bob) 91 17-18 Hedrich-Blessing Photographers 111 d'Espouy, Hector 16, 20 Hoffmeister, Theodore (Ted) 54, 137 Detcher, Mr. 91 Holabird, John A. 63, 85, 138 Detrich, Mr. 67 Holabird and Roche 126 Dewey, John 61 Holabird and Root 33, 61, 63, 66, 138 Dittman, Gerald 91 Holsman, Henry K. 74 Dudok, Willem Marinus 46, 47 Hoover Dam, Kingman, Arizona 19 Hornbostel, Caleb 15 Edwards, Arthur 87 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan 36 Eiffel Tour, Paris, France 21 Erikson, Carl 89-93, 101, 109, 110, 127 Jacobs, Arthur 5-6 Erikson, Carl, Jr. (son of Carl) 92 Johnson, Herbert F. (house, aka Wingspread), Wind Point, Wisconsin 44 Fairbairn, Peter 92 Johnson, S.C., and Co., Administration Farnese Palace, Rome, Italy 8 Building, Racine, Wisconsin 44 Faro, R. Vale 15, 27, 36, 89, 90, 137, 139, 141, 142, 146 Keck, George Fred 74 Flax, Ruth 108 Kepes, Gyorgy 83 Flint, Noel 16, 23 Kimball, William W. (house), Chicago, Fuchs, Frank 7, 29 Illinois 26 Fursman, Frederick 70 Klauder, Charles Z. 21 Krehbiel, Albert 8, 69, 140 Ganster and Henninghausen 106 Garbe, Raymond 92 Lane Technical High School, Chicago, Garden, Hugh M.G. 74, 90, 91 Illinois 3, 4, 66 Gare St. Lazare, Paris, France 45, 49 LaSalle-Walker Building, Chicago, Illinois Garrick Theater, Chicago, Illinois 33 60, 61 Glessner, John H. (house), Chicago, Lautz, William H. 10 Illinois 26 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jenneret Goodhue, Bertram Grosvenor 38 23, 49-50, 59, 83 Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois 27, Letarouilly, Paul M. 20 37 Lichtmann, Samuel (Sam) 114 Graceland Cemetery, Getty Tomb, Lipp, Franz 112, 136 Chicago, Illinois 37 Loebl, Jerrold 85 Graham, Anderson, Probst and White 33, 67, 126 McCaughey, William F. 8, 9, 10 Grand Central Terminal, New York, New McCormick, Leander 61 York 21 McCormick, Robert R. 73 Gropius, Walter 83 McCormick Place (first), Chicago, Illinois Grunsfeld, Ernest Alton, Jr. 74 73, 114-115

153 McCurry, Irene Tippler (wife of Paul) 72, Rebori, Andrew 24-26, 36, 60-63, 72, 74, 81, 89, 128, 135-137 126, 147 McCurry, Margaret (daughter of Paul) Rebori, Dewey, Wentworth, McCormick 128, 129, 131 61 McKim, Mead, and White 21 Reed, Earl Howell, Jr. 70, 137, 139 Marion College, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin Reynolds, Harold 27, 36 106, 108 Rice, Norman 139 Marrilac High School, Winnetka, Illinois Rich, Daniel Catton 139-140 104, 105 Rich, Ted 38, 39, 42, 43, 47 Mayer, Charles 91 Richards, John N. 55 Mayer, Oscar 143 Robard, George 63, 64 Marx, Samuel 7, 16, 138 Robertson, Elizabeth Wells 144 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 84-89 Roche, Martin 126 Miller, Edgar 138 Root, John Wellborn 16, 17, 72, 126 Millman, Ralph 106 Mitchell, Sally Garden 108 Saarinen, Eliel 85, 102 Moholy-Nagy, László 83, 84 St. George's Hall, Liverpool, England 40 Monadnock Building, Chicago, Illinois Salem Village Reconstruction, Salem, 17, 33 Illinois 68 Monroe Building, Chicago, Illinois 142 Saunders, Walter 56 Schmidt, Garden and Erikson 7, 89, 90 Nedved, Rudolph (Rudy) 24 Schmidt, Richard E. 89-91, 127 Nelson, Donald (Don) 23 Schonne, Charles 7 Nervi, Pier Luigi 119 Schultz, Paul 144 Nicolai, A. Erwin 36, 137, 143 Scott, Giles Gilbert 40 Norton, John Warner 69, 70, 71, 138 Sears, Joseph, School, Kenilworth, Illinois Norton, Madge 70 104 Senescall, Lionel 27 O'Connor, William 24 Seymour, Ralph Fletcher 140 Ogilvie, Richard 120 Shaw, Alfred (Al) 71, 127 Oud, J.J.P. 46 Skidmore, Louis 66 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 66, 127 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill 109, 116 Skinner School, Chicago, Illinois 103, 104 Palmer House, Chicago, Illinois 33, 83 Smith, William Jones 24 Pantheon, Rome, Italy 18 Steele, Claude 27, 36 Pennsylvania Station, New York City, Stock, Frederick 139 New York 21 Stoclet, Adolphe (house, aka Palais Perkins and Will 102, 106 Stoclet), Brussels, Belgium 48 Perkins, Chatten and Hammond 67 Storrs, John Henry 34 Perkins, Dwight Heald 103 Sullivan, Louis H. 26-29, 30, 31, 33, 127, Perkins, Lawrence Heald (Larry) 127 128 Perola, Lou 26 Suter, W. Lindsey 11, 12, 36, 137 Perret, Auguste 59 Sward Elementary School, Oak Lawn, Perret, Gustave 59 Illinois 101 Philbrick, Allen E. 140 Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy 54 Tallmadge, Thomas Eddy 11, 12, 23, 29, Polasek, Albin 140 30, 36-38, 60, 67, 69-71, 147 Tavern Club, Chicago, Illinois 138-139 Rand, Sally 72 Tessing, Arvid 92 Rasmussen, Steen 87 Tour de Bourges, Bourges, France 21

154 Traveletti, René 137 Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois 9-10, 137

Valentine, Curt 5 Van Risen, Joe 107 Veterans Administration Hospital, Chicago, Illinois 93-98 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzio 19 Viscerello, Vincent 7, 22 Voita, Eugene 27

Walker, Daniel 116 Walker, Ralph T. 10, 63 Watson, Vernon 12 Weissenborn, Leo 137 Wentworth, Albert 61 White, Stanford 37 Will, Philip, Jr. (Phil) 127 Wise, Frederick (Fred) 141 Woltersdorf, Arthur 85 World's Fair, 1967 Montreal, Canada 76 World's Fair, 1986, Vancouver, Canada 76 Wright, Frank Lloyd 27, 30, 36, 44, 85, 127, 128

Zettler, Emil 140

155