ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN MACSAI

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 © 2003 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 CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics v

Oral History 1

Selected References 195

Appendix: Curriculum Vitæ 197

Index of Names and Buildings 198

iii PREFACE

John Macsai’s youthful ambition was to become a graphic artist. He says, "I always drew. I really wanted to be a graphic artist. I adored graphic arts…I never really dreamt of wanting to be an architect. Architecture came through the back door. But once I entered architecture, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because, in a sense, it is graphic design." Although architecture was his second choice for a career, Macsai now looks back at his fifty-year tripartite career in architecture in which he designed and built some award-winning buildings; held a full professorship at the University of Illinois Chicago teaching architecture; and was the author of books and numerous articles on various aspects of architecture. Now retired, he paints and exhibits his paintings, and participates in archaeological digs.

To document Macsai’s interesting story of people and events, we met in his home in Evanston for sessions on June 18, 19, 20, and 24, 2002, where we tape-recorded almost nine hours of his recollections on 6 ninety-minute cassettes. The transcription has been minimally edited to maintain the spirit, tone and flow of Macsai’s original narrative. It has been reviewed for clarity and accuracy by both John and me. Books and articles written by Macsai and by others about his work, that I found helpful in preparation of this interview are appended to this document. This oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in a downloadable version from the Chicago Architects Oral History Project web page, www.artic.edu/aic

Thanks go to many people in the preparation and completion of this document. First, my sincere appreciation to John Macsai for his willingness to share his memories of people, issues and events with candor and thoughtfulness. To Denise Rohlfs, our transcriber, we are grateful for her great care in transposing our tapes into type, and to my colleague, Annemarie van Roessel for her skillful preparation of this document for print and electronic publication and the discerning judgement she brings to this process. Last, but not least, we owe a special acknowledgement of gratitude to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for their interest and support in funding this oral history.

Betty J. Blum January, 2003

iv OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Family Background and Growing up in Budapest 1 In Occupied Hungary During World War II 6 Returning to School After the War 9 An Opportunity to Study Architecture in the United States 13 Working at Holabird & Root 19 Working at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 20 Miesian System and Its Influence 21 Observations About American Ways 24 More About Holabird & Root 29 Working at PACE Associates 33 More About Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 35 About Stanley Tigerman 47 Comparing Holabird & Root with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 49 More About PACE Associates 51 At Hyland Builders 53 Raymond Loewy Associates 57 About Organizing Partnerships 58 More About Raymond Loewy Associates 61 Informal Association with Robert Diamant 67 Partnerships: Hausner, Stuermer & Macsai / Hausner & Macsai 71 First Job, 1150 Lake Shore Drive 71 More Highrise Apartment Buildings 76 About Litigation 77 More High-Rises 81 University of Chicago Commissions 86 Stories About Jobs and Colleagues 88 Partners: John Macsai and Wendell Campbell 96 Chicago Politics and Architecture 99 Teaching and Writing 102 Dealing with Unions 106 Opinion of Chicago Seven Activities 109 More About Teaching at University of Illinois Chicago 114

v Writings 134 Elderly Housing 147 Work at Lincoln Park Zoo 156 At O'Donnell, Wicklund, Pigozzi & Peterson 158 The True Story of Presidential Towers 164 Aspects of Housing in Chicago 167 Teaching in Rome, Italy 169 American Institute of Architects and Licensing 171 Ideas About How to Integrate a Neighborhood 175 Clubs 178 Awards 179 Opinions and Observations 180 On an Archaeology Dig 181 Painting 185 Evaluation 190

vi John Macsai

Blum: Today is June 18, 2002, and I am with John Macsai in his home in Evanston. We’re here to tape record John’s memories of his fifty-year career in architecture. John has designed and built housing of various types. He has taught for twenty-six years at the University of Illinois, Chicago. And he’s written several important books, published many articles. And since his retirement in 1999 he has devoted himself to painting, archeological digs, and probably other things that I don’t know about.

Macsai: Writing nasty articles about developers in Evanston. I’m always available for a good fight.

Blum: To learn how you managed to weave all these diverse threads into one whole, may we begin where it all began? You were born on May 20th, 1926, in Budapest.

Macsai: Right.

Blum: You just had a birthday.

Macsai: Last day of the sign of Taurus. I don’t believe in that, but…

Blum: In Budapest. You were born John Lusztig?

Macsai: Lusztig. L-U-S-Z-T-I-G. Pronounced Loo-stig.

Blum: Why was your name changed?

1 Macsai: Two reasons. Number one, I did not like to have a German name after my experience in a German concentration camp. Number two, there was, when I entered the Polytechnical University in Hungary, there was still strong anti- Semitism there, especially among the professors, the old-time professors who hung around.

Blum: The years you were at the Polytechnic were 1945 to 1947? Right after the war.

Macsai: Exactly. And they were not allowed to ask your religion, according to the new government laws. But if you had a German name—particular German name—they could tell whether you are Jewish or not. Lusztig, in Hungary, was a typical Jewish name. So I didn’t want to be judged on that basis, but on my merits, so I changed my name. Now, why Macsai? There is a town in Transylvania, where my family is from, M-A-C-S-A. And the "i," in Hungarian, means somebody from that town. And also, my cousin changed his name.

Blum: To Macsai?

Macsai: Also to Macsai, right. And he’s a renowned painter in Hungary. And the only person who made the name famous is my cousin’s son, Paul Macsai, who is right now probably the best-known actor in Hungary. A very serious, important, good actor.

Blum: So you really changed your name, say in 1945, 1946.

Macsai: 1945. No, 1946.

Blum: Was it officially changed?

Macsai: Officially, yes, I applied. Little did I know that in this country it didn’t mean anything. It made it very difficult to spell. But at least people remembered, because it was difficult to spell. Also, they had a wonderfully talented

2 designer here, Alvin Lustig. Remember? The designer of jewelry and graphics. He was popular in the fifties.

Blum: Well, taking a step back before your name change—how did you come to architecture?

Macsai: Well, it’s quite an interesting route. I always drew. I was drawing when I was three years old on the whitewashed wall of my grandmother’s house. I had very indulgent parents, in that respect. They let me draw anywhere I wanted. And I really wanted to be a graphic artist. I adored graphic arts.

Blum: For newspapers or posters?

Macsai: Well, posters, book jackets, this kind of thing. And when I was around fifteen, we didn’t know when the war was going to be over, but it was obvious that when I graduate from high school, it was not likely that the war would be over yet, and because of the restrictions on Jews, that I would not be able to enter the university. So I started to go, parallel with high school, to a graphic arts school in the evening, which was run, in Hungary, by the organization ORT [Organization for Educational Resources and Technological Training]. It was an ORT project for Jews who wanted to retrain. I didn’t need to be retrained, I needed to be trained. So I had two years of graphic arts. When the war was over, and there were no more restrictions on Jews, I was able to enter the university. I was seriously thinking of going to art school then. Well, I had an uncle who says, "What kind of nonsense is this for a nice middle-class Jewish boy to be a starving artist? Do something where you have a diploma, where you can get a well- paying job, a regular income," you know. Little did I know that architecture did not necessarily bring a regular income. Anyhow, it appealed to me. It combined art and a practical thing. So I came to architecture in kind of a tortuous route. I never really dreamt of wanting to be an architect.

Blum: Well, even wanting to be a graphic artist, where did that desire come from? Was your father or mother in the arts?

3 Macsai: Now, it’s interesting because my cousin, you know, being a painter, it has some genetic… And I have four kids. Two of my kids are in the visual arts. So there is this sickness which carries on through generations.

Blum: So do you think it was through your cousin that you had your first early exposure?

Macsai: Could be. No, on second thought, it really wasn’t my cousin; it was more like my mother. My mother, as a young girl, painted. I used to see her paintings. But who knows where it started? I enjoyed going to the museum, I enjoyed looking at pictures, and being able to draw. You know, people who can draw are somewhat unique, because most other people can’t. And so it got attention. And a kid does anything to get attention, right?

Blum: But did it also have approval, attention from your mother, your father?

Macsai: Oh, sure. Oh, absolutely.

Blum: And your grandmother?

Macsai: Oh, absolutely. Everybody, they saved my drawings. They were pinned up and all that thing. So I enjoyed doing that. It was an approval-seeking thing. But architecture came through the back door, you know. But once I entered architecture, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because architecture, in a sense, is graphic design. The façade of the building… Sure, I fully agree that the building has to stand up, has to function well, has to be economical, all that. But ultimately, as Ada Louise Huxtable says, it has to be beautiful. And by and large, most buildings are judged from [the] exterior view. You know, I used to tell my students, "People will drive by your building and make a judgment of you by looking at the building, maybe never entering. They don’t know that you did a good job on cost. And you are not able to put out a sign that says "Dear onlooker, this building looks screwed up because of the following reasons…" There’s no second chance. They will look at it. And

4 ultimately, it’s a graphic design of the solids and voids and the projections and the shadows and whatever is emphasized on the building. It ultimately appears on your retina, you know, as a flat thing, and a judgment is made. So graphic design was, in a way, very helpful in studying elevations. It was not very helpful in being able to build well-functioning buildings within a budget, et cetera. But that you pick up later.

Blum: So this was really a way to sort of recycle your interest in graphic arts, and more.

Macsai: Also, the ability to draw was very helpful in many other respects. [It] allowed me to go on my own. Because when I was working for Skidmore, and PACE, and Dunbar Builders, during all this time, I was doing renderings for other architects, making a good deal of money.

Blum: Do you mean you were moonlighting?

Macsai: I was moonlighting, exactly. In evenings and weekends, I doubled my income. You know, that was meaningful, to get paid twice. So when I was able, in 1955, I went on my own, I had some savings to fall back on, which I never would have had from the salary SOM paid me. I did renderings for Epstein, Bud Goldberg, C.F. Murphy. I did renderings all over. Even for SOM. That’s an interesting story.

Blum: Before we get to that story, may we just fill in a few more of the gaps early on.

Macsai: Okay.

Blum: What was your instruction like in the art school? Was it called the Atelier?

Macsai: Atelier Art School, exactly. Instruction was really, basically, two levels. One was drawing from nature.

5 Blum: Was it landscape, or was it drawing from models?

Macsai: Live models. And I remember my high school friends were so envious because at age fifteen, I drew nude models. I used to bring in the drawings to show to them. Okay. We also had, parallel with life drawing instruction, we had theory and, really, studio of poster design, packaging design, book illustration…

Blum: Was this an art school dedicated to training graphic artists?

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: Ah, I see, I see. So you went beyond just the drawing stage.

Macsai: Yes, yes. Yes, but I never finished. It was a three-year course. I finished two years, and then I dropped, because I needed to study for my finals at the high school. European high school finals are grueling exams. And then came the German occupation, so everything was suspended. Life got suspended.

Blum: So when you graduated high school in 1944—it is called Gymnasium—you already had two years of Atelier Art School.

Macsai: Exactly.

Blum: So what then? In 1944…

Macsai: In 1944, the Germans came in, occupied Hungary. And what happened to Jews in Germany and other countries—in Germany took six years, or more like ten years—happened in Hungary, but it took one month. It was like a speeded-up film, because the Germans came in March, and by June, we went through all the restrictions: wearing yellow stars, losing bank accounts, having to turn in your radio, your jewelry, not having a telephone, moving into a so-called Jewish apartment building. Men of military age were called in to labor service. And that was in Budapest. In the countryside, the people

6 were deported to Auschwitz. So I was taken into labor service, and I was there till I was liberated in 1945.

Blum: So from the time you graduated in 1944 until 1945, when you were liberated, you were in labor service?

Macsai: Yeah, a year in a labor camp.

Blum: What kind of work did you do?

Macsai: We built runways of airfields, cleared forests, and we starved and were being shot at. And finished it through a kind of death march through Austria, till I was liberated by the American Army. Anyhow, it was no vacation.

Blum: During that time were there any opportunities to further your interest in graphic design?

Macsai: Not really.

Blum: Or architecture?

Macsai: No. At that time, I was not sure that I would choose architecture. The decision was made after I was liberated. And I had no problem going along with my uncle’s decision, you know, who said that.

Blum: Oh. Not to be a starving artist. But it was okay to be a starving architect.

Macsai: Starving architect, right.

Blum: So you came out of the war. Do I understand correctly that Bob Diamant was in the concentration camp, or labor camp with you?

Macsai: Labor camp, yes. I didn’t know him when he was in the camp. He happened to be in a similar camp nearby, okay. But we didn’t know each other. I met

7 him at the university in Budapest, the Polytechnic University. That’s where.

Blum: So when you came out, you were ready to resume your studies?

Macsai: Absolutely.

Blum: Forgive me, I’m not too informed about what happened to Budapest during the war.

Macsai: Well, Budapest was heavily bombed. Heavily bombed. However, the Jewish population was, by and large, saved because they first deported the people from the countryside. So by the time they got to Budapest, the pressure from the neutral countries and the United States and the Vatican was so strong they stopped deportations. But then toward the end of the war, when Governor Horthy’s regime fell in Hungary the most vicious Nazis took over. The deportations were about to start again, but there was no place to deport people anymore. You know, the Russians were moving west; Poland was all occupied by Russia. So instead of deporting them, they just started to do mass executions and killing people in Budapest. Fortunately, the Russians came in before they could finish off the whole population.

Blum: So this was towards the very end of the war in Europe.

Macsai: Very end, January. Exactly. December, January, February, 1945.

Blum: Did your family survive?

Macsai: My mother was hiding; she survived. My father was killed. And I survived.

Blum: You were an only child.

Macsai: I was an only child, right. To my great regret. I always wanted to have, if nothing else, a sister. But, you know, nobody asked me.

8 Blum: So when you came out of the labor camp, you went back to school at the Polytechnic University of Budapest. What did you study?

Macsai: Architecture. Engineering actually, because in the Hungarian system, architecture was not part of an art school, but it was part of the engineering school, which I think made a lot of sense.

Blum: What was your curriculum there?

Macsai: I went there for two years. The curriculum was strenuous. In many respects, it was far better than American curriculum.

Blum: Was it more Beaux-Arts geared?

Macsai: No, no, it was not Beaux-Arts at all. It was heavily engineering. I mean, it was really an incredibly rigorous curriculum. After the war we had a huge class, because all the people who couldn’t afford university, people who were in the army, Jews who were not allowed, now they all could go to school. My class started with over three hundred in my class. Next, second year, we were down to a hundred-fifty.

Blum: Why, because they couldn’t make the cut?

Macsai: Exactly. Third year, it was eighty. And in my class, only fifty graduated in time. So it was a selection process, rigorous selection process. And I hardly remember a weekend where I wasn’t working, drawing.

Blum: Working on your homework?

Macsai: Exactly. And we had strenuous engineering training, structural engineering training, very, very strong drawing training. I mean, graphic presentation was an absolute must for an architect. And we had also immensely good and rigorous history training. So when, in postmodernism, you know, in the eighties, suddenly history became fashionable in American architecture, I felt

9 very much at home when we were teaching and started to have kind of make-up history courses for our students at UIC. So my training was exceedingly good. We had, really, four prongs. There was the technical training, you know, the engineering technical training; there was the drawing and graphic presentation; there was the history training; and there was the design. We had a schizoid faculty. Thank God. All my, and this was luck, all my design professors were predominantly Bauhaus-trained and very modern architects. My history professors were Beaux-Arts and Classicists. So I had the best of both worlds.

Blum: Were you personally aware of the Bauhaus?

Macsai: Oh, sure. Oh, sure.

Blum: How did you become aware?

Macsai: Everybody was—it was in the air. The instruction was so good that, in a way, when I came to this country and went to Miami University in Ohio, I was horror-stricken, how bad architecture instruction was here.

Blum: You were saying that you were aware of the Bauhaus. Did this come through school or did you read journals?

Macsai: First of all, if you went to high school and you were interested in the arts, you read books, you read magazines—European high school was a much better training than American high school. We had an art history course in high school and it was required. It was a one-year survey. But during that time, you know, you became aware of what’s happening in the art world. So the Bauhaus was not new to me. In fact, what was a shock to me was when I came here that Miami of Ohio at that time was under the Beaux-Arts system. I had classmates at Ohio who never heard the name Le Corbusier. I felt, I mean, "Podunk," in the middle of this cornfield. And it’s a double lie; it’s not Miami, Florida, and it’s not Oxford, England.

10 Blum: Did you speak English, did you read English?

Macsai: Minimum. Read? No. I didn’t read, and spoke hardly any. I learned here. But it was a tough job.

Blum: Was the same type of literature about what was current in architecture available in Hungary as it was in the States?

Macsai: American architectural journals weren’t easily available in Hungary. But we had French architecture journals, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and occasionally German, and occasionally British. But it wasn’t easy. Most of us didn’t have the money to subscribe, but in the library, you could get it. And as soon as we got hold of a magazine and saw a new building that occurred in somebody’s design, everybody copied, you know? Later, I remember when I was teaching, I was so irritated by students being influenced by the latest architecture magazine, I was ready to bar any architecture magazine from my classes.

Blum: Were you drawing on your own recollection?

Macsai: Right.

Blum: You made the statement—let me just read it—when you were asked, in University of Budapest, that the students were not only taught how to reconstruct historic buildings, but were also required to measure and document the peasant architecture of the villages.

Macsai: Not everybody, not every class, but third year, I think, in history, there was this documentation. I wasn’t there anymore, but it was part of the curriculum. I never did that. What we did, we had to document some Romanesque buildings, Gothic buildings. But folk architecture was not part of the second-year curriculum, which I finished. That was later, I think in the fourth year.

11 Blum: When you were in Hungary, were you aware of Mies, and the Bauhaus? But did you know the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Chicago School?

Macsai: I was more aware of Frank Lloyd Wright than I was aware of Mies.

Blum: Why is that?

Macsai: Well, I knew about the Barcelona Pavilion, but that’s all I knew, you know. I mean, Mies was not well known. He really became very well known once he came to IIT although he did some fantastically great work before. Frank Lloyd Wright was well known to us. The Chicago School, I never heard about it, so… All that became obvious to me through the book by Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, which was one of textbooks we had at Miami of Ohio.

Blum: Was it a textbook that you had in Hungary?

Macsai: Hungary? No, I didn’t even know it existed. No, but Giedion’s book was the textbook at Miami of Ohio. And I remember a Penguin paperback—I still have it—by Richards. It was called Introduction to Modern Architecture. That was the first book I tried to read when I came to this country. It was miserably difficult. I had to use a dictionary with it. I read maybe a page and a half in an evening. And, you know, not knowing the language, it was hard.

Blum: You knew the content, but you didn’t know it in English.

Macsai: Yeah, but then pretty soon you pick up the language, you know, especially when you are thrown into a situation. First of all, you’re young. If you have some talent for language… I don’t say it was easy, but by the time I finished two-and-a-half years at Miami, I was fluent enough to tell jokes. Though actually, I learned how to tell jokes much earlier.

Blum: In English?

12 Macsai: In English, yes.

Blum: Oh, with gestures and facial expressions?

Macsai: Enough to convey meaning.

Blum: In Budapest, was the teaching through drawings exclusively? Or did you do models, collages?

Macsai: Most of it was drawings. In two years, I never built a model. Models were not very heavily pushed. But drawing was. And if you were good at it, like I was, you could take advantage of not working as hard. What happened is that you could knock the socks off faculty by beautiful drawings, instead of necessarily first-rate design. You could disguise some of your less than great abilities by being able to present it so beautifully, you know? And by the way, that was one of my shortcomings through my whole career. I could draw so well, architectural elevations and drawings, that I could forget design. I could not only mislead the onlooker, but I could bullshit myself. And that’s terrible. Okay? So to draw too well is not a blessing.

Blum: It was a gift and a burden.

Macsai: Exactly. It has a double value.

Blum: But you were so accomplished.

Macsai: In drawing, not in architecture.

Blum: You had history of art, you had engineering, you had Beaux-Arts training, why, after two years, did you decide to leave the University of Budapest?

Macsai: Well, it was an opportunity that was handed to me. I had no idea, intention of leaving Hungary at all. I was sitting at home under two blankets and down comforters, because we had no heat—this was in the winter of

13 1946—and I don’t know what I was reading, when a friend of mine dropped in. He says, "How would you like to go to the United States?" And I said, "You’re full of hot air." And it was Bob Diamant. So he says, "You know, there is a possibility the Hillel Foundation, American Hillel, is giving out scholarships to Jewish students in Europe to continue their study in the States. You can apply." So I said, "What will it cost to apply?" "Nothing." So I filled in an application. Well, I had good grades at the university. I had almost—not all A’s—there is no such thing at the University of Budapest that you have all A's, because if you were good in history and design and drawing, you were not as good in engineering, you know. But I was good enough to make the list. And also, Bob Diamant, myself, and two other students won first prize in the War Memorial competition in Budapest. The Jewish community advertised for a war memorial.

Blum: For Jews who were lost during the war?

Macsai: Exactly. But it wasn’t built, because it was thought not practical enough, which it was not. It was not a monument that went up; it was a slit going down about twenty-five feet underground, and then it went up. And all the names were on the walls. We were kind of ahead of our time, because it was very similar to the Vietnam War Memorial, in a sense.

Blum: That, and the fact that it went below grade, like the one in Paris on the Cite.

Macsai: In Paris, exactly, on the Isle. So we won the competition, and it helped me get on the Hillel list. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to come. First of all, being a Socialist, American capitalism didn’t appeal to me much. Number two, I didn’t like the questionnaires I got from the universities, you know?

Blum: What was the problem?

Macsai: Well, I knew they had to ask my religion, in case I die, should they call a priest or not. But the race didn’t sit well with me.

14 Blum: Race?

Macsai: Yes. Especially since a couple of the universities, my answer to the race wouldn’t have been Caucasian or white. I had to select from the list they supplied. I would qualify under Hebraic, which I was incensed about. In fact, I reported it to the B’nai Brith and Hillel. And they said, "The State Department still has this anti-Semitic attitude and we are working hard to change it." And it was changed within a year or two. Nonetheless… So I wasn’t eager to come here. What made me eager is that the Communists started taking over in Hungary; the handwriting was on the wall. My family was heavily Social Democrat. My aunt was working as the secretary to one of the cabinet ministers. Later, she was jailed by the Communists. To cut a long story short, in about six months the situation politically changed enough that the United States seemed very attractive.

Blum: Did you know when you were filling out the forms that you were applying for Miami University?

Macsai: No, I didn’t know what university. Then they sent me an application from the University of California, Berkeley. And like an idiot, I refused to fill it out, because I was qualifying under Hebraic, and I didn’t want to go to this fascist… Not knowing anything about the States, this was meaningless. The head of the architecture department was a Jew, Erich Mendelsohn. I could have gone there.

Blum: It was a unique opportunity.

Macsai: But I turned it down, like an idiot, not knowing. By the time I decided that I want to come to the U.S., it was too late for Berkeley. So the only state university—because that’s the only thing the B’nai Brith, Hillel could afford, which was available, had a space in the school of architecture—was Miami University of Ohio. It wasn’t a great university, but it was a nice campus.

Blum: Was that called Miami of Ohio, or was it the University of Miami?

15 Macsai: Miami University—not University of Miami—Miami University, Oxford Ohio. People generally mistake it with Florida.

Blum: So you decided that you would take advantage of the offer.

Macsai: Yes, but I had no intention of staying here. I figured I’ll finish my studies and I’ll go back to Hungary. My mother was there and my friends and everything. But in the meantime, the political situation totally changed. The Communists did take over. The letters I received told me that the situation is really horrible; I should be happy in the U.S. So I declared myself stateless, and under the Displaced Persons Bill, eventually I became a citizen. A very complicated story that has nothing to do with architecture. I became a citizen in 1954.

Blum: When you came here, were you with Bob Diamant?

Macsai: Yes. Four of us came together from Hungary: a structural engineer by the name of George Kennedy, Bob Diamant, and another guy. Actually, there were two others that we met in Paris. One of them is a U.S. Congressman, Congressman Tom Lantos, from California.

Blum: Where did you disembark?

Macsai: New York. I disembarked in New York, spent a couple nights with a lovely family, who, through B’nai Brith, volunteered to take this greenhorn. And I stayed with them for about two or three days, and then I got on the train and landed in the cornfields at Oxford, Ohio. I was horror-stricken. This is a university? This is rural, you know.

Blum: When you saw New York, what was the impression it made on you?

Macsai: New York was great. I adored New York. And I somehow felt at home because I lived in Budapest, somewhat of a metropolis. I figured I’m going to

16 an urban university, you know? But when I arrived in Oxford, Ohio… The railroad station was in the midst of cornfields. And I arrive at the university, and all the buildings are two, mostly three stories, red brick Colonial architecture, which I considered totally alien. And it was an alien world.

Blum: How did you reconcile New York and Oxford, Ohio?

Macsai: Wasn’t easy. Well, Oxford, Ohio, you know… I think I disliked Colonial architecture and this rural ambiance so much that I was seeking out all the architecture magazines which dealt with modern work, you know? Bauhaus, Mies, whatever. That’s when I met Giedion’s book. Interestingly, eventually, how one changes—I was asked to give a lecture at Miami about five years ago. And I went back and I realized how beautiful the campus is.

Blum: You saw it with different eyes.

Macsai: Different eyes. I got accustomed to, I would say, phony Colonial, because very few buildings are really good Colonial. Most of them are imitation, you know, later, twentieth century. And while I still don’t love imitation Colonial, I can see that in that ambiance, to continue what was already there was not a totally wrong move. When I got there as a student, I thought, these people are idiots, they are intellectual prostitutes. I mean, how can you do this in the twentieth century, build these phony red brick buildings? Well, one changes.

Blum: So your impression of the United States was a combination of New York, which you say you liked…

Macsai: Yeah, but by and large, it was very difficult. I mean, it took a good deal of time to get accustomed to food, to language, customs. On the other hand, I had some wonderful experiences. You know, the first evening, we went out for beer with some of the students. And our structures professor met us at the restaurant. He came over and he sat on the edge of our table, there was no seat. My structures professor at the university of Budapest was like a god. I didn’t dare to talk to him. Here is this guy having a beer with us! The next

17 day, I had to meet the dean. I went to the dean’s office, and the dean got up and helped me take my coat off. The dean is helping my coat off? I mean, the dean was truly a god in Hungary, never talked to you. You went through the secretary, and it was formal, and it was all that bullshit. And here is the dean, just a wonderful guy, you know, who later helped me get a job.

Blum: How did that happen?

Macsai: Well, when he was teaching at Cornell he had a student by the name of Nathaniel Owings. So before I graduated, he said to Bob Diamant and me, "You guys should meet and work for Nat Owings."

Blum: What was the dean’s name?

Macsai: William MacLeish Dunbar. Had a beautiful Scottish name, yes. He was a charming, old-time gentleman, the first gay man I ever met. He had a younger friend he lived with. You know, at that time, this was not acceptable; this was the scandal of the university. But, you know, it was nice because early on in Hungary homosexuality is treated like a sickness, terrible. Through Dunbar, I realized that it’s just a preference. And he was such a wonderful man, I just loved him. I had a girlfriend, and he used to drive us to Cincinnati, because he had to go to a meeting, and he always said, "Why don’t you take your girlfriend to Cincinnati?" So I spent a lot of nice Saturdays in Cincinnati, driven by Professor Dunbar, you know. He was a gentle, lovely human being.

Blum: Well, he obviously has made a deep impression on you.

Macsai: Very deep. Nice human being. I mean, for him to offer to telephone Nat Owings… Unfortunately, it didn’t work out exactly, because I wasn't hired by Nat Owings. Came April, we got a letter from Nat Owings who said unfortunately, jobs are slow, we had better find another job somewhere else unless I wanted to draw maps for the Planning Commission.

18 [Tape 1: Side 2]

Macsai: Well, I didn’t feel like doing maps. So I sent photographs of some of my renderings to a dozen firms. And Holabird and Root hired me. But I went to Holabird with the understanding that if SOM picks up, I will leave. And when I left, it was really a very strong struggle, because Holabird and Root was a nice firm to work for. First of all, Helmuth Bartsch liked me very much.

Blum: He’s sort of a legend. What was he like?

Macsai: A lot of people thought he was a Nazi. He was very Germanic. He was an Austrian army officer in World War One, you know. Elegant. Male chauvinist, if there was one. He used to, at the end of the day, wash up and put a white towel on his neck, you know, holding the towel. Shirtsleeves. And he used to snap the towel on his secretary’s behind, excuse me. But he was a bon vivant. He did this to be charming, I think.

Blum: Snapping the towel?

Macsai: Yes. Then he ordered flowers, and I asked the secretary, "Who is his girlfriend?" She says, "Nobody, he likes fresh flowers at home. I order some fresh flowers every second day." It was rumored that he was gay. That, I didn’t know, but there was rumor about it. And when finally, SOM came through and I was ready to leave, he was very nice to me. He and Mr. Root called me in—Mr. Root, John Root, he was an old man—and he says, "Don’t leave. In a few years, you can have Mr. Bartsch’s job."

Blum: He said it in front of him?

Macsai: No, privately. He says, "You are a good designer, you can draw. You are a valuable asset. Stay here." And it was a big struggle, but I felt I had to leave. I’m not learning anything more here.

Blum: What was your job at Holabird and Root?

19 Macsai: Unfortunately, after one month as a draftsman, they discovered I can draw.

Blum: What were you doing for one month?

Macsai: I was detailing windows of Illinois Bell Telephone buildings in Matoon, Illinois. I didn’t know what I was doing.

Blum: You didn’t know what you were doing?

Macsai: Most young architects don’t know enough technical details. I just was copying. And then they discovered I can draw, so they put me under Bartsch, and I was doing renderings of all the South American hotels Holabird was doing like Hotel Maracaibo in Venezuela. And for years, they had these drawings hanging in the lobby at Holabird and Root. They were watercolors. And I didn’t want to do that. I mean, I wanted to learn architecture. And at SOM, when I left Holabird, I made up my mind, I was really going to do architecture, you know. But even SOM, when they discovered I can draw, they started to ask me to do renderings. And finally, I made a deal. I said, "Listen, I’m getting a hundred-fifteen dollars a week. I’m not going to be doing renderings, which cost two-hundred-fifty for you for outsiders. I’m willing to do one every two months."

Blum: Who did you say it to at SOM?

Macsai: Hartmann, Bill Hartmann. So Hartmann said, "Okay, fine, we won’t abuse you." And I also told it to my direct boss, who was Bill Priestley, and Bill said, "Absolutely not." He says, "I am not going to ask you ever to do rendering. You are an architect, not a delineator." I loved Bill for that. So it was avoided. And when I left, an interesting thing happened. I left because I asked for a raise. My salary was hundred-fifteen a week. And I didn’t get overtime because I was a senior designer. Anybody over a hundred didn’t get overtime.

20 Blum: I see.

Macsai: So I asked for a raise, and they said they'd give me seven-fifty a week. I said, "You’re full of shit. Seven-fifty? Give me ten bucks. George Cooper Rudolph gets two-hundred-fifty dollars a rendering, which I do in a week. At least give me ten-, fifteen-dollar raise." "No, we can’t afford it." That was when Bill Priestley left to go to PACE. So I called Bill. I said, "Bill, I can’t stand these cheap bastards." He says, "Come on over." So I went over. The first week is not over, I get a call from Bill Hartmann. He says, "Johnny, you did this rendering of the Ford City." It’s a beautiful aerial pencil rendering. He says, "We need four. I need three more, what am I going to do? Who can do it?" I said, "I can do it. I’ll do it freelance for you." He says, "Great! How much do you charge?" I said, "Two-hundred-fifty each." He says, "Great." So in two weekends, I made seven-hundred-fifty dollars, but I wasn’t good enough to get a fifteen-dollar a week raise. That’s total insanity. Anyhow, that’s the reason I left. But I loved it at SOM, it was a great firm. A great firm.

Blum: May we review these jobs to fill in?

Macsai: Absolutely. Go ahead, ask me anything.

Blum: When you were at school, at Miami University, you learned the language, you made friends. When did you begin to feel like an American?

Macsai: Not totally ever at school years. I began to feel at home as an American once I got married. I got married in 1950. I graduated in 1949, and I came to Chicago and to Holabird in the summer of ‘49,. I loved the city. I found it very exciting. See, a lot of buildings, which have been torn down since, you know, they…

Blum: What was Chicago like at that time?

Macsai: Well, my first place I lived in was in Hyde Park. [The] building doesn’t exist anymore. And Mies’s Promontory building was just going up. It was about

21 finished. And I found that so exciting. That exposed concrete frame building. Elegant, simple. Very transparent first floor, you know? Very open, airy. I mean, I just thought it was absolutely a great building. I remember photographing it. And I loved Chicago. I wasn’t crazy about the climate, you know, the heat. I didn’t have air conditioning, and SOM didn’t have air conditioning.

Blum: Oh, my.

Macsai: We used to put a towel under our arm, because from the sweat, the paper got wavy. Yeah. And it got air conditioning the year after I was there. But the first year, it was miserable.

Blum: Did you learn about Mies when you were at the Miami University?

Macsai: Only whatever I read in Giedion’s book. The professors at Miami, my design instructors, one was a Beaux-Arts man. And the next year I got two young men—they were graduates of Yale—they just came from Yale, and they were very much [Le] Corbusier, Gropius, not Mies. They always thought Mies was a little too sterile. I really learned about Mies when I worked for Bill Priestley at SOM. Bill had a retinue of IIT graduates around him, and I was an honorary. He had two people who were not IIT graduates in his design group. Because the office was kind of divided, either you worked for Ambrose Richardson or Bill Priestley. I worked for Bill. Somehow, Bill always reminded me… He looked very much like Edward R. Murrow, my hero. At that time, he did. Anyhow, and he was such a civilized man. You know, he was a musician, played the guitar and was teaching at IIT, studied in Germany. I liked the guy. Ambrose was a different guy. I liked both of them, but I felt much closer to Bill. And the two of us who were not IIT graduates, who he kind of allowed in his group, were Bruce Graham and myself. And I realized that the Miesian system, while it’s rigid and does not apply to every architectural problem, it’s a phenomenal learning experience. It’s a phenomenally systematic way to put a building together, where the last detail is in the same spirit as the total building. It’s an invaluable education if

22 you don’t become enslaved to it, you know? It’s like anything else. The most serious and important thing, you should be able to laugh at. That’s my Hungarian ironic attitude. But the same way, you should be able to learn everything about the Miesian system, and then to say, "For certain problems, this is bullshit, it’s too rigid, I can’t use it." And architecture can’t stop with Mies.

Blum: Now, you did not go to IIT, to go through the formal Miesian training program. So how did you learn it?

Macsai: No. No, I didn’t. I learned it all from Bill Priestley.

Blum: From Bill Priestley?

Macsai: Yeah. You know, he used to sit and tell me… Also, I met this IIT system later, when I was much more mature than the kids who studied there. And I was so impressed with it, I just soaked it up. And Bill was a great help to me. Great help. He was a little narrow. I mean, I admit it. You know, when I went to PACE, we were working on some schools in northern Michigan. And he wanted some presentation drawings of floor plans. And he knew I could do presentations drawings as well or better than almost anybody. But he says, "Johnny, the trees, look up in the Mies book how Mies indicated trees." Now, that’s being so goddamn narrow. I mean, Mies was a great architect, but I don’t have to learn from Mies how he drew trees. You know, that’s bullshit, that’s crazy. But I adored Bill so much I put up with it.

Blum: Did you look in the book to see how Mies did the trees?

Macsai: I looked at it, and I humored Bill, you know?

Blum: Did you have any training at either school, either in Hungary or in the States, on preservation or restoration?

Macsai: No.

23 Blum: Was that an issue then?

Macsai: Historic restoration, yes. In Hungary, architectural history was not taught like here. Here, architectural history is through slides and lectures. And in Hungary, we had slides, we had lectures, but we had to go out sometimes to measure the building and reconstruct a drawing, because they had Romanesque and Gothic buildings in the country. And also, in the history course, for instance, we had to do a lot of drawings. You only learn by doing. You don’t learn it by seeing slides and listening. You really learn, say, the Gothic style by having to draw the windows and the details. For instance, for the medieval history professor we had to go to a Romanesque wall surrounding the Castle Hill in Buda. And that wall is an undulating wall. And we had to design a lookout stand, covered, and steps going up on this medieval wall. That was our problem. You can’t do it in modern style, you have to do it so that it fits.

Blum: So you learned by doing?

Macsai: Yes. It’s a very contextual design. Now, why, after this contextual training, did I find Colonial architecture still so strange? I should have loved it, because you can do good Colonial work. In fact, later on, I did some Colonial work but I denied it for a long time. Why? Because I realized that the kind of Colonial they did at Miami of Ohio was phony. It had steel lintels, not true brick arches. And it had all these things which look Colonial, but technically they were phony, you know.

Blum: I’m surprised you picked up on that so early when you were a student.

Macsai: It was very easy. They were building a building at Miami of Ohio which was practically across the street from the architecture building, which was in a Quonset hut. And they had steel structure, which they covered up with brick. And they had a phony stone arch. Underneath, there was steel. And on the phony stone arch, it was engraved, "Ye shall learn the truth and it shall make

24 you free." That’s bullshit—right on this phony arch, you know?

Blum: I understand the contradiction you felt. You saw the building under construction, so then it was pretty clear.

Macsai: Right. But there was a lot of this kind of less than total honesty about America. Later, I got accustomed to it. I found American girls… You know, you take out a girl for the first date, you bring her back to the dorm—at that time it was usually at ten o’clock—and she’s all around you, kissing. But then, that’s where it stops. That was a typical American college coed.

Blum: What was so contradictory about that?

Macsai: Well, in Europe, you got to that point kissing a woman, pretty soon you slept together. But not with a coed. So I mean, it was like the steel thing under the stone arch, you know? It sure was strange, it sure was strange.

Blum: In the American university, were there any issues at the time?

Macsai: Political issues?

Blum: Well, no, not political issues, but issues like restoring city centers, urban flight to the suburbs…

Macsai: This was never discussed, not at Miami of Ohio between 1947 and ’49. In some schools, Cornell and other schools, yes. Miami was a very parochial, narrow, architecture school. And I learned all that through reading. Reading Mumford, you know? Once I learned English, reading became a very important part of my existence. It still is. My favorite pastime is to have a good book. And that doesn’t mean all intellectually heavy books; I love murder mysteries. But I remember Mumford was a revelation to me, the history of the cities, The Brown Decades and The City in History. And later, Jane Jacobs.

25 Blum: Well, that was not until the sixties.

Macsai: That’s right, that came much later. But really, my soaking up modern architecture in America, came very much from Giedion and Mumford. They were my two reading heroes.

Blum: When did you become comfortable with English, reading as well as speaking?

Macsai: I’m still not comfortable. No, I am comfortable with English. I would say, well, by [the] mid-fifties. When we were first married, my wife used to correct my English. And I learned a lot. See, at the university, one of the problems was I roomed together with Bob Diamant. So we talked Hungarian a lot. Thank God we both also liked women, and dated a lot, and that we did not date Hungarians. There were no Hungarians around, thank God. So also, I found movies a great learning source, to go to the movies. And books. Newspaper came very late. Newspaper English I found very strange.

Blum: Difficult compared to a book?

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: I would think just the reverse would have been the case.

Macsai: No, later I realized you are absolutely correct. But I was turned off by headlines. Headline English is an impossible English. It’s abbreviated. It uses slang.

Blum: To attract your attention.

Macsai: Exactly. And for me, it was total gibberish. I couldn’t understand. What are they talking about? You know They didn’t say Russians, they called them Reds, or the Russ, or what, you know, all that. To fit a headline into masthead, they needed slang and abbreviation, which I was quite unaware

26 of. But really, becoming good at English and comfortable, very comfortable, came in the 1960s. With what? I became the social action chairman of the temple we belonged to. And I organized every month’s meetings about the neighborhood, you know, South Shore was undergoing integration.

Blum: How did this improve your English?

Macsai: I had to introduce the speakers at Beth Am Temple in South Shore. I remember the first speaker I introduced, I wrote my introduction down and I read it.

Blum: I do too, as you saw this morning.

Macsai: No, no. But you do it very cleverly. I couldn’t. My hand was shaking. My voice was shaking. And doing this for a year or two helped immensely. And then by the time I taught, I was so relaxed in English, you know. It was 1970 when I started to teach. At Miami University, it was a struggle for English, but it was a very pleasant experience, all in all, as I look back. I have no unpleasant memories. I didn’t learn much architecture, but I learned it later. And certain things I never learned, you know? I’m still extremely weak on mechanical things like heating, plumbing, electric. That’s not my bag, you know?

Blum: But doesn’t an architect hire an engineer to do these things?

Macsai: Yes, he does, yes he does. But then he lives in his own house and an outlet has to be fixed, and he doesn’t know how to, and he screws it up. Please. I mean, I have total mechanical disabilities, okay? Two left hands. And I’m very good at drawing, but not building.

Blum: I understand.

Macsai: You know, architects are basically two kinds. One who loves to spend a weekend building something—add a back porch, build a garage, use their

27 hands, saw, hammer, everything. The other likes to make drawings and let somebody else build. I like to make drawings.

Blum: When you were approaching graduation at the Miami University, did you think about going to graduate school?

Macsai: I had an opportunity. That was interesting. The Hillel offered me, they gave me a five-year scholarship, and I did it in two and a half. You know, I did not start at the beginning, I was able to continue where I left off in Hungary. I learned English well enough rapidly so that I only had two years and a summer in school. So they said, you know, "You can take another two years from this scholarship. How would you like to go to graduate school?" And they suggested the University of Michigan.

Blum: Why Michigan?

Macsai: Because they had openings, they got a good deal there, whatever, you know. And the problem was that I had a choice to make, a decision to make: SOM or graduate school. And I picked SOM.

Blum: I thought you first went to Holabird and Root.

Macsai: I know, but I was offered the job, remember? Nat Owings was waiting for me.

Blum: Oh, right.

Macsai: Or should I go to University of Michigan to spend another two years making drawings, things which don’t get built? Later, when I became a full professor at UIC, I was one of three on our faculty without a master’s degree. The others were Ezra Gordon and Dean Whitaker. It’s a different world now. Today I could not become a full professor, I would need to have a master's degree.

28 Blum: Who was the dean?

Macsai: At that time, Dick Whitaker. In fact, let me tell you a funny story, talking about Miami University versus University of Miami. First graduation I attended, I noticed everybody has a colorful hood. And I don’t. So I said, "Why don’t I have a colorful hood?" Whitaker says, "Well, that’s your master's degree." So I said, "Dick, you don’t have a master's degree, what’s that fancy hood for?" He says, "The costume department doesn’t know. I lied to them." So next year, I lied. I filled out, "Master's degree, Miami University." Well, they didn’t know the difference—they’re just like you—that there is a Miami University and a University of Miami. They thought it’s University of Miami, which has the most garish colors, pink, orange, and green. University of Miami is like a parakeet. It’s like a Florida bird. Miami of Ohio is red and white. And I go pick up my gown and hood, and I get there, and I figure they made a mistake. No, they didn’t make a mistake. It’s Miami of Florida. Anyhow, that’s what happens when you lie.

Blum: When did you give up the idea of returning to Hungary?

Macsai: I gave it up last year of my school, when I found out what’s happening, that the Communists took over, and that I would, with an American diploma, I would not be able to find a job easily, I would have disadvantages. And by that time, I started to feel very comfortable here. I had a girlfriend the last year of school, and felt comfortable enough, wanting to stay here.

Blum: Did you think, when you left school and began your career out in the working world, that you were well-prepared for your career?

Macsai: Not at all. Not at all. I felt totally ignorant at Holabird and Root, because school never prepares you for how a building really is put together, okay? It’s very superficial. And it might be an intellectual underpinning you get, you get all the theory, but not how a building is put together. In Hungary, it was emphasized. Here, at Miami, not at all. So when I got to Holabird, I knew very little.

29 Blum: But wasn’t engineering part of your course of study at Miami University?

Macsai: Miami University? Yes, it was. But very minimal. In the University of Budapest, you had to prepare a lot of technical drawings. A lot of them. At Miami, very few. And so no, I wasn’t well prepared at all. I learned most of it at SOM. And I learned the other part at Dunbar Builders. I went to work for them because I wanted to learn how buildings are put together, not how you draw them, but what happens in the field. And that was a great learning experience.

Blum: Who were you working with at Holabird and Root?

Macsai: Helmuth Bartsch was my direct boss.

Blum: Was he was head of design?

Macsai: Head of design.

Blum: What was Bernard Bradley’s role?

Macsai: I don’t know. I know the name, I met him. I have no idea. Helmuth had his own studio. Bradley might have been also design. But Helmuth’s studio had in it Joe Passonneau, who became one of my closest friends. John Holabird was there. Bruce Graham was there. Ivar Viehe-Naess was there. And the office boy who helped us was Joe Casserly, who later became city architect. Little Joe, yes. Anyhow, we were in a separate floor.

Blum: You were all one team?

Macsai: One team, yeah. Doing hotels in South America. And doing the Ravinia pavilion. That was one of the jobs. John Holabird was in charge of that. He and Joe Passonneau were working together. I was working on the hotels, doing renderings of the hotels. I mean, I considered that a total waste of time.

30 Blum: Why?

Macsai: Renderings came so easy, also, but by the time you do the rendering, a building is designed. You don’t contribute anything, you know? It’s like in fashion design, obviously, the photographer is important and the model is important, but neither one of them are as important as the fabric and the dress. And the dress is made by a designer. The model only wears it, and the photographer only takes some dramatic photo. I was the photographer for these hotels, you know.

Blum: Oh, I see, I see.

Macsai: It was not really learning architecture. But it was a good life. [I] met interesting people. Who else at Holabird? Mr. Manning was the head of the drafting room. And I knew him, he was a very nice person. And Bill Cohen was head of the structural engineering department at Holabird. It was a nice group of people. And when I left Holabird, I was in an auto accident and I was hospitalized. I fractured my spine. And I got a gift in the hospital, a book by Kormendi, the Hungarian author. Helmuth sent me an English translation with his good wishes. He had such nice gestures, you know?

Blum: Well, he must have liked you, because other people have spoken about him in not such endearing terms.

Macsai: No, Helmuth liked me very much. Very much. You know, I was from Hungary, he was from Vienna. Who knows what? But he was very nice to me. I enjoyed it. And I, through my whole career, I always found very nice people. They couldn’t be nicer than Ambrose Richardson and Bill Priestley. Ambrose, I did not work with as much as with Bill. Later, when I became a fellow of the AIA, Ambrose was already teaching at Notre Dame. And we had one happy time, Ambrose and I, we kind of loved to tell jokes, including dirty jokes. And Ambrose always loved to ask me, "Johnny, any new jokes?" I also had a very nice relation with Nat Owings.

31 Blum: And what was he like?

Macsai: Well, Owings is the one who hired me. He foisted me on the neck of the design department, because of Professor Dunbar, you know, at Miami, who was his professor at Cornell. How did I know him? I didn’t know him very well. He sent us a wedding present, which was a nice gesture. A young design draftsman. I felt very touched. And then the first Christmas party I was there, they wanted to decorate one wall. So I said, "Let me do a caricature."

Blum: Oh, did you actually draw on the wall?

Macsai: Not on the wall, on white paper, butcher paper, covered the whole wall. It was six-foot by six-foot, with three arches, and in one arch there was Nat Owings, the other was Louis Skidmore, and John Merrill. And one covered his eyes, one covered his ears, and one covered his mouth.

Blum: That was clever.

Macsai: Oh, it was a great success. And the little drawing I made from which I did the blow up, I found years later and mailed it to Nat Owings in Big Sur. He was already retired. And he sent me a lovely note thanking me.

Blum: Well, he must’ve gotten a kick out of that.

Macsai: Yes. Yes.

Blum: Well, just one comment about the fact that you felt you were expendable when it came to the renderings that you did at Holabird and Root. Y.C. Wong said that in that office you did the most marvelous renderings. He admired them greatly.

Macsai: Y.C. is a nice, was a nice man. He died. He sat behind me at Skidmore. And I

32 found it so amusing. Here he is working on some technical point, [he] takes a tiny book, like this size, [a] pocket dictionary, Chinese-English, and he goes like this. And then he letters it. He didn’t know the proper English word for something, but he knew it in Chinese. And he later did those very nice atrium townhouses in Hyde Park. Y.C. was a lovely human being, a narrow Miesian, if there was one. With him, you know, it had to be one way. A lot of architects who studied under Mies became narrow Miesians.

Blum: Well, that has been the basis of a lot of criticism.

Macsai: Yes, but not all. One of my favorites is David Hovey, who’s doing these two high-rises in Evanston. He went to IIT and is not a narrow Miesian. PACE Associates also did very narrow Miesian work when I was there. But again, I enjoyed it there.

Blum: Were many of the people who were partners at PACE out of IIT? Genther was not and he was closely associated with Mies.

Macsai: That’s right. Most of the partners were not IIT-trained. Skip Genther was one of the most interesting human beings. When he was my boss at PACE, I hated his guts.

Blum: Well, he was supposed to be pretty hard to work for.

Macsai: He was a miserable bastard. He called me in one day with Bill Priestley, who was my boss, who was the designer, and told Bill Priestley, "What you’re doing is stupid," and chewed his ass out in front of me. He was a madman. Then later, I am in practice in architecture and he tries to get one of my clients. And he tells him that he will do his building only with a Miesian approach. My client later told me, he says, "Johnny, who is this madman? He wants me to hire him, give him a high-rise job, but it has to look like a Mies building." And then I go to UIC and Skip Genther is a teacher there. And he became the most wonderful, mellow, human being. In fact, when he retired, we went to New Mexico to visit him. He became a good friend. A good

33 friend. Skip was one of the few people who had undergone the most wonderful metamorphosis from a total miserable bastard to a warm, caring, very much loved teacher. His students adored him. So it shows that we can change. Because he was mean and miserable as a boss, not just to me, to other people too.

Blum: Do you have an explanation of why so many people migrated from Holabird and Root to SOM?

Macsai: The reason is Holabird and Root did not do good modern work at that time. SOM was the pioneer of large-scale modern architecture in the United States. The first modern buildings came from SOM. And everybody wanted to do modern work, that was the fashion. Since then, I mellowed enough to believe that in architecture form doesn’t necessarily follow function, it follows fashion. And in fact, I wrote an article about it for the Evanston RoundTable, "Does Form Follow Fashion?" with a question mark. And then under, it said, "Wright or Wrong?" but right was spelled with a W.

Blum: Was that your reason for wanting to work at SOM?

Macsai: The younger crowd—and I was just graduating—really wanted to be part of the zeitgeist, the modern architecture, which SOM was doing and Holabird was not doing. Eventually, Holabird did, but predominantly under the leadership of Jerry Horn. But that was considerably later.

Blum: So you got to SOM. Were you actually hired at SOM by Bill Hartmann?

Macsai: No, I was hired by Nat Owings.

Blum: Oh, by Nat. So this goes back to the connection you had made through your dean.

Macsai: Yes, yes. And then SOM called me at Holabird in December—no, November 1st—1949, that they are ready, that I can start on December 1st.

34 Blum: At SOM?

Macsai: I started at Holabird in June, and I moved over to SOM December first, and they had just let about a dozen people go.

Blum: And they hired you?

Macsai: They promised me, and I was making very little money, so I was no big load for them. And then we picked up new jobs. They just started New York Life Insurance Company, right on Thirty-first street. And that was my first job I worked on.

Blum: Lake Meadows.

Macsai: Yes. Lake Meadows was my first job. I remember I had to letter some sheets, and Bill Hartmann comes to me and he says, "Johnny, I don’t think we can show this to the client." The last sheet, which has the plan of the penthouse, I lettered "panthouse," P-A-N-T. Lake Meadows had just started. In fact, I did the rendering of Lake Meadows. And some of the Lake Meadows buildings at the entrance had about a ten-by-ten panel of mosaic mural. I did those murals using standard bathroom tile.

Blum: This was on the outside of the building?

Macsai: Outside, next to the entrance.

Blum: Are they still there?

Macsai: They don’t hold up very well. Eventually, they popped, and they didn’t want to spend the money to repair, replace, so they just covered it over. But it was fun.

Blum: What was the SOM office like at that time? How large was it?

35 Macsai: It was at 100 West Monroe. And designers were on the twenty-first floor. That was designers and executive, and bookkeeping. And the twentieth floor was the drafting and engineering.

Blum: So they had two floors?

Macsai: Yes. And the nicest thing was Bill Priestley introduced a new system. Anybody who worked under him as a designer on a project, if he was willing, when the drawings moved, when working drawings started, we moved and we, the designers, were the crew who did the working drawings.

Blum: Was that a good system?

Macsai: What a great learning experience!

Blum: What was the advantage to that?

Macsai: It was that the details were done by the same people who did the design. It assured him a continuity of spirit and thinking. And for us young designers, it was a great learning experience. Bill was not thinking of leaving, he was building up a cadre of designers who also could do technical drawings. So for us, it was an incredible learning experience. Myself, Bruce Graham, about five of us were moved from design to working drawings under Bill.

Blum: Did Ambrose run his studio like that?

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Macsai: In Ambrose’s department, when a design was done, the drawings were turned over to the technical people, under a job captain. But the designers did not move with the drawings. That very seldom happened, what Bill Priestley did. I mean, I am forever grateful to him for giving me that opportunity.

36 Blum: And at Holabird and Root, it was like Ambrose’s system?

Macsai: Exactly, the traditional way of moving production. Priestley was unique in that, and the only place I ever heard where this happened. Later, in my own office, I very much fostered that. The young designers who work for me, first of all, I didn’t allow them to design till they spent two years doing working drawings. And then I insisted that if they design, naturally, I was involved in design, too. And they really were working under me—because it’s a small office, you can’t avoid that—but once they took the design over, they also had to be part of the production team. And I also, wherever it was possible, I sent them out to supervise the job in construction.

Blum: I see.

Macsai: Great learning experience. I have four young guys who, in effect, were trained that way—three, really—-who all became senior associates at O’Donnell Wicklund Pigozzi and Peterson (OWP&P). They are unique guys. And that came to me because I went through the same with Bill Priestley. So you can see his lasting influence on me.

Blum: When you were at SOM, what jobs did you work on?

Macsai: I worked predominantly, in the beginning, on the New York Life job.

Blum: Lake Meadows?

Macsai: Lake Meadows. Then I worked on the drawings for a competition for a shopping center, which we didn’t win.

Blum: Was that Ford City?

Macsai: Not Ford City, no. This was Old Orchard. Four architects were invited to submit schemes for Old Orchard, and it was won by Loebl Schlossman and Bennett. SOM’s scheme was not the most conducive. We had a very radical

37 solution. All parking was underground, under the shopping center. And packages went down from the store and were moved around, so that you could pick it up at a station near your car. It was a fantastically mechanized scheme. But I tell you, it would have been so expensive. But there was no surface parking—except cabs. I mean, it was a very intelligent solution, but too expensive.

Blum: Was that site wooded?

Macsai: No, it was not wooded by the time we were working there. So I worked on that. Then I worked on a couple buildings at Great Lakes Naval Training Center.

Blum: Oh, yes.

Macsai: I worked on a mental hospital in Tinley Park. That was quite a bit. And then I had one of my own jobs, a prototype gas station for Colorado Oil. It was a new oil company. That was a major failure. To this day, I feel guilty.

Blum: Was that a competition?

Macsai: No, no competition. We got the job and Ambrose wanted me to handle it; I was the designer. And it was an elegant design, like a Miesian pavilion, which was totally [the] wrong approach for a gas station. And in the background, there was this signboard where the message changes with rotating vertical pieces. An elegant canopy over the pumps. I mean, it was really a good modern station. There was only one problem. The client had a hundred-seventy thousand dollar budget, and the bids came in at 350,000 dollars.

Blum: Oh, you could build half of it.

Macsai: And you know what? To the everlasting credit of Ambrose and the SOM system, nobody ever blamed me. They didn’t—they should have fired me.

38 They should have fired me. I mean, you know, come on. A designer has to be conscious of the budget. It’s easy to design without limits.

Blum: Did you know the budget?

Macsai: Yes, I knew the budget, yes. Yes, I knew the budget.

Blum: Was it inexperience, or just what was it?

Macsai: Total goddamn inexperience, number one. Number two, being narrow, because I wanted to design this gem, and I figured somehow it will be done. And then the job captains, the technical people who then took over, didn’t… The project manager, Frank Kovar—I remember him—he was telling me, he said, "Johnny, this is going to be expensive." And I figured, Ah, what does he know about good architecture? I somehow lived in this Pollyanna attitude that it will come in okay. Well, it didn’t. And the client abandoned the new gas station. Then years later—end of the story—I am already Hausner and Macsai, and I get a call from Mr. Beck, of the Colorado Oil Company. And he says, "I understand you have your own office now. How would you like to design a gas station for us?" And I did. We got paid. He didn’t get the property and it never went ahead. So he and I had bad karma.

Blum: Was your design a repetition of what you had done years earlier at SOM?

Macsai: No, no. No, it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t. But he was impressed enough to come to me, instead of to SOM, which was very rewarding.

Blum: I would say so. You must have had a unique position at that time at SOM, because you were formally with Priestley’s team, and yet you did projects for Ambrose. Was that usual, to be able to move from one to the other?

Macsai: Yes, that’s right. Because when I did Colorado Oil, the Priestley team wasn’t busy, so we were sent back to the twenty-first floor. And people were interchangeable. In that respect, the office was wonderful. On a human

39 relation level, there were some problems. Nat Owings wasn’t an easy person, okay? And also, there was a lot of drinking. Every second Friday, a liquid lunch. The record was seven martinis. Seven martinis!

Blum: Seven?

Macsai: Yes. But normally, Richardson came back bleary-eyed and gargling with mouthwash, because he had to see a client in the afternoon. You know. It really was not intelligent, this level. Or Nat Owings one day came in and went to the guy next to me, he says, "Hi, I am Nat Owings. Your name?" "Oh, Al Hammersky." "So nice to meet you." Turns out to be Al Hammersky, had been with SOM at that time for two years, and Nat Owings was unaware.

Blum: How large was the office, that someone could be there for two years and not know…

Macsai: Hundred-twenty people.

Blum: Oh, well, that was a pretty large office.

Macsai: And Nat was not there that often. Nat was doing a lot of marketing at that time. I mean, nobody called it marketing. But Nat Owings was very socially connected. You know, his wife's father was a partner of the banker, Charles Dawes, who had been the vice-president of the U.S. Nat Owings’s wife was an Otis and her father Joseph Otis was a banker.

Blum: Emily Otis.

Macsai: Whatever her name was, Emily, right. And that’s the reason, Nat’s father-in- law was a partner of Dawes in of one of the banks in Chicago. And how did Owings and Skidmore start? They started out by meeting at the Century of Progress, the 1933 world’s fair needed a local architect. Dawes was one of the chairmen of the fair, and pushed Nat, his partner’s son-in-law. And that was their first job.

40 Blum: Pretty good first job.

Macsai: And they were located where later, my office was, in 104 South Michigan, on the sixteenth floor. Fifteenth floor was Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, and you had to walk up another floor. And it was a famous place, because SOM started there. Then, at the turn of the century, Frank Lloyd Wright had his office there. And I remember we had a skylight, which had one part with a metal panel. And the janitor was telling me that Mr. Wright’s Franklin stove, the flue used…

Blum: The pipe vented up there?

Macsai: Yes, the pipe went up there.

Blum: Well, it was a historic location.

Macsai: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Blum: I have read that between Richardson and Priestley, there was, a star-studded cast of characters, such as Chuck Wiley…

Macsai: Wiley, yes.

Blum: Gyo Obata?

Macsai: Gyo Obata, right, right, right. Tom Burleigh, Chuck Wiley. I correspond with Chuck. Unfortunately, he’s losing his eyesight. His wife died last year. He lives in San Francisco. He was one of the guys near me, an older person, a few years older than I. But, you know, when you’re twenty-one, twenty-three is very old. And he was a very talented guy, Chuck Wiley, very talented. Gyo Obata was there; George Anselevicius was there, who became dean at Harvard later; Joe Passonneau was there; Bob Diamant was there; Johnny Weese was there.

41 Blum: John Weese, yes.

Macsai: Poor Johnny. Boy, he was…

Blum: Now, he went to the San Francisco office.

Macsai: Yes. And he married Vesta Firestone from Akron, Ohio. See, at SOM, you could become an associate by being a very good architect. It would also help an associate to marry right. Unfortunately, Johnny became an alcoholic, and found Vesta shacked up with some hippie in San Francisco. They divorced. Then he died of a liver ailment. I mean, it was a sad story. The whole Weese family were drinkers, except…

Blum: No, not Ben.

Macsai: Not Ben. John and Harry were. I adored Harry. Harry was one of my other heroes. Never worked for him, but I…

Blum: You did go from important office to important office for a while, before you went off on your own.

Macsai: Harry, I never worked for. I wrote two or three articles for Inland Architect and he loved it. He encouraged me to do it. And I remember he was so bitter. He didn’t like Stanley Tigerman, so we had this mutual dislike of Stanley. And then he also felt, unjustifiably, very bitter about Helmut Jahn. He used to call him "Genghis Jahn."

Blum: Well, Harry was clever.

Macsai: "Genghis Jahn." And then when SOM was working on the world’s fair and had a whole team of architects involved, Harry decided to have his own team. And all the halfway good architects who were not invited by SOM, Harry invited. So I was invited by Harry. We used to have a breakfast

42 meeting at nine o’clock every second week in Harry’s office. By nine o’clock, he came in, he was slurring his words.

Blum: That’s so sad.

Macsai: It’s totally sad, because he was, in my opinion, one of the two most genuine talents in this city. They were genuine talents, Harry Weese and Ed Dart. Ed Dart was unique also. They both drank too much.

Blum: What is there about architecture and liquor and sometimes music that seems to come together?

Macsai: And even Jews, who are generally not very good drinkers, under architectural influence, became very good drinkers, like Stanley Tigerman and others. I never could make the social ladder in architecture, because I get sick if I drink too much. I throw up. So thank God… Yeah. I mean, two highballs is my limit. But four, five martinis? I would be scraped off the floor.

Blum: Was that to entertain clients, or was that just to drink?

Macsai: Depends… Payday, they went down for liquid lunch. This group was invited for my wedding.

Blum: This is at SOM?

Macsai: SOM. They came late to the wedding. Why? Ambrose said they’re late because they stopped at O’Connell’s for a chocolate milkshake to coat their stomach, so they can drink. It was a wild crowd. And Tom Burleigh, dancing with my sister-in-law, tried to make out, and it was funny. It really was funny.

Blum: Well, there was certainly a lot of talent in that office. To go on…

Macsai: And at Christmas time, the Christmas party at SOM was wild. Several wives

43 called the next morning, to ask where the husbands are?

Blum: Oh, they’re not home?

Macsai: Not home. One woke up and burned himself on the radiator at the Illinois Central Station. His name was Shell Ingerbretzen. You’ve heard his name?

Blum: Yes, I have, but I can’t tell you from whom or in what context.

Macsai: Anyhow Shell was, oh, he was a great drinker. He was drinking like a fish. I think he was the one who won the seven martini prize.

Blum: Well, even though you didn’t make very much money, you certainly had a lot of fringe benefits.

Macsai: And then there was this young black architect, good friend of ours, both he and his wife, Ed Presley.

Blum: Ed Presley?

Macsai: Presley. Very talented, brilliant black architect and also a good drinker. And one day he left architecture, moved to Florida and nobody’s ever heard from him since. He was an IIT guy. Bill Priestley brought him in. Then there was Bill Dunlap. Bill Dunlap was the best drinker. Nobody could—maybe Bruce Graham could drink Bill Dunlap under the table.

Blum: Oh, really?

Macsai: Bill Dunlap. David Green, another IIT guy, not a drinker. He passed away a few years ago. Personal friend. Who else?

Blum: Well, you’ve exhausted the list, with the exception of Edward Bennett.

Macsai: Ed Bennett, yes. I remember him very well. Yeah. That was one of the guys.

44 And Art Myhrum.

Blum: Well, I have the sense that these were all young, talented designers.

Macsai: Most of them.

Blum: And SOM did have—more specifically, Nat Owings had the reputation—for finding good young talent and allowing them to do their thing.

Macsai: Exactly. Listen, where would a young guy, out of school less than four years, or three years, be allowed to design single-handedly this prototype gas station for this large oil company? I mean, no other firm gave that opportunity. And then be totally tolerant for me fucking up that whole job. I mean, to this day, I feel guilty about it. You know? I used to tell that story in my office to my guys all the time, that what a great office SOM was. And it was. Fred Kraft, project manager, was the mentor of one of my partners at OWP&P, who also started at SOM. He is a personal friend, and we meet—-he lives across the park—we meet every couple weeks for lunch. George Hays, he was a project manager for the University of Illinois, Chicago campus. George was in charge of that job.

Blum: So he worked with Netsch.

Macsai: He and Walter, yes.

Blum: Was Walter there when you were there?

Macsai: Walter moved back from San Francisco to Chicago. He was the classic example who was a talented young guy, but also married well, just like Johnny Weese. Not married well, I’m sorry, was born well. His family, on his mother’s side, is related to an Eastern meat-packing firm that was bought by Swift. And that helped. And who else? Jack Train was there. He is now in partnership with Joe Valerio.

45 Blum: So SOM was really sort of an incubator of an awful lot of talent that went out in various directions…

Macsai: Exactly.

Blum: …and really established themselves.

Macsai: I never forget Perkins. Larry Perkins became a friend, personal friend. Called me one day, offered me partnership in the firm, like in 1969. It’s a long story; I won’t bore you with it now. But he said to me—he felt so bitter—-you know, he and Nat Owings were classmates at Cornell—"how come Nat is getting all these awards, AIA awards and everything, and Perkins is not getting anything?" And I said, you know, "Because at SOM, the designers are kings. It’s not a democracy. It’s dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship of good designers. And you guys have a horizontal organization. Everybody talks into it, it gets watered down. And you should turn it over to a design dictator."

Blum: Which they did, years later with Johnson.

Macsai: Ralph Johnson, yes. He’s pretty young, and he’s not a total dictator; there is some other work going on. But he’s a very good designer. Johnson is an outstanding architect. His first wife was my student.

Blum: Well, Perkins and Will did establish themselves as school architects. They were undisputed authorities for schools for many years.

Macsai: Yes. With the help of two people; one was Saarinen, You know, Crow Island school. And the other was with the organizational talent of Bill Brubaker, who just passed away last week. And they did a lot of good schools. They became the school architects par excellence.

Blum: Yes, they were.

46 Macsai: But they did some criminally bad buildings. A prominent location, like the United States Gypsum building, that cock-eyed thing, which poor Perkins was so proud of.

Blum: The building has been demolished.

Macsai: And thank God it’s gone. Perkins and I became kind of friendly. Periodically, I invited him to my class. He was a very good teacher.

Blum: Well, he also was on the UIC staff in some capacity. He used to take students to sketching class in France. Was it Versailles?

Macsai: Yes. Yes, and he loved it. Nothing to do. You know, here is an older architect. He loves to do it, and the students learn. I’ll tell you something, typical of Stanley Tigerman. When Stanley became director at UIC, he said, "I’m not hiring that old fart anymore." I said, "Stanley, why?" He says, "He’s intellectually not with it anymore." I said, "I don’t care whether he is with it or not. He’s not following the latest fashion but the students love him, and they learn a lot from him. And, you know, he has so little; no more practice. Why can’t we just be nice people?" "Johnny, it’s bullshit." At that time, Stanley and I were good friends; later, we were worst enemies. And he absolutely would not let Perkins come to juries or take students to Europe. So what happens? You know, there are ways life pays back. He left the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana fifty-thousand dollars.

Blum: Perkins?

Macsai: Perkins. He would have split that had he stayed on our faculty, okay? But we treated him like shit and Champaign-Urbana let him continue teaching. I mean, on a crass practical basis, Stanley screwed us.

Blum: You said that he left fifty-thousand dollars to the University of Illinois?

Macsai: In Champaign-Urbana.

47 Blum: Oh, Champaign, I see.

Macsai: Because we are UIC. He would’ve given at least half if not all to us. He loved to come to UIC. I used to ask him to come to juries. And then once, he told me, he says, "You know, I appreciate you inviting me, but," he says, "I really don’t like to be treated like a fifth wheel." Stanley treated him… Oh, you’ll get—well, then let’s have an extra tape for that. I will show you my cartoons. I have an entire folder full. It says "Tigermania."

Blum: Tigermania?

Macsai: You know, I was at the forefront of the people who got rid of him.

Blum: Yes, you were… I think what I read was that someone said you were captain of the palace revolt.

Blum: Do you want to talk about it?

Macsai: I was senior faculty. I was a former close friend of Stanley’s. And I was pissed enough—and I was dramatic enough—to call the chancellor, Brodsky, and the new dean, that lady we had, Bebe. And I asked them to talk to me. And I said, "I don’t know how to start this, but I am a survivor of a concentration camp. And since I was liberated, I never felt as humiliated and fearful as I feel every time I teach in this school, because of Stanley Tigerman."

Blum: How intimidated you must have felt.

Macsai: Because he used to come into class, be nasty to students, to me. I remember my class was over at five. At four-thirty, I’m leaving. You know, I’m a full professor; I know what I teach, I don’t punch a clock. And he saw me leave at four-thirty. He hollered, "Macsai, you can’t leave yet, it’s only four-thirty." So I turned around, "Fuck you." That’s the kind of relations we had, okay? And I wasn’t alone.

48 Blum: Well, there are many people who have spoken about how offended they were by things he did to them directly and indirectly.

Macsai: To students. The cruelty! I cannot tell you the cruelty this man exhibited toward students. And, I mean, he called them "fucking Pollack," "that fat broad." Oh, please! He countermanded… I gave a thousand-dollar scholarship to one of the finest students I had, from Vienna, and he said, "You’re not going to give a scholarship to a fucking Nazi. Not in my school." This guy was not a Nazi. It just so happened that later, I visited him in Vienna and he had a poster of Waldheim crossed out, at the entrance of his office. I said, "If you deny him the scholarship, Hitler has won." Anyhow, Stanley does not talk to anybody anymore. You know, when I see him on a social occasion, he turns his head.

Blum: Well, apparently, there were also questions raised about whether he was damaging the name of the school.

Macsai: Yes. Well, unfortunately, in last January issue of Chicago magazine, you know, there was an interview with him and Margaret. And he said, "You know, they fired me, but they were right, because I was haughty and conceited," or something like this. He finally admits it. But not when he sees some faculty. He’s so bitter about us getting rid of him. And he told somebody that, what an unfair way we handled it.

Blum: What actually happened?

Macsai: We went to the dean while he was in Japan. Well, you know, when you want a revolt, you want to succeed, you’re not going to ask him, invite him. What the hell did he imagine? When you do a putsch, you do it while the enemy is away.

Blum: One last question about Holabird and Root and SOM: aside from the type of architecture that they did—Holabird and Root doing more traditional, and

49 SOM doing modern—what was the biggest difference you found between the two firms?

Macsai: On the human level, Holabird and Root was a nicer firm to work for. Everybody was caring, the salary scale was better. Comfortable dealing with… You know, SOM was slightly arrogant. I mean, "We are it."

Blum: Well, I’ve heard.

Macsai: And you have to be happy to be here. Okay? I think they were very good to me, not because I was so talented, but for two reasons. I was a European, with an accent; that kind of appealed to them. I think that bullshit…

Blum: Was that distinguished?

Macsai: Yes, it appealed to them a little bit. I had a good classical education, so intellectually, that… And I drew well, okay. There was a little bit of this conceit, but justifiably conceited.

Blum: That’s what SOM says, "We’re good, and we know it."

Macsai: Exactly. You know, Churchill said, "Mr. Atlee is a very modest man, with a lot of things to be modest about." Well, SOM was just the opposite. Conceited bunch of bastards, with a lot of things to be conceited about.

Blum: And for money reasons, you left SOM.

Macsai: I left for money reasons, yes, and went to PACE.

Blum: Bill Priestley had left SOM to work at PACE too.

Macsai: Bill Priestley had a lot to do with it. If Bill had not gone to PACE, I would have tried to find a job somewhere else.

50 Blum: Did he precede you at PACE, or did you move with him?

Macsai: No, he preceded me two weeks. He was barely established. He didn’t have a drawing board for me; I used his board. It was wonderful. And that’s where I met Ezra Gordon. He was at PACE Associates. And Herbie Ganz, was our in- house sociologist, who became a big man later.

Blum: Now, was that the first time you ran into a sociologist on staff or being a consultant to an architectural firm?

Macsai: Absolutely inconceivable to me, the whole thing. I was so impressed that they have this sociologist for this new town or group of buildings somewhere in the copper country in Northern Michigan.

Blum: Was it White Plain or White Pine?

Macsai: White Pine, Michigan, on the peninsula.

Blum: What was a sociologist on staff to do?

Macsai: I wasn’t that involved in the design of that whole project. But it was very impressive to have this, you know, sociologist. The other place where I learned a lot and was very impressed, after PACE, I went to Dunbar Builders, you know? And then from Dunbar Builders, I worked for Raymond Loewy, the product designer. And that was another place where I realized that architecture has other components. There, the advertising the product design, it was very…

Blum: You were very close to your first love.

Macsai: Graphic design. Well, they had a graphic department. I used to watch what they do, with my tongue hanging out.

Blum: At that time, were you satisfied to be an architect?

51 Macsai: Yeah, I was satisfied. The dissatisfaction, again, came much later, when I started to do big buildings on my own, and I didn’t like them.

Blum: Oh, and you didn’t like them. What do you mean?

Macsai: Well, you know, you screw up a book jacket, it goes out of print—or a poster. You screw up a tall building, it’s there for a long, long time.

Blum: That’s true.

Macsai: And you hear about it, and you see it, you know? And it hounds you. So I used to deny them and not put them in my brochure until one day a student of mine says, "Professor Macsai, did you do that building?" I said, "Which?" I said, "Where did you find out?" Well, they loved to do that, to embarrass the old man, you know? They loved to do that. So my standard answer was, "I didn’t design it, it was my partner’s design." That’s what you need partners for.

Blum: To attribute all the bad buildings to?

Macsai: To take the blame, right.

Blum: When you were at PACE, what did you work on? I know you weren’t there long. Did you work on the White Pines new town?

Macsai: I worked for a very few weeks on one of the school buildings at White Pine. And then I worked in a factory building.

Blum: For the new town?

Macsai: Not for the town, somewhere in Chicago area. I got a factory job and they needed drafting help, and I was just a young draftsman. I didn’t work as a designer there.

52 Blum: How long did you stay at that job?

Macsai: Four months, five months. I would have stayed there for a long time but I got a call from Roy Schoenbrod, who was an architect and a partner in Hyland Builders; later became Dunbar Builders. They built two flats, four flats, homes. Crap. Real bad buildings. I used to moonlight for them doing drafting at night. And he called me and he said they need a full-time person; field, in- office. He can’t handle it himself anymore. And it was an opportunity to learn how buildings are put together. And I worked for them for a year and a half. Most miserable year…

Blum: Was this Dunbar Builders that you worked for?

Macsai: At that time, it was called Hyland Builders and it became Dunbar Builders. I was a field superintendent, and a draftsman in the afternoon. I was out on the job at seven thirty in the morning, and… My God, those were some of the western suburbs and we did crummy buildings.

Blum: Who designed them?

Macsai: Nobody. My boss saw a house doing well, selling, [so he] went to the foreman. For five bucks, [he] got a set of plans. I copied it.

Blum: And you were the designer?

Macsai: No, I was just a draftsperson. And then I went to Herb Rosenthal, who was the other partner, a tough, rough guy, and I said, "Herb, I want to design one of our houses. You have to let me do one." So he agreed I can design a house. So I designed a house in LaGrange Park. And hundreds of people went through the house because of the Tribune ad, but it didn’t sell. They liked the plan, but they said, "Can you make it look like the one across the street?" With diamond shaped windows on the door and all this shit. My house had a sloping high ceiling, open kitchen. Nice, narrow and vertical siding. It was a

53 modern house. Couldn’t sell it. Couldn’t sell it. It was on the market for two months, couldn’t sell it. At that time, selling was good. Some three hundred people traipsed through, two weekends, from the Tribune ad. Finally, Herb Rosenthal moved in, so it didn’t go wasted. A great lesson to John Macsai. Great lesson. A, avoid doing houses because it’s a tough, miserable market. And then, also, it was a great lesson that you have to know a lot about the market before you touch a house. Either you know the user and it’s a custom- made house for somebody, that’s one thing. But when you do houses for sale, you have to know your market. You cannot design a good house and think people will buy it. It’s a blue-collar neighborhood, LaGrange Park, you know?

Blum: I don’t know the area.

Macsai: They never heard about the word Bauhaus. I mean, this is a working class neighborhood. So you don’t go with the kind of house I designed, if you want to sell them.

Blum: So if you had that opportunity today, would you design a very modest, traditional house for that market?

Macsai: No, if I had the opportunity, I wouldn’t do it. I would say, "I’m the wrong architect for it. Really, the wrong architect." Or, if I would be very money- hungry and I wouldn’t have any savings, and I need the money desperately, I would study who it is for—I’d do a compromise, and never put my name on it. I mean, I’m enough of a compromiser. I just don’t want to be known as one.

Blum: Yeah. I see. Well. So when you were at Hyland, or Dunbar Builders, you were there for what, two years?

Macsai: Year and a half.

Blum: And you drew these plans?

54 Macsai: No, I was on the job at seven-thirty in the morning. I had eight masons and twelve carpenters under me. I had to watch what they do. I have to make sure that everything is coordinated, the kitchen cabinets arrive, the plumber shows up. I mean, it was a strenuous job. At four o’clock, I was back in the office. I’d make some drawings, work into the evening.

Blum: So were you a field supervisor?

Macsai: I was the staff architect, who handles field as well as drawings. I used to go to City Hall with an envelope and money in it to bribe… For a building permit. I had five-dollar bills to pay off the cops in LaGrange Park, who showed up inevitably because we broke some sidewalk when the truck drove through it. We replaced it eventually. I mean, that was part of it. But until it was replaced, every cop was willing to close their eyes for five bucks.

Blum: Was that an essential part of being an effective architect?

Macsai: Right. I mean, it was not elite architecture.

Blum: Why did you decide to work for Hyland Builders?

Macsai: I felt at that time that I really need to know how a building goes together, how financing works.

Blum: You didn’t have a sense of that or an opportunity to learn about that at PACE?

Macsai: No. These large firms have specialists who go out in the field, you know. At SOM it looked like I will have an opportunity eventually. But I left there because of money.

Blum: Did Bob Diamant stay there?

55 Macsai: Bob Diamant stayed there. Bob has what I call a reinforced concrete buttock.

Blum: Pardon me?

Macsai: Reinforced concrete buttock. He set it out, though he was unhappy for a long time. And then he underwent a metamorphosis. They made him a partner and Bob lost his sense of humor about SOM. That can happen. I remember when we were there we talked about Gordon Bunshaft, that dictating bastard. But when he became a partner, suddenly it became "Gordon," and he couldn’t pick on him anymore. You know, when you become important and serious about it, when you lose your critical sense. And that happened to my friend Bob. What SOM did was always perfection in his eyes, and to laugh at SOM was too threatening to him, I guess.

Blum: For him there must have been other rewards.

Macsai: Money. Well, I would not lose my sense of humor. [I] tell you, your sense of humor and your ability to be ironic about the world, to me, is as important as health. No money should buy that. I mean, my freedom of being critical of anybody, including myself, and being able to laugh at anybody, including myself, is one of the most precious possessions you have, besides your loved ones. Now, Bob, unfortunately, lost it. He took that firm so seriously. Too seriously. And listen, his career was fantastic there, you know? He became a full partner and made a lot of money when the time was good. And he enjoyed himself.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Blum: John, we’ve sort of talked up and back about the four years you spent in Chicago at Holabird and Root, SOM, and PACE and a bit about Hyland Builders, where you got construction experience. With all of this in your head you began to know what architecture was all about, designing was all about, supervising a job on the site. You did an about face, it seems to me. And you went to work for an industrial designer. How did that happen?

56 Macsai: I’ll tell you what happened. I got a call from Raymond Loewy Associates. They called me. Would I like to join them? How did they hear about me? They saw some of my renderings. And they wanted, in the architecture department, somebody who can draw.

Blum: They had an architecture department?

Macsai: They had an architecture department, Raymond Loewy Associates. The head of the department was Ray Stuermer. Ray was a lovely guy. Later, he became a professor at Champaign. And he called me. At that time, I was at Dunbar Builders. I thought it was perfect timing; I was eager to leave. I figured I learned as much as I could building these ugly, crummy buildings which we did. So I went over to Raymond Loewy to work in the architectural department. It wasn’t pure architecture, because we didn’t do working drawings; we only did design drawing. And then some other firm in Chicago—it was farmed out—did the working drawings. We only did design.

Blum: Well, what was the difference?

Macsai: Well, design is just, you know, plans and how the building looks; but putting it together, the technical drawings, the blueprints, that was done by other firms.

Blum: When you got this call from Ray Stuermer to come to work at Raymond Loewy, you said you were sort of fed up with Dunbar Builders, had you considered going back to any one of the three firms you had formerly worked for?

Blum: No. You don’t go back. I somehow never believed in that. And I like to try new things. I think it’s wonderful when they call you. I figured, What can I lose? And I was there for about a year and a half. And I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was not doing architecture, I was doing architecture products.

57 Formica, we selected new colors and patterns for Formica. I designed new ceiling tile patterns for Celotex. I was involved in finding new uses for Masonite, new architectural uses. The only building I ever designed there was the Chicago Yacht Club, which never went ahead, which would have been so much better than that crap they built. Anyhow, now, one day at Raymond Loewy, my boss comes in and he says, "I’m leaving…"

Blum: Your boss?

Macsai: Ray Stuermer. Ray said, "I’m leaving. I’m going to open my own office. And I need a partner to run the office. How would you like to be a 20 percent partner?" Well, you know, here it is, an immigrant doesn’t have any connections, didn’t go to school here, how often do I have a chance like that? So I said, "I’d love it." Next month, you know, I was eager to see our new office—because it was being remodeled—and see my name on the door. So I went there, 160 North Dearborn, I think it’s where the Civic Center is now and I walk in and I see, on the glass, lettered, Stuermer, Hausner and Macsai. So I went back to the office, I said, "Ray, who the hell is Hausner?" "Oh," he says, "I decided we need him, too." But he says, "You’ll get your twenty percent, he gets twenty, and I keep sixty." Turned out to be Bob Hausner, was the chief of design at Shaw, Metz and Dolio. He has done a lot of high-rise buildings for Shaw, Metz and Dolio. And he was also very well-connected. Handsome, very friendly, the nicest WASP in the world. Knew everybody on the North Shore. So I finally met him, and we decided we’ll try it. He liked me, I liked him. Well, what happened, after a while, we realized that we don’t like Ray anymore.

Blum: You don’t like Ray, the person who organized the firm?

Macsai: Ray Stuermer. Why? Because the only job Ray brought in was an equipment manufacturing company. They did kitchen equipment. And we did restaurant interiors. And frankly, for restaurant interiors, I’m convinced you don’t need an architect. You need interior decorators or bullshit artists to create a mood. You know, it’s like theater, stage sets. That’s what restaurants

58 are—they are not architecture. And after doing one… I was working on the Blackhawk [Restaurant] on Wabash Avenue.

Blum: Oh, yes.

Macsai: The open grill with the hood over it, that was my design. And Hausner, on the other hand, had a lot of connection with developers who did high- rises—among them, John Mack and Ray Sher of Lakeshore Management. And they were so happy to see Hausner open his own office, they said, "Okay, enough of Al Shaw, we have to support Bob." And they were totally delighted that Bob had the intelligence and liberalness to find a nice Jewish partner. So we left.

Blum: How did it work between the two of you?

Macsai: It became Hausner and Macsai. At the beginning, Bob brought in all the jobs; I had no connections. So he had eighty percent, I had twenty. And then as we grew—we changed it every year, and at one point, really, it was fifty-fifty, the way we brought in the jobs, so we became fifty-fifty partners. And we were partners for fifteen years. He was a really wonderful guy. Later, I was somewhat sorry that we broke it up. But it had to be broken up, the partnership, because an interesting thing happened. We got busy, we got all kinds of awards, we got large commissions. And I and my silent partner, a Hungarian, Al Hidvegi…

Blum: Where did he fit into all of this?

Macsai: He’s a good friend, and he’s brilliant. And it turned out to be that every Saturday, and weekday evenings, Al and I were working in the office, and Bob was at home building his house, or playing polo with one of his North Shore friends. Now, that would be wonderful if, out of the polo playing, there will be connections and jobs. Turns out to be that Bob was a close friend of Gaylord Donnelley, who was chairman of the University of Chicago trustees. But John Macsai, the little Jewish immigrant, got the University of

59 Chicago as a client. So there is something wrong there, right?

Blum: Was the U of C job the result of a competition?

Macsai: No, it was a result of my being active in Hyde Park and South Shore in social action. And then John Macsai got some hospital work. And turned out to be Bob Hausner got, from that point on, all the Jewish developers. It was a total role change.

Blum: It was curious, how the lines of influence developed.

Macsai: Now, I am convinced that we like to appeal to a social, economic group we have not ourselves come from, you know? So Bob always had admired these developers, who made money. And I mean, he got along wonderfully—they adored him, too. Listen, these Jewish developers, here is this tall, blonde, blue-eyed, WASP giant and they loved him. You know, he was a very nice guy. But in the end, it was just unfair that we were working like demons, and at five o’clock he went home. Saturday, occasionally, he called in, "How you guys doing?"

Blum: Were you feeling used?

Macsai: I mean, he never worked in the evening, never worked on weekends. Finally, it broke up. It broke up because I had this black architect, Wendell Campbell. And he did not have an office. At that time that was the period of "black is beautiful," okay? There were a lot of opportunities for blacks, if they could perform. Anyhow, he needed somebody, an office. So Hausner and Macsai, he hired on several buildings, which we did together. And then when my problems with Bob started, Wendell heard about it, and he says, "Hey, why don’t the two of us…?" And it sounded good. He gets all the work, and I run the office. The problem, really, was that you don’t practice architecture fifteen years, like I did, develop connections, and don’t get any more work. I think Wendell resented all the work I brought in. Isn’t that stupid? He had to bring in the work. It really hurt him when he didn’t bring in the work.

60 Blum: Well, you and Campbell were partners for five years.

Macsai: Four, four-and-a-half, five, yeah.

Blum: We went so quickly through about twenty years. May we go back to Raymond Loewy?

Macsai: Yes, we can. So what would you like to know about Raymond Loewy?

Blum: Were you in Raymond Loewy’s Chicago office. And you say you were developing products related to architecture. Was Raymond Loewy in this office?

Macsai: No, he was in New York. He visited the office. He came to the Christmas party. Came in the morning of the party, walked around the office, stopped by at everybody’s table, and then in the evening at the Chicago Yacht Club—now at the Belmont Harbor Yacht Club—he appeared, and called everybody by name, "Mrs. Macsai."

Blum: You mean he came to meet you in the afternoon?

Macsai: He came to meet everybody in the morning at the office. In the evening at the club, he knew everybody’s name.

Blum: That is impressive.

Macsai: Yeah. He was an amazing man. All senior designers or product executives, they called them, like I was, had to fill out a sheet every Friday which was airmailed to him. We described briefly what we are working on. It was a very simplistic thing. Why? Mr. Loewy was flying somewhere—to Paris, to wherever—one day, and next to him in first class was a gentleman who was so delighted to find out that his name is Raymond Loewy, because he says, "I am one of your clients," and Loewy didn’t know about it. And from that time

61 on, he had to know who was the client, who is working on the job, who is in charge, and what’s happening, very briefly.

Blum: Well, it was very intelligent management.

Macsai: Oh, he was a supreme manager.

Blum: He was supposed to have been a very flamboyant character. How would you describe him?

Macsai: As a flamboyant character. He had these very long tab collars, and a carnation, and cuffs… I mean, he was elegant. And he’d just gotten married to Viola, age twenty-nine, when I was there, or just a year before, and Viola became pregnant. I mean, at sixty-three, he had a kid, finally. He was a kind of a legend, I think, Mr. Loewy. What else can I say? He was a very powerful designer. The firm has done some great work.

Blum: What were some of their products?

Macsai: The greatest was the Studebaker car, the little 1952 Studebaker. I did some furniture design at Loewy’s. That was a quite devastating experience.

Blum: Would you describe the experience?

Macsai: I forget the name of the company—it will come to me later—a low cost furniture company, who saw how much Herman Miller and Knoll are sought after, so they wanted to come out with a cheap line of modern furniture. Well, we eliminated all the mitered corners, and we just lapped the corners; we eliminated the drawer fronts; we allowed the joints to be seen; and we simplified it. It was really a very good line. But it wasn’t selling.

Blum: If it was pretty much the same design and you just cut your corners in certain craftsman-like ways, why wasn’t it selling?

62 Macsai: Yeah. Why wasn’t it selling? Mr. Loewy asked the same question. He said, "It’s not selling because these stupid salesmen don’t know how, and to whom, to sell a modern product." So we had some training sessions for the salesmen. I mean, Loewy was brilliant. And even that did not do much good. People generally don’t like modern stuff.

Blum: Well, why were they buying Knoll and Herman Miller?

Macsai: Well, it’s a very small group. It’s a very small, select group, okay? Like a very small group would wear the rings like you have. They would have little diamonds and little crap, you know? And the furniture, too. What happened, happened to the Studebaker car. The furniture company said, "You know, can you make it a little jazzier? Instead of wire handles, give it a little flair." Instead of chrome, use brass, so it’s polished. And then the leg of the furniture, which was a straight tube, [they] said, "Can you make it tapered? And make it out of wood, but the end of it out of brass." And just like the Studebaker car got crapped up with chrome, the furniture got ruined. And that was a great lesson for me.

Blum: And the lesson was…?

Macsai: The lesson was, find out the market before you design something.

Blum: Well, you learned that lesson, I thought, with the home that you that you built for Hyland Builders, or Dunbar Builders.

Macsai: Obviously, I did not. Well, no, I just assumed that Raymond Loewy, or maybe my boss, Stuermer, somebody had analyzed the market. I was just a designer, you know, in this firm. Later, the two together was a very good lesson to find out what the market is. You don’t have to serve the market, but before you decide whether you serve it or not, you have to find out what it is.

Blum: I understand.

63 Macsai: And I don’t know how you could have found out. Loewy was very good at marketing. But obviously, he made mistakes, too. Or there is no way to turn around the taste of a lot of people with money. I remember we designed—not "we," but the graphic design department—a new bottle for a new beer company. The wrapping, the label, and the bottle cap, and the shape of the bottle. And suddenly, we had shelving brought in the office, and every beer in Chicago was put up there because the only way you test the visual effectiveness of a new design is on the rack, as it will be in the liquor store.

Blum: I see.

Macsai: So Loewy did all that. Loewy also had a wonderful, wonderful way of making money. Only Loewy could get by with it, nobody else. He went to a client and said, "On your job, we estimate we’d like to make a ten-thousand dollar profit. That’s your retainer. And then we just bill you for the hours, what we put in. And we’d be happy to bill you weekly, bi-weekly, so you know the exact hours, that we are not fudging." What a great idea, getting the profit in advance.

Blum: And then he billed time and material?

Macsai: Exactly.

Blum: That is a unique way, I think.

Macsai: I never heard it. Well, Loewy was a unique person, a very unique guy. And everybody at the Loewy office was a yachtsman, you know? They owned boats, everybody, all the executives. Interesting group of people.

Blum: How large was his Chicago office?

Macsai: Well, it was at 444 North Michigan. The building has been torn down since. We were about fifty people.

64 Blum: Oh, that was a big office.

Macsai: Now, that was graphics, product, and architecture. That’s three departments. Architecture was small. The architecture department started years ago, [when] Loewy designed the logo, IH, for International Harvester. And the color scheme and everything.

Blum: How did designing a logo lead to the creation of an architecture department?

Macsai: Loewy discovered that these nice logos don’t look very good on the crummy buildings they have. So he suggested that Loewy design a new plant for them. And we did all the International Harvester work.

Blum: So he went from the sign to the building? And that’s when his architecture department came into being?

Macsai: Started, right. The big office was in New York. New York City had the big office, some hundred people. And they had a small office in Los Angeles for department stores. They did a good number of department store interiors. And the store interiors, interestingly, were not under architecture, but they were all over. We did some interiors. The architecture group had one interiors account—it was Florsheim. We did all the Florsheim stores.

Blum: Did you think it was curious that you, an architect, were not put into the architecture department?

Macsai: I was in the architecture department.

Blum: Oh, I thought you said you were in product design.

Macsai: But architecture and architecture product was the same. Then there was a product department, which did the automobiles, the scales, the dinnerware, Rosenthal china—which, by the way, was partially owned by Mr. Loewy.

65 Blum: Oh, Loewy owned Rosenthal?

Macsai: The Rosenthal family and Loewy owned it together.

Blum: Was he working on any of his NASA designs? Didn’t he design the NASA logo?

Macsai: That must have been done in New York.

Blum: Oh, I see.

Macsai: You know, while I very much enjoyed the atmosphere and the nice treatment—they were lovely people, and paid a good deal better than architectural offices.

Blum: Did it?

Macsai: That helped, too.

Blum: Didn’t that convince you to stay in that line of work?

Macsai: Not enough. I really must tell you that it appealed to me to do buildings. And when that issue came with Stuermer and Hausner, I was ready for it. So that was a major change in my life, and I had my own office.

Blum: Did you keep in touch with the pulse of architecture while you were with the Raymond Loewy office?

Macsai: Absolutely. Well, you know, you gossip, have coffee, or have a drink with all your co-workers. I kept up all the gossip at SOM. Just like now, I am keeping up all the gossip at OWP&P.

Blum: I see.

66 Macsai: And when you are gone from a place, you are far more a safe recipient of gossip than when you are there, because everybody likes to bitch about somebody—not in his or her face, but to a third party.

Blum: Was Ray Stuermer a licensed architect?

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: Where did you meet?

Macsai: I met him because he called me at Dunbar Builders He saw a rendering and saw my name, and traced me down.

Blum: Oh, you didn’t know him before?

Macsai: Not from anything. He called me and he says, "I saw your renderings, they are good. How would you like to work for Raymond Loewy?" I said, "What?" I knew about Loewy, because I knew somebody who worked in the New York office. I said, "Well, let’s talk about it." I went over the next day, and that’s it. It was okay. It was not my greatest experience. It wasn’t as exciting an experience as SOM, in that respect, but it was a variety.

Blum: Well, it seems to me, as you speak about being at several architectural offices, working with a builder, now being with a product design office—industrial design—that you were taking in many things in a very short period of time.

Macsai: Those were good formative years.

Blum: Were you and Bob Diamant partners for a short time in 1955?

Macsai: No, we were not partners, but did some work together. First, as students who had just graduated from Miami University, we entered… The Chicago Tribune had a competition every year for interiors. And we won one. It really was not an important competition. And then, you know, like all architects, we did

67 some moonlighting. And I got a house commission. I did all those things with Bob. Bob and I did a house in Highland Park for the Pauls, Stanley and Arlene Paul. And they still live in it. Last year, Stanley called me and he says, "My roof is leaking." I said, "Call a goddamn roofer." After forty-five years, it should leak.

Blum: Now, you built that house with Bob Diamant. Was Stanley Paul your connection?

Macsai: Yes, it was my connection. He was the art director for the Buchen Company, advertising agency. And he hired me to do some illustrations for one of the Buchen Company’s products because he also saw some of my renderings.

Blum: I see.

Macsai: And I did some renderings of this product for the Buchen Company. I’ll never forget it. He asked me, says, "How much is one of those renderings?" I said, "About hundred-fifty dollars." He says, "Four-hundred. If I tell the client it’s hundred-fifty, they won’t think it’s good enough. We’ll make it four- hundred, then they’ll think it’s very good." That was the advertising world.

Blum: Well, you were learning a lot, in many ways.

Macsai: Yeah. Anyhow, so then we did a house for my brother-in-law, Gerry’s sister’s husband [Dr. Benjamin Gans]. I did that together with Bob Diamant. Just before I left Raymond Loewy, I was doing well with the renderings as a side business. And I had a conversation with Bob. I said, "You know, I’ll keep doing my renderings, and you keep your job at SOM, and we’ll start an office. I could quit here at Loewy’s and just do renderings. So I’ll put in my rendering income, you put in your SOM income, and we’ll work together on jobs we can get on weekends, et cetera, et cetera." He didn’t want to take the chance.

Blum: Did SOM frown on moonlighting like that?

68 Macsai: I think it bothered him. It interfered with his sense of loyalty, I think. I don’t know. And also, he didn’t want to chance giving up his… Because eventually, the idea was that once we get busy, you quit at SOM, and I continue the rendering, but bring in the money. I made more money doing renderings than he made at SOM—I can tell you that—at that time. Later, he became a partner and made a lot of money. But at that time, his weekly salary must have been hundred-forty dollars, and I got, for any rendering I did, two-hundred-fifty to four-hundred dollars. And I could do a rendering a day, if I had enough clients.

Blum: Did you and Bob actually open an office, or was this just a weekend agreement?

Macsai: We had a weekend agreement. And it never went ahead, because you know, this idea, he wanted to just stay at SOM, and do together the occasional house job, which we got.

Blum: So it was sort of an informal agreement.

Macsai: Informal, exactly. Exactly. I met my wife through Bob’s first wife. Charlotte Diamant, who passed away. She was the sorority sister—well, at that time, U of C had no sororities—the club sister of Gerry’s. And Bob and I roomed together in Hyde Park. That’s when I had my auto accident. I was in a cast, and I was released from the hospital, and Bob called and said, "Charlotte has asked me if you would like to join us Monday at a lecture at KAM." And I said, "Tell Charlotte I’ll join you if she gets me a date."

Blum: You needed a date to go to listen to a lecture?

Macsai: Absolutely. And they roped my wife into going. I looked, literally, like the Michelin man, like the Michelin tire man.

Blum: Did you have a brace on?

69 Macsai: I had a body cast. A body cast. And we always joke that she really married me because she expected a major settlement, because I sued the driver who hit me. I had a fractured spine. I mean, it was serious. And, well, it turned out to be that four years later, when I finally collected six grand, that’s all, two went to the lawyer, two went to the doctor, and for two thousand, we got a good hi-fi set.

Blum: For two thousand, you got a very good life. You’ve been married for over fifty years. Do you think it’ll last?

Macsai: I guess so.

Blum: Does the name Hans Polgar mean anything to you?

Macsai: Hans? That’s the hypnotist?

Blum: I don’t know.

Macsai: His name is Franz Polgar, he’s a hypnotist. Franz Polgar was the evening program at KAM.

Blum: When you met your wife?

Macsai: Yes. He was a famous Hungarian hypnotist.

Blum: So how long did your informal arrangement with Bob Diamant last?

Macsai: Two, three years.

Blum: And this was while you were still at Loewy, and then broke off?

Macsai: That’s right. Yes.

70 Blum: Then Stuermer, Hausner and Macsai was founded.

Macsai: That lasted only about four months, five months. We started in late 1954, and by March 1955, it was Hausner and Macsai. It was very short-term. Very short-term, less than half a year. It didn’t work out.

Blum: What did Ray Stuermer do?

Macsai: He was hustling business, you know, the restaurant business. And he expected us to, you know, do the design and the drawings. He spent a lot of time outside the office. And we both hated these goddamn restaurant jobs. As I said, it’s not a very exciting work for architects, okay? And Bob, on the other hand, had the promise of two houses, two good modern houses, and a high-rise building, 1150 Lake Shore Drive.

Blum: So he had some jobs lined up.

Macsai: And when he got the call from John Mack, from Lakeshore Management, that 1150 is a go, that’s when we told Ray, "You’re not interested in construction jobs, you’re interested in interiors. We really should split." And he readily went along with it. So that’s when we moved to 104 South Michigan, up [to] the old SOM and Frank Lloyd Wright attic.

Blum: When was 1150 Lake Shore Drive completed? 1959?

Macsai: It was completed in 1958. By 1959, we were sued. We had suits on most of our buildings. I will tell you about it.

Blum: All right. So the first commission as your new office was 1150 Lake Shore Drive?

Macsai: First big commission, yes, was 1150 Lake Shore Drive. Yeah. It was very interesting, because the basic idea to curve the building was a good one. Our client wanted to buy the north corner, also. So this would have been a pair of

71 curved buildings; one on the south corner and one on the north corner.

Blum: Oh, do you mean with Division Street running west between the two?

Macsai: Yes, like a gateway. Anyhow, Mack never could get the north property, which is truly a mistake to do half of something that will be a pair. It’s happening many places. It happened in the city. Anyhow, that was our first building. And it was a very interesting building.

Blum: There was an old mansion on that site that you had to take down.

Macsai: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t remember it. Honestly, I don’t remember that. The design of 1150 was predominantly Bob Hausner’s. He was working and I was helping, so my memory is not as good as it should be.

Blum: That was a very important stretch of Lake Shore Drive, important in Chicago. Why did you break the streetscape, where all the façades are rectangular and face the lake on the east?

Macsai: Well, now it looks a mistake, but I’ll tell you why. We thought that we could get the north corner, number one, so that would be a gateway to the Near North Side and Old Town. That was one reason. The other reason is more apartments can see the lake this way than if we had a straight building.

Blum: Not knowing that two buildings were planned but only one was executed, it was always my impression that the facade curve was so more people would have a lake view.

Macsai: Two reasons. Lake view was one reason. The other was the hope that, you know, this will be a pair. There’re some very excellent pairs in Chicago, from [an] urban design point of view. You know, one of them is 104 South Michigan, and across the street, the University Club—both have beautiful pointed roofs. The other is the northern extension of the Congress Hotel, where the architecture beautifully echoed, you know, the Auditorium

72 building. Beautifully echoed it. I don’t even know who was the architect. So that there are pairs a lot of places. But I think they should only be done when you own both properties, because Michael Gelick’s building just north of the river, you know, the one which is turned forty-five degrees, looks stupid turned forty-five degrees. Why? Because—nobody knows [but] I know—there was supposed to be another building turned forty-five degrees, so the two would echo each other, kind of speak across the street. But the second one never went ahead. You know? The second one became, I think, the Sheraton hotel. Anyhow, there is a danger of doing this. You can only do it when you control the land. And somehow or other, land speculation, land prices, and the way the market goes in land acquisition is more fundamentally influencing architecture than almost anything else, next to financing.

Blum: Do I remember that 1150 was originally blue?

Macsai: And how. What a terrible mistake. Thank God they painted it.

Blum: Why blue?

Macsai: Why color? Okay. The owner wanted the building to stand out, okay? And wanted to see some brick samples. And like an idiot… We had some beautiful orange, kind of Swedish red, orange ocher, reddish bricks, and we brought along a catalogue of glazed brick samples. And the owner loved it. And that was it. And also, besides the failure of the shape and the wrong color, I also should feel guilty about the air conditioning, because that was the first building in Chicago which had through-the-wall air conditioning. I went to New York to study, because in New York they did it first. And I thought, What a great idea, economically and everything. But it looks like shit. It does.

Blum: Well, many other buildings have the same system. It speaks to a time in our construction history.

73 Macsai: Yes, I know, but it still looks pockmarked. It’s the wrong time. Anyhow, so that’s the story of that building. But there are many other stories about that building.

Blum: What’s another story?

Macsai: Well, that was the building, the first building on which the Structural Work Act, was rejuvenated.

Blum: Would you please explain that?

Macsai: The State of Illinois had an old 1906 law, that when a workman is hurt, Workman’s Comp is not enough. The owner, the contractor, the sub- contractor, and the architect are responsible for the safety of the workmen. Nobody ever used this. On our job, one of the carpenters got hit by the hoist, was thrown, and became a vegetable. Had he died, we would have been better off, because Workman’s Comp would have taken care of [him]. But since he became a vegetable, they sued. And some smart-ass lawyer uncovered this act, which was never used by the legal profession. It was our building where it was first rejuvenated, fifty years later. And they sued us for $375,000. And the first week, the owner was dismissed. So there was the architect, contractor, and the sub-contractor holding the bag. It was a nightmare.

Blum: So what was the final resolution of this?

Macsai: Courts dropped us out of the suit. The courts realized that the architect was not responsible.

Blum: So was it the contractor that stood responsible?

Macsai: The contractor and the sub-contractor settled it, [for] $200,000. In 1959, that was a lot of money.

74 Blum: Well, who is responsible when someone gets injured in a construction job?

Macsai: That depends on how somebody gets injured, but certainly, the architect is not. All architecture contracts say that the safety of workers, we have nothing to do with that at all. That’s the general contractor’s problem, to provide safe, clean space for workmen, not the architect’s. We don’t deal with the means of construction. As I always say in jest, if they can pour concrete and instead of using good cement, they use ground-up human skulls, I couldn’t give a damn as long as the concrete sets up properly. We are not the guardians of safety during construction. We are the guardians of public safety, that the building stands up and it functions in a secure way, but the method of construction is not our responsibility.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Macsai: As I mentioned, the courts eventually dismissed us. But it took us about $2,500 legal fee till we got to that point. So when I said that throughout my whole career I was always sued, it was because of the Structural Work Act. And that was the most common lawsuit against architects. Finally, it was repudiated. It’s not a law anymore, thank God. None of the cases were decided holding us responsible. We usually were dismissed. But the courts first wanted fact-finding. Why? Because most judges are political hacks, and they are really not brilliant people. And they are cowards, because they should have known that [the] architect is not responsible, he should be dismissed, period. No, they want a little fact-finding. I mean, the law profession enjoys it, because in the meantime, they run up a bill. But now, luckily, that does not exist. But that law was rejuvenated on that building.

Blum: At the time, was 1150 considered a success?

Macsai: Very much a success. Yeah, it got an AIA [American Institute of Architects] award. It was built within budget. It rented extremely well. Extremely well. And we got several more jobs from Lakeshore Management. We did 1240 Lake Shore Drive. We did some motels for them. Did one in Park Ridge, the

75 Park Ridge Inn, which is now an elderly facility. Anyhow, they became a good client.

Blum: With 1150 under your belt, you went on for the next ten years to do many apartment buildings on the Gold Coast and further north on Marine Drive and Sheridan Road. And they were all high-rise or mid-rise housing.

Macsai: We did a lot of buildings. That’s right, predominantly housing. That was at least fifty to sixty percent of our practice. We had university jobs, factories, hotels and we had hospital work, but this was our bread and butter.

Blum: Did you consider a hotel like the Water Tower Inn, like a residential job?

Macsai: Well, kind of in between. No, not really a residential job. But we had some hotels. We did the Water Tower Inn; we had the Bel Air East and the Diplomat Motel in St. Louis; the Wilshire Inn in Beverly Hills, California; the Hyatt in Lincolnwood, Illinois.

Blum: Oh. Was this all with the same developer?

Macsai: No, different developers.

Blum: When you were doing the Water Tower Inn, did the site, one that was very important historically, did that put additional pressure on you to design something special for that site?

Macsai: Only in a sense that… Well, it created all kinds of problems. In a way, the building should go north-south, instead of east-west, because that way it would have closed the square beautifully. But this way, all the hotel rooms had a diagonal view of Michigan Avenue and the lake. So you compromise. The one place where I think the building uniquely respected that location, which the current building really does not, is that it was kept low—though we could have gone higher—not to dwarf the Water Tower. But what happened since, you know, to Michigan Avenue, Michigan Avenue lost that

76 boulevard feeling and it became a canyon among these one-uglier-than-the- other high-rises. You know, the Hyatt is dwarfing it. It’s just too big.

Blum: Well, how did your solution to run the building east-west emerge, if you think it should’ve run north-south?

Macsai: Because if you make it north-south, the west hotel rooms don’t see the lake at all. So there was very little choice, if you respect what the hotel client really wants.

Blum: With the Water Tower Inn, am I mistaken to think there was a lawsuit on that building?

Macsai: Yes, there is a lawsuit on every building, practically. Here, it wasn’t a workman who got hurt, it was a woman.

Blum: Was she a pedestrian who fell off a curb or something?

Macsai: A pedestrian, exactly. What happened, there was a garage ramp right on the front of the building, which went down and up, and then you could drive down and turn into the garage. At the edge—you know, where the ramp starts from zero, it becomes six inches, ten inches, et cetera—when it’s more than twelve inches, you have to have a railing so people don’t step off and fall. Instead of a railing, we had these 250-pound, 300-pound containers of plantings. There was a series of planters there. Well, the management didn’t know the purpose of these planters. They moved them, without telling us, or providing another barricade there. So some lady stepped out, and broke her rib and one arm, and filed a suit. And again, we were dismissed by the court, because we could prove that when the accident happened, the architecture design was changed. I had a lot of these things. Harbor House, which is truly my favorite building I got sued about twelve years after it was built. I got a summons that the door of the valet shop hit somebody—it illegally swings out in the corridor. The guy broke his nose. It was a laundry deliveryman. I didn’t recall a valet shop in that building. So I went out to see. Somebody

77 remodeled the building, and—the boiler room was too big, it was very spacious—took part of the boiler room, made it into a valet shop. The door, which opened out, which was operable only with [a] key for the engineer, now suddenly became a public door. And nobody bothered putting a view panel into it. And it indeed hit some deliveryman.

Blum: So it was the remodeling that was at fault?

Macsai: Exactly. This was another thing that we were sued for a huge sum, and we were dismissed. But again, it cost me, I think, $4,000 legal fee.

Blum: Is this something that happens…

Macsai: Happens all the time. Any architect who is not sued quite some times is not doing buildings. You know, one of the reasons I merged into OWP&P had to do with insurance. I carried a million dollar coverage, with $25,000 deductible. My annual premium was between forty and fifty-thousand dollars. In 1989, I thought, maybe I should retire: paint, teach, just do something else. And I discovered that it’s not so easy. First of all, I had to let all these wonderful human beings who worked for me, to let them go, without a job. That’s not my operation. But the most important was I found out that for ten more years, I am responsible for all my work. And to buy a ten-year tail, they call it, coverage, costs four years of premium. That’s $200,000. I couldn’t retire with a $200,000 out-of-pocket obligation. When I merged with OWP&P, they took over all the responsibility. But the single most expensive item in an architectural office—after producing the drawings and after payroll—is rent and professional liability insurance. No question about it.

Blum: Just like doctors.

Macsai: No, we pay more than doctors. My internist at that time, I remember, was crying on my shoulder. I said, "Hey, I pay more." Doctors are not sued that often because it’s very hard to prove medical malpractice. I’ll tell you why

78 architects are sued so often. Because everybody thinks he’s an architect, and [that] they understand the process much more. Laymen do not understand medicine. That’s the reason doctors are paid so well, it’s mystery. It’s the magician who cures you, okay? Just like the lawyer who understands the incredible bypasses of the court system. So one saves your life, the other saves your ass from jail. So they both overcharge incredibly. Architecture, everybody understands architecture enough because they had a garage addition or put in a nail to hang a panel. So an architect is a necessary evil, because he’s going to cost extra money two ways—he will charge a fee, and on top of it, he’s going to make the building better. But the better makes it more expensive. So by the time they move in and have to pay the bills, nobody likes architects.

Blum: Do you think that architecture is a well-paid profession?

Macsai: No. No, architects are not grossly, but they’re underpaid, when you compare it with the risks they take. And the biggest problem is that in my kind of practice, which was developers’ high-rise, mid-rise housing, every developer is an exploiter. Like some film producers. Until a movie sells, money only goes out. Until a building is rented or the condos are sold, he is risking a lot of his own money, and the bank’s money and everything. So he wants to minimize his exposure. And he can cajole or convince any architect to go along with him for a minimum amount of money to get the commission. But when the building goes ahead… Now, smart architects invested. They said, "Okay, don’t pay me a fee, but give me a share in the building," and they made a good deal of money that way. I tried to do that, and on the first building I doubled the money. So I figured, This is wonderful, right? The second building, I invested—Bob Hausner and I invested—we lost our underwear, okay? Because we had to put more money and more money, because renting was down. And I realized, hey, it’s not all gravy. I can’t sleep at night risking the firm’s money. You know, if we run out of money, do we pay the draftsmen or rent? I was too much of a chicken. The architects who invested much more courageously, or had to—like Ezra Gordon—they did very well. See, Ezra is not a gambler either. But he invested mainly because

79 his clients were willing to share the profits with him.

Blum: How large was your office?

Macsai: Hausner and Macsai was about twelve people, a dozen people. And Campbell and Macsai was about twenty-five people. And then when I broke up with him and became John Macsai Associates, it was about fifteen, sixteen people—which is the ideal size.

Blum: Did Al Hidvegi work for you?

Macsai: Oh, yes. He was a partner.

Blum: For Hausner and Macsai?

Macsai: Yes, exactly. He came to this country in 1957, after the Hungarian revolution, and came up to the office and was looking for work. So I told him, I said, "Look, why don’t you… I’ll give you a recommendation to SOM. Work for them till you learn English, and then you can work for me."

Blum: Is that what he did?

Macsai: Bruce Graham later accused me, he said, "You sent over all the fucking Hungarian refugees to learn English. And when they became good architects, you took them back." Look, Al Hidvegi is a uniquely competent, brilliant guy. In fact, many of the buildings which I got credit for as the architect, really was heavily his work. I mean, it wasn’t that I didn’t contribute, but it was basically his design and his creation. 1110 Lake Shore Drive was one of those he did practically all by himself. You know, we got along wonderfully, working together. He started to work for us in 1959. And I worked with him up till about four, five years ago. So when you work with somebody that long, you become very efficient. We don’t spend forever about arguing. I mean, we knew that [on] conceptual, we work together. Then he takes over and does the early planning, because he is much better at it and he is more

80 thorough. And when we get to the building exterior, I take over. And so it was a very good cooperation. He is retired now. He came to OWP&P with me. And we went to the same school in Hungary. And also, it always gave me an opportunity to talk about my partners to Al behind their backs because they don’t understand Hungarian. Right there in the office. You know.

Blum: You have said that Harbor House was your favorite. Why Harbor House?

Macsai: Favorite of my own buildings. There are many better buildings. But of the buildings I’ve done, I’d say I can count on one hand the buildings I really am very happy with. Harbor House is one of them, though many things have been changed on it, which are not to my liking. Unfortunately, when high- rise buildings change hands, and a new owner and management come… You think when they repaint the building they would call the stupid architect and find out what he or she would do? No. They’ll let the building committee decide. I mean, ridiculous things happen like that. In fact, there was only one building that later, they made changes, and they called me. I felt so honored, I didn’t charge them.

Blum: Did you tell them that?

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: I suppose it’s understandable. They sort of look for another architect or when there’s a brother-in-law of one of the board members who’s an architect, he takes care of it.

Macsai: Exactly. The brother-in-law is a more common occurrence. See, this is another thing, you would not pick, in most cases, your internist on the basis that he’s related to your sister or brother-in-law. You would pick a doctor on the recommendation that he is a goddamn good doctor, a very successful, good doctor. You could check on him with other doctors. An architect? In most cases, when he’s a relative, and when he can do cheaper work, they use him. But see, this is predominantly the practice in the developer class. Academic

81 buildings, public buildings are not decided to that extent in this way. They are decided the same way, but on a higher level. It’s not the relative, it’s the political friend of the mayor or the congressman. But developers pick relatives, pick young architects, sometimes because they can squeeze them on the fee.

Blum: You worked for, you said, John Mack?

Macsai: John Mack. And Ray Sher, Raymond Sher. They were the clients at Lakeshore Management.

Blum: You did a lot of buildings for them and they obviously were satisfied. How did you work with them?

Macsai: Yeah, they were satisfied. They paid us well.

Blum: Did they dictate much of the program for you?

Macsai: Every developer dictates the program. I mean, they give you the program. The kind of apartment, the size of apartment, the mix of apartments. That they give you. That’s the program, you can’t avoid it. Do they dictate the looks, the style? Not particularly, no. They were not dictatorial. The best apartment client I had—who not only didn’t dictate, but was listening, and he was a friend—was Marvin Romanek, Romanek and Golub later. I did for them 1400 State Parkway, and Harbor House. I mean, Harbor House had enough innovation that most normal clients would not agree to it. But Marv was a courageous young developer, who thought that… And really, he pandered his courage into millions and millions of dollars. He’s a very successful, now retired, multi-millionaire former developer.

Blum: What was innovative about Harbor House?

Macsai: Well, a lot of things. First of all, it’s three elevator towers, there are no corridors. The corridors are as long as you saw here in this building. So every

82 apartment has minimum corridor. Every apartment looks at the lake. There are no apartments which just only face west. About a third of the apartments have split bedrooms, which was the first.

Blum: What is a split bedroom?

Macsai: Well, it used to be that you had, like, kitchen, dining, living room, and then the bedrooms on one side. We had the kitchen, dining, and living room in the center and a bedroom here and a bedroom here…

Blum: On either side.

Macsai: …with a bath on either side. It was an aesthetic reason. I wanted a symmetrical appearance. And we dropped the living room down three steps, which was another innovation. So you walk in and you have this wonderful high ceiling and sunken living room. But in order to maintain the symmetry, I had to put the dining area inside. And my client said—he understood why I’m doing it, and he says, "Okay, let’s see. I think it might appeal to the market." And it had tremendous appeal.

Blum: You can always put the children on the other side.

Macsai: Or two unrelated adults can share the apartment. A lot of stewardesses, friends, elderly, are willing to live together, as long as they have separate bedroom, separate bathroom. They can share kitchen and living room.

Blum: Was that the market that you were appealing to, that you had in mind when you split the bedrooms?

Macsai: No. I had absolutely no idea what the market would be. It was an aesthetic reason. I admit it now.

Blum: Approaching Harbor House from the drive, it looks like a honeycomb.

83 Macsai: Exactly. Well, this was the other one that the columns and the slabs are all pulled out, outward instead of pushed inward. That had two advantages. One, it doesn’t jut into the room. It moves outward, so it creates cleaner interior spaces, and a more powerful, brutal, strong exterior on the outside. Costs money. All of these which I describe to you cost more money. The traditional developer would have told me where to go. Marv Romanek was willing to experiment on a very expensive building. And he was somewhat of a gambler and it worked out very well. The building is very successful. [It] became a condo later.

Blum: Was it originally a rental building?

Macsai: Rental. All of these buildings were rental. Then came the condo conversion mania, and a lot of people made money on that. Bought the building, cosmetically redid it, redid the survey and titles, and—hocus-pocus—became millionaires.

Blum: What was the purpose of the shadowboxes that sort of jut out on—was it the second or third floor?

Macsai: I’m so glad you ask this question.

Blum: What purpose did they serve?

Macsai: We discovered a serious problem when the drawings were finished, that our property doesn’t go, on the west, all the way to the property line, but there is a ten-foot easement for the next property to be able to access it. The lawyers did not discover the easement. It was not shown on the survey. So the lawyer screwed up, the surveyor screwed up. And we realized that we can’t afford to lose ten feet. Somehow or other, the parking we could work out, because it was in the basement. But above it, we had to cut the building ten feet shorter. In order to squeeze in the beauty shop and whatever was on the second floor, we had to jut out.

84 Blum: Oh, I see.

Macsai: That was one price we had to pay. The other price we had to pay, the parking underground had to go out under the sidewalk and parkway. That’s possible in Chicago, but you have to pay for it quite a bit. You buy the underground rights from the city. And we were lucky there were no major utilities under the sidewalk. So we extended the basement to the curb. I mean, we couldn’t bring the whole building forward, but these three elements… It was a compromise solution.

Blum: Well, it is unusual.

Macsai: It’s unusual, right.

Blum: And it seems that your preferred building material is concrete.

Macsai: It’s not my preferred material. Concrete is not the greatest material in the world. But in Chicago, to build high-rises, there are not too many other choices. It’s cheaper than steel, for a multitude of reasons—one being that the high-rise contractors in Chicago all are concrete contractors. So they do their own concrete work. They can do that cheaper than buying and erecting steel. And there are all kinds of other technical reasons, but concrete is a logical choice. What’s wrong with concrete is that unless you do a very good job, or you paint it, it looks filthy after a while. Also, after a rain, it looks brown. But it can be done well. It has to be very good concrete, properly done. And then you don’t even have to paint it—it has this nice, hard, light gray finish. A number of buildings have been done with good quality concrete. It’s just you’re not sure whether the contractor is going to be a good contractor, whether you have control or not. And when the owner is his own contractor, God save me, because then all kinds of shortcuts are created, and if they don’t succeed, usually they blame the architect for it.

Blum: You spoke about buildings paired. Were Malibu and Malibu East yours?

85 Macsai: No, they are by different architects. I did Malibu East, that’s the north one. Malibu, the first Malibu, is kind of a hodgepodge, is not very great architecturally. The connection, yes. We were told to make a connection, so the Malibu people can cut across [the] interior and get down to the Captain’s Walk, which was the commercial area. Yeah. We did that. That was a requirement. And Malibu East is a good enough building—it’s Dunbar Builders, my former employer. They became my client. That’s for Dunbar Builders.

Blum: Is that a building with balconies on all four sides?

Macsai: No, on two sides. North and south, Not on the…

Blum: And the east?

Macsai: In the east, but not on the west. It’s a kind of a solid wall on the west. We needed that solid wall to rigidify the building.

Blum: What about the University of Chicago jobs? How many buildings did you do for them?

Macsai: We did the National Opinion Research Center, and then we did the High Energy Physics building, and then we did the Social Services Center, and then we did the gateway to the new athletic field, and then a large number of remodelings: zoology department, Hitchcock Hall, Snell Hall for women, and a lot of departments in the hospital.

Blum: It sounds like the U of C was like an annuity for you.

Macsai: It sure was. And sure is now for OWP&P. They are doing a lot of remodeling at the hospital. It’s very interesting how I got those jobs.

Blum: How did you? Well, I know you lived on the South Side.

86 Macsai: Yeah, I was very involved in social action. And also, I was vice-president of the South Shore Commission. The executive director, Dick Jaffee, was also the assistant to the director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. So when they decided to build their own building and move out of the brownstone or wherever they were, he needed an architect. So he called me because we were involved, you know, through the South Shore Commission. He says, "How would you like to do it?" I said, "I’d love to do it." He says, "But you have to be approved by the university architect." I said, "I don’t know him." He says, "Try to meet him."

Blum: Who was he?

Macsai: Well, Lee Jones was the guy. A wonderful guy. So how do you meet him? You call him and knock on the door? That’s not… You need an introduction. Yeah, you need an introduction. So I knew who are the contractors who do work at the university. And one of them, George Sollitt, I called, I said, "Look, you guys, can you arrange a lunch where I can meet Lee Jones?" So he says, "Better than lunch, we’ll have lunch on the yacht." George Sollitt owned a yacht in Monroe Harbor. So one afternoon they invited him, and as a coincidence, I was invited. I met Lee Jones, and told him how good we are. He was a trustworthy soul. So when next week, my name came up from NORC, that they would like to hire me as the architect, Lee remembered. Just thought you know, the charming Hungarian, or whatever he did.

Blum: Did you ever tell him that it was all plotted and planned?

Macsai: Yes, yes. Lee and I became good friends. [He] passed away since. [He] was a wonderful guy. I must tell you the nice thing in my career, there were a lot of clients who left me because they didn’t like my work, or they thought I overcharged. But I don’t think anybody, client, contractor, anybody, severed connections with me because they didn’t like me as a person. I get along very well with people.

Blum: Do you think there were jobs you didn’t get because you were Jewish,

87 because you had an accent? Do you think there was any—that played a part in any selection?

Macsai: Oh, no, no. In fact, being Jewish was very good, in some respects.

Blum: How did that work?

Macsai: At the university, they didn’t give a damn. Didn’t care. I also got work from the Jewish Federation, one job, the Lieberman Geriatric Health Centre. That started me on the whole gerontological planning. That was my first elderly job.

Blum: Where is the Lieberman Centre?

Macsai: In Skokie. So that, to be Jewish was quite helpful. And the developer clients whom I had, whether they were Irish, Greek, or Jews, actually being Jewish was an advantage.

Blum: Why do you think that was so?

Macsai: Because they thought you are money-smart. You know? And the developers are all Jews anyhow.

Blum: The stereotype?

Macsai: They’re all Jews—whether they are Greeks or Irish. They are risk takers, they are pioneers, they’re crass, they’re moneymakers. I mean, this is, I think, a little bit of the mentality of the group, which was locked in a ghetto for a long time, didn’t have opportunity. Finally, they have an opportunity, and now they’re really aggressively trying to make it. And that’s a developer. And that’s, in a way, very much of a Jewish trend, I think.

Blum: Were there jobs that you refused for reasons other than just not wanting the job?

88 Macsai: There were two jobs like this, where I was accused that I should not work for anti-Semites. I was accused that in one of my buildings, they were not willing to sell apartments to Jews. Well, it wasn’t the case. It was a co-op. And a co- op, like where I live, have a right to decide. And the couple which was turned down was not turned down because they were Jewish. She was obnoxious. And probably, I would have turned her down, too. Once the building is built, I have no control. The other thing was I did—it was an award winning building—the big Volkswagen building in Deerfield. And the owner, Carl Schmidt, owner of the Midwest Volkswagen, was a very religious Catholic. And he wanted to add a chapel to his house, and got the archdiocese to approve it. And I was supposed to be the architect. He came in the office, and I got really excited. So I told him what I want to charge. And he says, "You’re going to charge me money to do a chapel? Why don’t you think of it like casting bread on water?" I said, "I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Carl. Because it’s not a big job I will handle it personally, won’t have much payroll. Tell you what I’ll do with you." I wanted $5,000. This was back about twenty- some years ago. I said, "You tell me your favorite Catholic charities. You make out a check to them. Give it to me so I can mail it to them, and then I’ll do the work for nothing for you." So he says, "You son-of-a-bitch. You got me by my own word," and the job never went ahead.

Blum: But you would have done it on that basis?

Macsai: If he pays my fee to any of his Catholic charities. And there are all kinds of stories. One of my great stories is about Dunbar Builders. Herb Rosenthal, who was crass, tough, rough, but a good-hearted soul down below all the heavy layer of crust. And he owed me money on a job and I couldn’t collect. I couldn’t collect. It wasn’t, I mean, paying thousands of dollars in fees, it was only $2,500. He usually liked to stiff every vendor with the last payment. So I wrote a letter—it was in August—and I said, "Herb, you know, just because I am now a successful architect and a Fellow of the AIA, I am still the same little Jewish immigrant whom you met many years ago when I worked for you. I need to meet payroll. Please, pay your bill. And also, Yom Kippur

89 coming, make sure that your name is put in the Book of Life, and don’t make me say Kaddish over the $2,500." So I got a letter back. "John Macsai, FAIA, President, John Macsai and Associates. Dear John, Yitgadal veyitkadash shemey raba…"—the whole Kaddish—"signed, Herb." It was an exhibitable letter. It was funny.

Blum: When you were with Bob Hausner, you really became apartment specialists.

Macsai: Yeah. There were really two or three firms in Chicago who were apartment specialists. Ezra Gordon and Jack Levin…

Blum: Were they your competition?

Macsai: No competition, because we had different clients. Never the same client. In fact, once I called his client and I said, "Listen, any building you want to give to Ezra, I don’t want. He’s my best friend. But any building you want to give some other guy, I want a chance." That was Dan Levin. I never got a job from him. Anyhow. So Ezra Gordon and Jack Levin. And then Solomon, Cordwell and Buenz, SCB. They are really outstanding in high-rise housing. These were the three firms who did a lot of high-rise housing, good ones, in Chicago.

Blum: So they were the ones that also were looking for these jobs.

Macsai: Yes. I’ve lost some jobs to Solomon, Cordwell and Buenz, but never because they charge less.

Blum: They were a much bigger firm, weren’t they?

Macsai: They were much bigger, yes. Much bigger but we were good friends. John Buenz is a good friend of mine. His son was my student at UIC. John Cordwell was one of my close friends. Once a year we would reminisce, because during the war he was in Stalag 17 in Germany. And that was, I don’t know, how many kilometers from the camp I was in. So once a year, we

90 used to have lunch and had a beer to celebrate the defeat of Germany.

Blum: Oh. Well, his was a well known story.

Macsai: The classic story… You know John Cordwell? When he became a partner at Solomon, Cordwell and Buenz, there was a party at Irv Markin’s house, the investment banker. And there was this developer there, Bob Greengoss, heavy, big, uncouth, loudmouth developer. And there is Lou Solomon. And Lou turns to Bob—we’re all holding martini glasses—he says, "Bob, I’d like you to meet my new partner, John Cordwell, from London." And John starts talking. And Greengoss is looking, looking. He says, "You son-of-a-bitch. You and your fucking phony British accent. I remember you from Marshall High School."

Blum: How could that be?

Macsai: It wasn’t, but he thought it’s an old friend from Marshall High School who’s pretending to be an Englishman.

Blum: How curious.

Macsai: Poor John. He was very sick before he died. In his later years, we became close. What happened is when they sold Sandburg, he wound up with two million dollars. So he owed the government a million. He paid it, and he says, "What should I do?" We had dinner together. I said, "Put it in the safest bank or government securities, and between your salary and this, you’ll live like a king. You’ll get a hundred and fifty thousand, at least, a year." And that wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted to be a developer. And he was cheated by a number of people. He lost a big piece of property in Michigan. He lost a good deal of his money by being a developer. And the reason I know these things, because he called me and he says, "John, as a developer, I will need an architect. I’d like you to be my architect. I am not going to do too much talking about it. I can’t go back to John Buenz and work with them. You know, they don’t want me anymore." So I was supposed to do all John’s

91 work. None of them went ahead. And he lost the land, which was painful.

Blum: Well, he always had the Red Lion Inn, which he seemed to enjoy; it brought more than money to his life.

Macsai: Exactly. He was a raconteur. His stories about Skip Genther are priceless. He was at PACE when I was at PACE. And when I told him what a miserable bastard, at that time, Skip Genther was, he topped it. He was going to a client downtown with a roll of drawings and suddenly, somebody grabs him on the shoulder…

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Macsai: Anyhow, it was Skip Genther who grabbed him and thought that he’s stealing a set of drawings of a particular building and is bringing it to some competitor. He was one of his most loyal associates. But, you know, Skip was a wild man at that time but that luckily changed. Anyhow, John was a wonderful guy.

Blum: Well, too bad he lost on the developer’s end. When he came to Chicago, it seems that no one had any training in city planning. And he did. So he really had quite an advantage there.

Macsai: They also lucked out on Sandburg Village. Architecturally, it’s not a great thing, but as a planning idea, it’s a beautiful one. Unfortunately, it started, on the city’s side and the developer’s side, with a rather immoral attitude.

Blum: Can you give an example of what you mean?

Macsai: That piece of property was bid. And the condition of the bid was to provide "affordable" housing. You know, nobody defined it. The city goofed, because they should have defined what affordable means, what low-cost means, how many, what kind? Nobody defined it. The high bidder was the developer—what’s his name? I’ve forgotten the name of the developer.

92 Blum: Rubloff, wasn’t it?

Macsai: Rubloff, yeah, right. Arthur Rubloff was the high bidder and considerably higher than anybody else. And what they built is very fine, urbanistically—both high-rise, townhouse, everything—middle to upper income housing. So they could afford to bid high, because they knew damn well they are not going to adhere to the city requirement of affordable rents.

Blum: Do you know if they were friends of Mayor Daley?

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: Was that the reason he got the job, got the bid?

Macsai: Sure, sure. Rubloff was Daley’s fair-haired boy, for a while. Then there was a falling out.

Blum: This is the story that needs to be told.

Macsai: The falling out occurred when the assessor—what was his name? It begins with a C. I forgot the name, not… Cullington [Parky Cullerton]? He was involved with some kind of scandal and was caught, that people are assessed on a favor basis. So to prove his integrity, he reassessed a lot of developers, including Arthur Rubloff. Assessed him high enough to cause a rift; high enough that it killed the job I was working on with Stanley Tigerman.

Blum: You worked with Stanley?

Macsai: Yes. And then we were still very good friends. And he opened his mouth, went to the press—Rubloff against Daley and against Cullerton. And he became kind of persona non grata after what happened. Rubloff owned the property of Eugenie and Wells. And he wanted to put up… We were the architects… Legally, he could put up, within rights something like a

93 thousand units. And in his projection, I think he projected some $300,000 real estate taxes. He was assessed over a million, a million-two, which, by the way, was the right assessment—maybe a little bit higher than the right one, and this made the figures not work. So he abandoned the project. Stanley and I were doing that together. Stanley got the job, but he’d never done high- rises. And he and I were still very good friends.

Blum: Was this work with Stanley connected to Sandburg?

Macsai: No, no, no. No, this was a Rubloff job at Eugenie and Wells. It was Stanley’s connection; he knew Arthur.

Blum: Did that one ever get built?

Macsai: No. Rubloff lost the property. And then the neighborhood got in an uproar. A thousand units on the… They down-zoned it. And eventually, it got up again, but not that high. Dick Barancik was the architect on the apartment building which was built—a totally mediocre, nothing kind of building, the kind of buildings Barancik did. Barancik is an interesting architect. He’s never done a building with a bad floor plan.

Blum: What do you mean?

Macsai: Floor plan. His plans, his apartment plans—like 990 Lake Shore Drive—work. I mean, he’s a good technician, planner, but his buildings all look like nothing. He’s a classic example of good planner, but not good architect.

Blum: Well, maybe you need specialists in a big team.

Macsai: He would be very good in a team. But he would not work in a team, because he is one of the largest egos among Chicago architects. In fact, I first heard the name Dick Barancik by reading it on the front page of the Tribune, back in the early 1950s. He made the front page of the Chicago Tribune by beating up his

94 mother-in-law.

Blum: Oh, my goodness. That’s a shadowy past. Well, thinking about all the buildings that you built along the drive, and into the North Shore suburbs, many were published, many took awards, did you think the press treated your work fairly?

Macsai: Yes and no. No, the press, the daily press, the architecture press, no…

Blum: And the journals, the newspapers, the AIA?

Macsai: Yes, by and large, I think so. See, I got thirteen AIA awards, and some Progressive Architecture awards. They all occurred between 1959 and 1973. Well, what happened after 1973, either I went out of fashion or modernism went out of fashion. But that was a definite break. Postmodern buildings started to go; buildings with cute philosophical bullshit, like Stanley did. You know, the Hot Dog House and House for the Suburban Jewish Princess and the philosophical addition to architecture, instead of just doing a good- functioning and beautiful-looking building. It had to have either historic recall or some philosophical significance. And that really wasn’t my bag, you know? So the last AIA award we got was in 1973.

Blum: Did you resent going out of fashion and not…

Macsai: Getting awards? A little bit. Especially, I resented it because the building which I thought was the best building never got an award. That’s Harbor House. It was written up with really strong acclaim by Bill Newman of the Sun-Times, who just passed away, you know, last year. Bill considered it one of the best apartment buildings, next to Mies. Bill was a great fan of Mies. And I never got an award on it. But, you know…

Blum: Bill seemed to like many of your buildings; he wrote about them frequently.

Macsai: Yes. Look, architecture is so much affected by fashion. I mean, once we get to

95 the next phase of my life, which is teacher at UIC… At that point, I can illustrate to you how the zeitgeist influences architecture totally, I think. Anyhow, I never felt bitter about it—bitter enough to give it more than two minutes thought.

Blum: When Hausner and Macsai disbanded…

Macsai: In 1970.

Blum: 1970, yes. Was it the lawsuits that did you in?

Macsai: No. What do you mean? We just decided to…

Blum: You just decided not to continue.

Macsai: I told Bob that I can’t continue, unless he is going to change. And he wasn’t very eager to change. He had a comfortable lifestyle. He had his own clients, I had my clients, and it was quite amicable.

Blum: So you just decided to go your own ways.

Macsai: Right.

Blum: And you teamed up with Wendell Campbell.

Macsai: Wendell Campbell, yeah, right.

Blum: What kind of jobs did you get when you were partners?

Macsai: That partnership was not very happy for me. So the less we speak about it, I think…

Blum: That was a time that other things were going on, too. The sixties were tumultuous, worldwide and in Chicago.

96 Macsai: Right. And I’ll tell you, in a nutshell, Wendell and I got together as idealists. This would have been the first truly integrated office in the Chicago area, because John Moutoussamy being black, at Dubin Dubin, didn’t make it integrated, and some black architects with all blacks didn’t make it integrated. Here, we tried to keep it well balanced but unfortunately, it didn’t work. It didn’t work for a number of reasons but mostly it didn’t work because I think he resented when I brought in a building, because he thought it showed him in a poorer light. And that’s a problem I couldn’t solve. So after four years, he wanted to separate; he wanted to practice under his own name. And I was totally delighted.

Blum: How did you and he both feel about women on your staff?

Macsai: We always had women on our staff, women architects. But Wendell Campbell and I did not. When John Macsai and Associates became independent, from day one till we closed, I always had at least two women architects. Not for any social justice reason; but having taught at UIC starting in 1970, and having such a large number of women architects, I realized that there’s a lot of good architects there; I don’t give a goddamn if they are black, white, women, men, I hired them. And I had Martha Lewandovska, who became Martha DeCapri, she worked for me for four or five years, maybe six years. She is now a contractor, works in Evanston, married Dennis DeCapri, who used to be an associate at SOM. And the other, Diane Travis worked for me. Diane moved out of Chicago and is now the western states advisor or representative to the Masonry Council of America. Has a very respected job, which gives her enough freedom to buy two flats and four flats and remodel them and make some money.

Blum: Oh. But this was when you were John Macsai and Associates.

Macsai: Exactly. Look, it was hard enough to find qualified black architects.

Blum: Did the fact that he was on your staff, or he was your partner, did that open

97 up possibilities for jobs that, without him, you wouldn’t have been eligible for?

Macsai: Oh, absolutely. Sure. He brought in a lot of jobs. We increased the number of city jobs we had; we got some jobs in Gary, Indiana; we got jobs in East Chicago. Wherever there was black political power, we were able to get some work.

Blum: What type of jobs were they?

Macsai: Unfortunately, on many of the jobs, I lost control. And that was one of the reasons I was not unhappy when the breakup happened. Though just a couple months ago, Wendell had his retirement party, the firm gave, and I was invited, you know?

Blum: Well, and he must think kindly of you.

Macsai: We both like each other as a person; we couldn’t get along well in business.

Blum: Well. Did any of the high-rise and mid-rise residential jobs follow you when you became Macsai and Campbell?

Macsai: Campbell and Macsai? Oh, absolutely. Dunbar Builders continued work with us. We did two buildings. Actually, Malibu East was done at Campbell and Macsai, and the Waterford was done at Campbell and Macsai. That’s on Gordon Terrace and Marine Drive, the red brick building with white columns in front.

Blum: Was the red brick your reference back to your student days at Miami University?

Macsai: Whatever. But Waterford also had white handrails, which they painted this stupid black; and also had white balcony edging, which they painted some light pink. I mean, that building, when it was freshly repainted, reminded me

98 of a high-rise bordello. You know, with the pink…

Blum: Well, the columns struck me as being a unique feature in your design.

Macsai: No, it’s changed totally in character. The concrete was not painted originally; it was just exposed concrete. It’s a classic case. The stupid manager… Had they called us, we could have prepared a color scheme and would not have charged them. But, you know…

Blum: Well, maybe you ought to give a guarantee with your building for the first remodeling. Half price or something.

Macsai: Well, there are some architects who do that.

Blum: Really?

Macsai: I belonged to a synagogue on the South Side, Beth Am, which was done by Percival Goodman, a rather famous synagogue architect. And I was on the building committee. And we discovered that all editions and remodeling to this building must be done by Percival Goodman’s office. And we had front steps that were falling apart, and I needed to make drawings for it, naturally, gratis, but we had to write first to Goodman’s office to get their permission.

Blum: How did this system work?

Macsai: It’s wonderful. That’s the way to do it. But you have to be Percival Goodman, a big ego. And he easily gave up. I mean, his office is not about to make drawings for a front stoop, you know. No, an architect is very seldom called back. And honeymoon between clients and architects can be wonderful, but they don’t last forever, you know? One year, one day, before I lose all ability to think, I would love to write a book about all my clients, and tell the world about their deals, their swindling, their charms, their ability to work with the Daley machine, the payoffs, all that.

99 Blum: Do you think you’ll ever write that book?

Macsai: No, but I got close to it. Last year, I was invited by the AIA housing committee to give a lecture. The young people meet Tuesday nights. And I said, "Okay, I will give a lecture on the vicissitudes of housing practice in Chicago." And I went through all of my buildings, mentioned names where there was political payoff, where they cheated on zoning. I went through all the Chicago architects I knew who did fee-cutting. I mentioned names. And toward the end, the secretary, Alice Sinkevitch, who was there, jumped up and said, "This meeting is closed." She got very worried that I’d say something.

Blum: Well, there’s an underside that hasn’t been exposed to the light of day, I suppose.

Macsai: Well, you know, I think it’s a significant enough part. And I am not so much worried about that somebody would be interested in the scandal of who paid off whom, or who was screwing whom. That’s not the issue. The issue is that decisions in architecture are not made on a rational basis, which would be the best for the neighborhood, for the community, and including the developer, too, but they are made on bases which would make your hair stand up, okay? The alderman, who usually is paid off—every alderman is a crook in the city of Chicago. I can say that freely. If my own alderman—Larry Bloom, who is president of my synagogue—was caught in a payola, then there are no honest aldermen. He was Mister Clean, you know? He was he inheritor of a ward, which among its aldermen counted former Senator Paul Douglas, Leon Despres, Bob Merriam. I mean, these were, Democrat or Republican, the giants of Chicago politics. And then he became corrupt.

Blum: Maybe the system corrupts.

Macsai: Yeah, the system. And all these hearings on the lakefront protection ordinance and a variety of zoning is so complicated anyhow, and so difficult to do the right thing with neighborhood participation, where there are

100 conflicting interests, and human interest; there is good architecture; there is money interest. It’s almost a miracle when it all works out. Then when you add to it venal politics, it’s just very depressing.

Blum: Were you feeling this way as you were building these buildings for the developer, knowing all of this?

Macsai: Oh, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. What choice do you have?

Blum: Well, you had jobs at the University of Chicago. Did these involve that kind of stuff, too?

Macsai: No, it did not. But I didn’t have enough University of Chicago jobs to sustain the office. You know, you needed both.

Blum: In your office, did you try actively to get your work published?

Macsai: No, I never had any marketing plan. That was one of our serious failings. I was the sole job-getter. And almost all jobs came to me, instead of I soliciting. And I had two silent partners—Al Hidvegi and Endre Ivan—and neither one of them was able to bring in a single job.

Blum: This is when you operated as John Macsai and Associates?

Macsai: John Macsai and Associates, right.

Blum: When you were doing all the residential work at Hausner and Macsai, did you have a marketing department?

Macsai: No, we never had a marketing department. Later, I realized in the mid years of John Macsai and Associates that I need marketing. I called a couple people, and they all wanted husky, deserving salaries. And I said, "What guarantee do I have that you’ll succeed? How about working for half of that, but I’ll double it if you bring in work? Gamble with me." Nobody wanted to do that.

101 You know? So I couldn’t afford marketing. I just simply was too small an office. And also, I did not do really cutting edge work, that opens new avenues. My work was high quality modern, good design. And it got recognition, but was never the favorite of architecture publications. That was always a little bit looked down on. Interestingly enough, when my book Housing came out, I sent it to ten architects in Chicago with compliments.

Blum: Who were the ten?

Macsai: One was John Cordwell. So John Cordwell, that afternoon, calls me. "Macsai? Cordwell. Sonofabitch. That goddamn book. Now everybody can do it."

Blum: Well, that book has been complimented many, many times.

Macsai: Yes, it became the kind of bible of multi-family housing. It was a very fundamental approach.

Blum: It was a book waiting to be written; there was no other on the subject.

Macsai: See, when I started to teach, I went to teach for a financial reason. I realized that I will need, when I retire, a pension. How can I get a pension? By teaching. In fact, I called Stanley Tigerman. He was a big muckety-muck there, and he said, "Let me talk to the dean." And the dean was delighted. They hired me as a lecturer, you know. In fact, I taught with Stanley. In my first semester, we were team teaching. We were good friends. That’s the reason it was even more depressing, the break. And very shortly in my teaching career, I realized that there is no good instructional material. And my teaching design, the reason it became so memorable to so many practicing architects who tell me now, is that it was not design only; it dealt with the complete product, building. It included the client’s need, context, zoning, building code, financing, and design, et cetera. And I realized, there is no material. I have to repeat a lot of times the same thing every semester. And I realized, there ought to be a book to which I can refer and ask students read from page sixty to seventy, and then we can discuss it, instead of me

102 going through it, each time. And Wiley agreed to do the book.

Blum: Well, it filled a very necessary gap at the time.

Macsai: Unfortunately, it still would fill a necessary gap. But Wiley turned me down. We had a falling out.

Blum: Well, there was a second edition.

Macsai: Yes, and there would have, should have been, a third edition. There should have been.

Blum: Is there so much more material to add?

Macsai: Oh! First of all, the book went out of print, totally sold out, and they never wanted to reprint it. Whatever reason a publisher has, I don’t know. And then they called me, would I be interested in doing a revised edition? I said, "Absolutely." The second edition, they paid eight thousand dollars to Al Hidvegi to do all the illustrations. The third edition, he wanted ten thousand, which is very reasonable, because everything would have to be redrawn. Since then we have handicapped-accessibility, so nothing, none of the drawings are usable in the book. The ideas are, but not the details, so that all the details would have to be reworked. And Al wanted then thousand, I notified Wiley, and Wiley said, "Be happy to pay the ten thousand, but five of it comes from your royalties." I said, "The hell it comes from my royalties; there is no book then." I said, "For two editions, you guys paid for the illustrator. That was my deal. My deal stays the same." And they absolutely wouldn’t do it. You know, the Graham Foundation also turned me down.

Blum: Did you ask for a grant to pay for illustrations?

Macsai: You know, I got two grants from the Graham Foundation in the past. And I asked for a grant for the Housing book. Actually it was for travel because what happened in the meantime, for ten years or so, housing was not

103 fashionable. Magazines didn’t publish housing. Housing wasn’t built much after 1986. So I didn’t know what good housing is where. I was planning to travel around—New York, Minneapolis, you know, the important urban centers—and I asked for $10,000 to cover just my traveling expense, not time or anything.

Blum: So this would have been for your research?

Macsai: Yes. And they turned me down. If Wiley had gone ahead, I would have even financed it from my own pocket. But both occurring, I figured, the hell with it, I don’t need it.

Blum: Well, someone else may take up the banner.

Macsai: Now, the interesting thing is that there were two young faculty members at UIC who were interested to take it over. I called Wiley, I said, "Here are two talented young architects who can do this." I said, "They are fresh at this game. You can negotiate them down on anything you want. They are not experienced. Whatever you want to do, call them, they’ll work with you."

Blum: Oh, did they work it out?

Macsai: They couldn’t work it out. It’s too much work. You cannot believe the amount of work which went into that book. The second edition was easier. The first edition was an immense amount of work. I mean, to gather the material, to organize it in a coherent way. And the beautiful part of the book was that it was organized almost as an architect works. First it talked about the client, the zoning laws, the building codes. And it always showed practical examples, calculations, as well as built examples of other architects’ work, which was, by the way, also an immense amount of work, to contact architects and get permission, datasheet, and photograph. And then the goddamn photographs, I had to pay the photographer for his permission, too.

104 Blum: Oh, yes, right.

Macsai: And then one photographer was really a bastard. He wanted X dollars per square inch.

Blum: That’s an unusual way to charge.

Macsai: Yeah, and I needed photographs of that architect’s work, and I agreed, and made each photograph so small that I don’t have to pay a lot of money for it.

Blum: Yes, but then you can’t see it.

Macsai: Well, no, this is visible. It’s small enough, but still visible. The book gave me a great deal of pleasure. It was immense work, and made teaching much easier, once there was a book. Much easier.

Blum: When you were in practice, who was your photographer of choice?

Macsai: Well, I had several photographers. My choice, if I could afford him—not because of fees, but because he was out of the city—was Balthazar Korab. He was my classmate at the University of Budapest.

Blum: So he was an old friend.

Macsai: We are very close friends. We’ll spend an evening together every summer. He also rents a place in Michigan near my house. He is a wonderful, wonderful, talented human being.

Blum: You say if you could afford him. Was he more expensive than other photographers?

Macsai: Well, you know, to fly him in to Chicago from the Detroit area each time I need a photo. So he used to call me, and he says, "Hey, I’m coming to photograph for SOM—need anything? I’ll just do it at my time." I’ll never

105 forget, he came to my office one day, and we said, "Okay, after it, we’ll go to dinner, to Ireland's, remember?

Blum: Oh, I do.

Macsai: Korab came in the office, looked at the model, he reorganized everything. Found a huge sheet of white linen…

Blum: Oh, the job was to photograph a model?

Macsai: Yes, for photographing a model. He moved all the lighting, and moved some of the acoustical tile in the ceiling. I mean, the office looked like a nightmare. And then in one hand, he took an illustration board, in the other hand a flashlight, opened the lens, and the illustration board he held against the light. Then moved it, and with the flashlight, he was moving lights on the white background. And then he says, "Okay, I’m done. Let’s go to eat." I said, "You took one film. Don’t you take at least another one?" He says, "I don’t need to."

Blum: What a professional!

Macsai: I considered it the height of self-confidence. Took one photograph and it turned out magnificently. He is a great guy, great guy. Also, I used Hedrich- Blessing. And I also used Howard Kaplan. But my favorite was Korab, if I could afford him. He did a number of buildings for me.

Blum: Well, was it important to have your buildings photographed?

Macsai: Oh, absolutely, especially for my brochure.

Blum: Did you ever have any trouble with unions in Chicago? Chicago unions are sort of notorious for that.

Macsai: Yes. I was doing a little medical building, on 75th Street, if I recall, the dental

106 building. And one morning, I go out on the job—I supervise it myself—and the dentist was a friend of mine. It was a lovely building. It was a kind of a Y.C. Wong building with an inner court, so when you sat in the dental chair instead of looking at a faded Monet reproduction on the wall, you looked at a tree, with bird feeders and birds coming and going, you looked at a little garden.

Blum: How pleasant.

Macsai: And one day I arrived—I usually checked every Friday—and the contractor says, "We have a problem. The electricians union’s business agent wants to close the job down unless we put the loudspeaker and the music wiring into conduits." I said, "That’s bullshit. The Chicago electric code does not require low-voltage wiring in conduits." He says, "I know that." I told him and he says, "I am the code," the business agent, "And if you guys don’t do it next week, the following week you won’t get electricians."

Blum: So did they have you?

Macsai: I said, "What to do?" He says, "Leave it for me, I’ll handle it. Come back Monday." So I figured, He’ll pay him off. That would have been the easy way to do it. Monday I come in, the drywall is up, and conduit is going through the drywall with the wiring. I said, "You did it. You realize that the doctors are not going to pay you a dime extra. You had no right to go ahead without me clearing it with the owner. There will be not a penny extra for you." He said, "I don’t need any money." I looked in between the studs and the conduit just did this—[it] went through the wall, just a short sleeve and inside the wall there was no conduit, just that little wire.

Blum: Oh, just where the wall was.

Macsai: Yeah, wherever it came through the wall, it went through this zinc tube, which was a phony.

107 Blum: So he satisfied the union.

Macsai: Exactly. Cost my client nothing, and we didn’t violate the code.

Blum: Well, you were lucky such a creative solution was possible.

Macsai: Oh, he was a very creative contractor. He was the most creative contractor.

Blum: During the sixties so much changed in the United States and worldwide. And in architecture, things were changing, as well.

Macsai: Absolutely.

Blum: There was the civil rights movement. Students were taking over the campuses…

Macsai: Even when I started to teach, in 1970, there were still the residual. I had two students whom, totally undeservedly, I gave good grades, because they both wanted to avoid going to Vietnam. And I did anything to help people avoid doing that.

Blum: Yes, Vietnam was a big issue, and Watergate followed. And then…

Macsai: And there was also a lot of dope on campus. I remember I had a student who spent most of the time in the studio under the table sleeping.

Blum: Well, how did all of this upheaval, this time of unrest, reflect itself in your practice? It was all through the sixties and into the seventies.

Macsai: Somehow, it never affected my practice seriously, no. It did not. I can’t say that it did.

Blum: It was about at that time that the Chicago Seven began to try and turn things around in architecture in Chicago. And they had several exhibitions

108 beginning in 1976.

Macsai: I remember. And they talked, and they published, and they wrote, and they were…

Blum: And they exhibited.

Macsai: As—what’s his name? Sorkin.

Blum: He writes for the Village Voice.

Macsai: As Sorkin said, the discourse was louder than the architecture.

Blum: In 1976, they had an exhibition to present the work of other architects.

Macsai: Also, to self-aggrandize.

Blum: And also for their own selfish purposes.

Macsai: Marketing. It was a wonderful marketing tool. I mean, I am very cynical saying it, but I am generally, if not cynical because cynical is bad-willed, ironic. I find these things ironic, when an architect says that, "I do this to propagate a direction," instead of saying that, "I do it to propagate myself."

Blum: Well, they all admit that. And they all realize they were doing it as much, if not more, for themselves than just to open up the field.

Macsai: Right. My work had nothing to do with this group.

Blum: But you were in the other show, the Miesian-type exhibition. The one that was titled "A Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago."

Macsai: Right.

109 Blum: The Chicago Seven’s exhibition was called "Chicago Architects."

Macsai: Correct.

Blum: And what was in the "Hundred Years?" Your addition to Farragut High School was in that.

Macsai: Right. It was a totally Miesian building.

Blum: Did you feel yourself that you were in that camp, in the Miesian camp?

Macsai: No, I wasn’t. See, "Hundred Years" was a totally badly put together exhibit. It emphasized the Mies or Mies derivative buildings, totally disregarding that Chicago had a lot of non-Mies derived good architecture. I mean, Ed Dart, Harry Weese, okay? One of my high-rises, which was in, it should have been Harbor House instead of this exposed grid, one of the other ones which they put in. What it really was, presenting Chicago architecture as an exposed grid, Miesian, tall buildings. It was probably as untrue as the Chicago Seven was self-aggrandizing.

Blum: Are you saying that the "Hundred Years of Architecture" was also not a clear picture.

Macsai: Was not a true picture. I think the Chicago Seven was a clearer picture, but it was very much a marketing tool. "A Hundred Years" was not a marketing tool, but it really was not a true picture. It emphasized the Miesian thing, which was overdone. Now, Farragut High School is an interesting point. I feel kind of guilty about that.

Blum: Oh, why?

Macsai: I’ll tell you why. Jacques Brownson, who is one of the most talented architects I know, was the head of the Public Building Commission. And when we did the first Farragut High School scheme, I presented it, and

110 Jacques… It was a concrete building with very strong exposed concrete, with redbrick infill. And he looked at it, and he says, "I want it in steel."

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Macsai: So Brownson said, "I want it in steel." And I tried to explain to him that in Chicago, concrete is more economical; in this case, it has a logical use. And we went through the whole architecture raison d’!être of concrete. And he looked at me, turned his back like a spoiled child and to the wall, he said, "You can do whatever the fuck you please." And I realized at that point [that] he got infuriated, because I dared to suggest… And I absolutely didn’t know what to do. Here is a guy I respect tremendously as a very good architect, as a decent human being, a good administrator. And I realized that all our payments, which up till now had been difficult, will be impossible because he will have to approve everything. So not only will I do a building which my client doesn’t like; anything that will go wrong will be my fault, with the concrete, and I won’t get paid even as slowly as the Public Building Commission normally does. So I said, "Okay, I’ll rework it in steel," and I walked out. And I reworked it in steel as a compromise. He was very happy.

Blum: He was happy. What about you?

Macsai: No. I was very unhappy about the building.

Blum: Well, someone thought it was good enough to put in the exhibition.

Macsai: I’ll tell you why they liked it in the show; because it had one very beautiful, original idea—which in fact, was Al Hidvegi’s idea—to put the cafeteria in a bridge between the gymnasium and the scholastic building. That was a really very elegant architectural idea. But going back to the Chicago Seven, I think they did a good job. You know, they are good architects. All of them, singly, are good architects. I think the only thing which held them together is a certain friendship, because their architecture is totally different. Jim Nagle would not do a historic building if his life depended on it. He is an absolutely

111 talented, wonderful modern architect, okay? Tom Beeby ate up the historical recall, and handled it with great wit, and translated it, okay? Larry Booth ate it up too, but handled it much more clumsily, you know? Stuart loved it, and he still makes a living out of it on his residential work. So they are all different in doing it.

Blum: But they did come together in this way.

Macsai: Unfortunately, postmodernism, with its historical recall—it’s hard to prove what I’m going to say—[has] probably done as much harm to current architecture as they claimed the Miesian grid did. I don’t know which one is a worse sickness. Because a large number of buildings were influenced in Chicago by postmodernism and the historical, glued-on ornament.

Blum: Do you think the Chicago Seven was instrumental in bringing back postmodernism?

Macsai: Postmodernism in Chicago, yes, very much so. Maybe it was in the air and they just helped the architecture community’s awareness. But whatever it was, you know, to find these Ionic capitals and columns and various other historic elements occurring—in a witty, I must say, clever way—in modern buildings, originated pretty much then.

Blum: And with the Seven?

Macsai: Or then. I’m not up on my history, how it really did originate, but they certainly embraced it.

Blum: Well, their goal, as I understand it, was to open up architecture, so it wasn’t only one way, wasn’t only the Miesian way.

Macsai: That’s true. But it never was only the Miesian way. See, this was these complaining bastards who didn’t get enough commissions, and they said, "We have to get work too, not just the Miesians." But there were others; Harry

112 Weese and his office was never Miesian, okay? Ed Dart and his entire production was never Miesian. Who else?

Blum: What about Bud Goldberg?

Macsai: Goldberg, while he was a Mies student, was not a Miesian. Look, I don’t think [there’s] anything wrong in doing something self-aggrandizing. I just would like them to admit it.

Blum: Oh, I think they do.

Macsai: Oh, good, good. Then I have no problem.

Blum: I think they think that their activity sort of stirred things up. Would you agree?

Macsai: Yes, it did.

Blum: What do you think was the most positive thing that came out of their activity of over several years?

Macsai: A better pluralism.

Blum: Would you agree that an exchange among architects in the forum of the Chicago Architectural Club was an end result of their activity?

Macsai: Yeah, [the] Chicago Architecture Club was great. It’s too bad it’s fizzled.

Blum: So John, now, thirty years later, how would you assess the activities of the Chicago Seven: their exhibitions, their seminars, their press?

Macsai: I think it was very helpful. I think it was. While I still maintain it was slightly self-advertising, but it was a catalyst for a lot of new ways to look at architecture.

113 Blum: Just a few minutes ago, you said you thought maybe it was due to their activities that postmodernism became so strong.

Macsai: Yes, they were very helpful in that. And they gave credibility to this, using history and historical recall, which I think in some respects was a disaster, looking back.

Blum: Do you mean because of the way it worked in the buildings many architects built at the time?

Macsai: Yes, yes.

Blum: There was another facet of your career that I know you’ve been waiting to talk about. That is the teaching you did at UIC for twenty-six years.

Macsai: Twenty-six years.

Blum: That’s like an entire other career.

Macsai: Absolutely.

Blum: You began to teach, as you said before, because you wanted a pension. And you called Stanley; Stanley put you on as a lecturer.

Macsai: No, Stanley convinced the dean to put me on. No, the director. At that time, the director was Tom Jeager. And they hired me as a lecturer. And Stanley convinced the director that we should have a housing studio, which he and I ran.

Blum: How did it work between the two of you?

Macsai: That’s the time Stanley and I were doing together the building for Rubloff. And Stanley thought that the school can use somebody to teach housing. And

114 we did that. Stanley, after that year, retired from Circle, and spent the next ten years doing a lot of architecture which he claimed he was not able to do while teaching, and also spent ten years badmouthing UIC because he wasn’t there anymore. Nevertheless, he came back. Tom Beeby became the director, and he rehired Stanley. Stanley wanted to come back. And actually, his five years under Tom Beeby were the best years, because he’s an excellent teacher, an inspiring man, who is a catalyst in all kinds of intellectual ways. He started the architectural departmental newspaper; he started collegiality, we gathered monthly to chat at somebody’s house or in studio. He’s done incredibly good things. And then he became the director, okay? In fact, I nominated him for the directorship; worked hard for him to become the director. And he was the director for five years.

Blum: Director of the architecture department.

Macsai: The war started in the fifth year. Why this split? Stanley, by this time, was hell bent to make his mark in the architecture history by creating a Harvard cum Yale combination out of the University of Illinois, for the poor kids in the Midwest. Our kids did not have the kind of preparation which Yalies or Harvard guys have. But this is fine; I don’t care if you want to imitate or emulate the better ones, that’s perfectly fine. What was wrong was that Stanley was convinced that the way to do it is to emphasize theory, architectural theory. All the philosophical bullshit of deconstruction. That was the vogue. Obtuse, unrelated to architecture, philosophical cogitations… Even that, we could survive. I took a course in deconstruction. It was given by—what’s her name? The granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright, you know. Whatever her name is. It’s very Freudian I forget her name, because I think she was a terrible person.

Blum: Catherine?

Macsai: Yes, Catherine Ingraham. Anyhow, at the beginning, I was going along with this. But parallel with this came the pushing in the background of anything which seemed practical. So for instance, my course—which was the multi-

115 family housing course—I admit, was a how-to-do course. And I used to start my first lecture, I called the guys and said, "This is the contract, guys. You agree to work your ass off, and I guarantee you will learn about housing more than most practitioners know." They loved that. You know? And the whole class was like this. What did they produce? According to Stanley, the problem with the course was that their work was not better than the work of those architects who do housing in Chicago. So my point was, that’s not bad, that’s pretty fucking good if my students, after one semester, can do as good housing as Solomon, Cordwell and Buenz or some… But he felt this was mundane. So anyhow, that’s where our break started. And then many of the faculty didn’t want him to have his contract renewed for five years. Whitaker, the dean, decided that in spite of the faculty objection, he will renew his contract.

Blum: In the hierarchy of the university, does the dean have more authority than the director of a grad school?

Macsai: Absolutely, absolutely.

Blum: So Stanley was really under the dean?

Macsai: Stanley was not the director of the grad school; Stanley was director of the whole department of architecture.

Blum: Okay, well, was he accountable to the dean?

Macsai: To the dean, absolutely. See, the dean is the dean of the entire college—the college of arts, architecture and urban planning, those three departments. Now, not all departments have a director; some have a chairman, which is a rotating position, only for two years. See, a chairman cannot become a dictator because he’s out in two years. A director could be a dictator.

Blum: But to be the director, and to remain the director…

116 Macsai: You have to be reappointed…

Blum: By the dean?

Macsai: By the dean. Yeah, his contract is for five years, but he has to be reappointed yearly. Every year, his performance is reviewed and he’s reappointed. Five- year appointment is guaranteed, unless [there is] something like what happened to Stanley, when there is a revolt.

Blum: Yes, that was called a palace revolt.

Macsai: Palace revolt, right.

Blum: And you were in on it.

Macsai: Yeah, I was in.

Blum: This flap with Stanley occurred…

Macsai: Toward the very tail end of my teaching.

Blum: Where in the continuum of your twenty-six years?

Macsai: On the tail end. It occurred in 1990, 1991, and he was out by 1993. So it was at the tail end.

Blum: He was out, but you were still in.

Macsai: Yes, I stayed in till 1996.

Blum: I see. You went to UIC to teach housing which apparently you did in a very pragmatic way.

Macsai: Correct.

117 Blum: And if you were just teaching one course then, how did you get on the permanent staff and become senior faculty?

Macsai: Well, let me put it this way. One course in architecture is a bigger load than three courses or five in liberal arts, because studio design, which I taught, housing design, meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon, from one to five. So it’s a full load. And also, the big difference in my course was, usually, in a typical studio, the students are given a problem and they work on it, and the instructor comes around periodically, looks at it, criticizes it. Then they have coffee, and he walks… I mean, it’s a kind of very adult level.

Blum: Were these first-year students?

Macsai: No, I never taught first year. This was fourth-year students. But a typical studio has no lectures, but criticism. I changed that totally. Every class started with an hour lecture, which I gave and I gave them homework. I never asked them to design something unless in a prior lecture we covered the item. Consequently, I didn’t let them design a full building until the end of the semester. They took parts of it. They had to learn about elevators, stairs, kitchens, bathrooms, exterior problems, underground problems, zoning, building codes, financing. And they had short problems, one-week problems, from Monday to Monday. The first year I taught this way, I had twenty-two problems in a semester. They were complaining endlessly. I mean, nobody made them work this hard. But I told them, "You’ll work your ass off,"—that’s the expression I used—"but you’ll learn. So don’t complain to me. If you don’t really like it, go to another field." I had a wonderful way with my students. Students like to be treated with real confidence on the side of the instructor. It’s almost suggestive to them. You cannot walk in—at least not with architects, I believe—and pontificate. I think you have to be a little bit of an actor, and make them part of the game; they have to buy in. Anyhow, it was very successful.

Blum: Stanley should’ve been very good at that.

118 Macsai: He was masterful. He was outstanding. He’s charismatic. You know, I still feel very regretful that our friendship broke up, that it was not renewed, because I always found him a very interesting guy, fascinating guy, in fact. We had one thing, also, in common, that he has four grandparents who were born in Hungary.

Blum: Well, that should have drawn you two together.

Macsai: No question that being the descendant of four Hungarian Jews is an assurance of being neurotic.

Blum: Why, when you wanted to teach, did you think of the University of Illinois? There were other architecture schools.

Macsai: What others? I have a practice in Chicago, okay? In Chicago, there is only one other architectural school and it’s IIT. And while I adored Mies’ system and work, I couldn’t teach it. To begin with, they only hired, for a long time, people who were graduates of IIT. It was a very inbred kind of incestuous architectural system. It broke up later, but it was closed. You know, UIC was an excellent school. Nobody came to UIC because they were rich. This was urban kids, who lived at home, who really wanted to be architects. And the school made it easy for them by its location. But also, a lot of people came from other areas, because Chicago is a living laboratory of good architecture. And that was Tom Beeby’s brilliant idea. And Stanley continued to invite practicing architects to teach one semester every two years. They did it for minimum money.

Blum: Local architects?

Macsai: Local architects. Larry Booth, Jim Nagle, Ron Krueck, Helmut Jahn. Even Bruce Graham, so to speak, but he hardly showed up. He sent an assistant to his classes, and then he comes to jury. The students are so honored by the big man looking at their final work… He was there [at] nine o’clock in the

119 morning [and] at nine-forty the chauffeur came for him because he needed to go to a meeting, and he never came back during the day. That’s chutzpah, at best. Anyhow, but to bring in local architects, that enriched the curriculum immensely. And also, we had a wonderful heterogeneous faculty, a great mixture. We had theoreticians, we had technical experts, we had good designers who taught very differently. Some taught the traditional studio and my way was completely different. So once the student had gone through five years, he was exposed to immensely broad influences. And that got watered down. Most of the studios became kind of places for speculation and pushing the envelope by young, ignorant people. You know, pushing the envelope is great in graduate school, or a few years after you learn about practice. But before you build anything, to be critical of the entire field—you haven’t earned it yet. You know, it reminds me of the old story. The guy goes to the priest and he says, you know, "I don’t believe in this junk. I am an agnostic." The priest says, "Wait, have you read the Old Testament?" He said, "Nah, no." "How about the New Testament?" "Just a little bit." He says, "Any of the early church fathers? Martin Luther? Saint Augustine?" "No, no, no, I haven’t read anything." So the priest says, "Listen, you don’t know enough to be agnostic yet."

Blum: So are you saying that theory and criticism is appropriate after you’ve learned a more practical foundation?

Macsai: Or concurrently. But you cannot eliminate the technical and the practical, because ultimately, architecture has to prove itself, not just by looks—that’s the frosting—but it has to economically make sense, it has to stand up, has to be secure, has to function well, and ultimately, has to look very good. Now, while I make this list, of this entire list—all of these are prerequisite—the most important is ultimately, to me, the looks. I admit it.

Blum: Are looks most important to you?

Macsai: The looks, yes. Because that’s the way the architects are judged, I mentioned that before. And I used to tell my students, I said, "Look, if you must choose,

120 absolutely must compromise on function or compromise on looks, you compromise on function. But you keep your mouth shut—you don’t tell anybody that Macsai told you that. Okay?"

Blum: Well, I certainly understand what you were imparting to your students.

Macsai: Right. They understood it. I mean, my instructional method was crazy enough that they understood it very well. I also taught some other subjects besides housing design. From 1981 till about 1988, under Tom Beeby, I started to teach general design studio. And Ezra Gordon, who team-taught with me housing, took over the housing course. Because Tom felt that the course is too top-heavy. You know, two old-timer practicing architects teaching together the same course is kind of a waste of talent. So we split up. And then, when Stanley became the director, then I taught with Stanley. We team-taught, for three years, the one-year graduate studio. And Stanley taught it with me one semester, and the other semester, guest architects came, and so that was a nice relief. I also taught some lecture courses. The one which I, in a way, developed was the professional practice course, which is a lecture course once a week. It’s about the business of architecture, about licensing, about law, about contracts, about supervision of construction—what you need to know to get your business going. And I team-taught it with a lawyer whom I brought in. And it was an interesting course. I told the students that, you know, "I will keep you solvent, and he, Mr. Lawyer, will keep you out of jail."

Blum: Well, that was a good combination.

Macsai: Well, it was a good course. It’s still taught by a lawyer, Mark Friedlander, and I lecture a couple times a semester in his course. Just as a friendly gesture.

Blum: It sounds like the courses you were teaching were very practical, very useful.

Macsai: Very useful.

121 Blum: There was an interview with you I read—let me just find the date of it. In 1980, you said that students have changed. I mean, I don’t know what they changed from. But you said, "They now want to be employable."

Macsai: That’s right.

Blum: Well, you began to teach in 1970. What was the attitude of the students then?

Macsai: I don’t remember exactly, but it varies, you know? Sometimes students are far more eager to learn theory. And they are rebellious, you know, against the government, against the middle class.

Blum: Well, you were saying there was still this carryover of the sixties when you began to teach.

Macsai: Right. But then being employable became very important. And I can tell you I’m very proud of this fact, for instance, when the guys went to look for a job, when SOM saw a photocopy of some of the work they did in my studio, they were very likely to be hired. For a simple reason, they knew they can use them the first day. Because they learned how to put a building together and how to draw and all of that, which kids who do mostly theory, hardly know any design and certainly, have very little technical knowledge. They have to be nursed, as an employee. And most employers don’t have the manpower to do that in the office. So one of the nice things in this archeological occupation I have in summers, I visit with former students. I have four former students who live in Israel. And I tell you, it’s wonderful. I go there, and they wine and dine me. And they are grateful, and they tell everybody that whatever they do during the first three, four years of practice, they can thank me. So who doesn’t like to hear that?

Blum: Was there a large contingent of foreign students at the University of Illinois?

Macsai: Yes, a goodly contingent. The largest contingent we had was Greeks. That’s

122 the Greektown area, you know? We had some Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Israeli, Arab. We always had foreign students.

Blum: What was there about the University of Illinois that attracted so many foreign students?

Macsai: It was cheap. They establish residence here. You know, you live here, you can live at home, you can take public transportation to school. This has changed a little bit; the school became more esoteric, more research oriented. I’ve had my disagreements with the chancellor. Everybody was pushing research. Now, the big problem with architects is that they don’t do research. Their scholarly product is buildings, okay? There are very few who write. I was a rarity who published a book. Maybe [of] the whole faculty, three people did write. So we are judged very negatively, when it comes to promotion, by liberal arts people, who are predominantly writers. And that’s kind of an unfair treatment, because good teaching is not rewarded, research is rewarded, okay? Well, I completely disagree. I think both are important. But in an urban university with undergraduates, to me, it’s more important to have people who are charismatic teachers, who turn the students on, than being themselves great researchers or writers or anything. One of the best teachers in the school of architecture was a mediocre architect, but he was great with the students; they were turned on. You know? So naturally, all this is gone, because the university did turn into a far more research-oriented school. You have to do that, because that’s one of the ways a university attracts graduate students. Architecture never had that problem. Why? Because it’s Chicago. You know? It had nothing to do with the University of Illinois. It’s Chicago. It’s the city, and the visiting faculty, which no other city can produce. You know, we got them from IIT, we got all the Prairie School kind of people—a variety of people came to teach, or were able to.

Blum: I understand that during Stanley’s tenure as director that the guest speakers or the guest lecturers would be star architects from New York and from California.

123 Macsai: Absolutely. Yes, some of them were.

Blum: Would that also would enhance the appeal of the school for students?

Macsai: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, not everybody could do that. That was Stanley’s uniqueness, that he could take the telephone and cajole or ask for reciprocation. One way or the other he could…

Blum: Call in a favor?

Macsai: He could get, you know, Bob Stern here for a semester. Peter Eisenman was hanging around; got an honorary chair appointment. And others, too.

Blum: Was Gehry there?

Macsai: No, he wasn’t. I’m sure later, he might have been, but not while I was there. No, Frank Gehry was not.

Blum: How did you feel, as senior faculty, having these stars come in and captivate the students?

Macsai: It was wonderful. You know, that really enriched the education. It did not in any negative way affect my pragmatic courses. I think it was great. Stanley was really unique in that, that he could get almost anybody. And that’s too bad, because… A lot will change now. When I say about the current university, it’s already out of date. You know, there is going to be a new director hired, Katerina Ruedi resigned. Garofalo is a temporary appointment. And a lot will depend on the new director. A director can call the shots, create the tune of the entire department. So we’ll see what happens.

Blum: When you taught, did you require drawings in your class?

Macsai: Oh, immense amount of drawings.

124 Blum: Did you use models, as well?

Macsai: Building models?

Blum: Yes.

Macsai: The students were free to do it. I said that drawings are far more important, because they can be made faster, and they’re more abstract; a model misleads us because of how nicely it’s done. Too much attention is paid to how nicely it’s put together, instead of what it represents. And that takes time. I predominantly relied on drawing.

Blum: My understanding is that when Mies came in, models came in. And people who were raised in that system say, "Well, you can see so much more, you know, and learn so much more about what you’re doing in three dimensions than two."

Macsai: My answer to that is a model is very useful to sell something to a client. If you are an architect and you cannot visualize three dimensionally in your head, you shouldn’t be an architect.

Blum: What about the computer? Was the computer widely available then?

Macsai: No.

Blum: Was it in the classroom?

Macsai: No. You’re talking to the wrong person. I am a computer illiterate.

Blum: How about a collage?

Macsai: Well, the collages were made, but the computer was not at all available. In fact, the last year I taught, it was still not available.

125 Blum: And computers?

Macsai: Yeah, for everybody in school. But it started to be.

Blum: What about art history? Did you teach that at all?

Macsai: Art history was. Regretfully, in this school, art and architecture history courses are taught by art historians. Consequently, it’s taught by slides and lectures. In the school I went to in Hungary it was taught by architects. And therefore, drawings were required. And once you draw it, you learn it. When you look at somebody’s slide, it goes in and goes out. So architecture history is taught very poorly at UIC—in most American schools—because art historians teach it. Art history should be taught by art historians—architectural history should be taught by architects. And students should draw. It’s not enough to look at a Gothic cathedral, you have to draw a cross section of it; you have to understand how it was put together. And that, art historians don’t do adequately. I did teach, but only an elective course, turn-of-the-century architecture and art. Art Nouveau…

Blum: American?

Macsai: No, no, a general survey. American, European. It was a period that was very interesting to me, say between 1890 and 1915, that period. So I did that. There were all kinds of other elective courses I did teach. I taught a course on architecture criticism. I didn’t particularly like electives. You put in an immense amount of energy to develop a course—studying, getting material—and then, you know, it’s not required. They sign up. How do they sign up for electives? How easy the course is. They want easy credits. And how popular and easy-grading the professor is. Okay? That’s the game. So I never liked electives. Students are very clever. The one thing I learned, that student evaluation, in my opinion, is over 95 percent correct.

Blum: Students evaluate the teachers?

126 Macsai: Yes. Every year, we had to give them evaluation sheets, and they are totally anonymous. And forgetting some of the nasty comments, by and large, they were exactly correct. The criticism against me, I knew it, I felt guilty about it but I couldn’t change it. It was that I don’t spend enough time in the studio.

Blum: I thought you said it was three afternoons a week.

Macsai: Yes. But many times, I left at four o’clock, okay? There were a lot of complaints about that. "You’re supposed to be here." I said, "I’m not a goddamn taxi driver, I mean, I’m not working a meter." You know? I’m not a factory hand. I’m a professor. I should be judged by one thing only, my students’ performance. If my students complain that I’m not around for whatever they need, it’s legitimate. For you guys to see me leave early and complain, I don’t want to hear it. Because a number of times, I had students over at my office. I even had class in my office. I had a very important meeting one day in the middle of the afternoon. So I told my students, "Come to my office"—I had a very small class, seven people—"Come to the office. You can work in the conference room. I’ll give you a few drawing boards and you can sit and work there. In fact, it will be very impressive; my stupid client will think there are so many more people."

Blum: That you have such a big staff?

Macsai: Right. And the kids loved it. They absolutely loved it. I made the secretary make coffee for them. Oh! I mean, they were really… This was one of the best experiences they had.

Blum: Well, that’s what they were going to school for, to get in the practical world, in the drafting room.

Macsai: Exactly.

Blum: Did you ever hire students to work in your office?

127 Macsai: All the time, all the time. Unlike some of my colleagues, I paid them going rates. Some architects exploit the student-professor relation. It’s more prevalent than sexual harassment, believe me. And it’s much more harmful, not psychologically, but economically. I mean, you know, both Stuart and Stanley hired kids and paid them nothing, but they were honored to work for them, you know? They fell on their ass that the big man asked them. I had, all the time, students.

Blum: Mies did that, too.

Macsai: Oh, yes!

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Blum: Did you function as a professor in your office, as well as in your classroom?

Macsai: In some ways. Our office always was a small office, where everybody got involved, got into the act, even too much so. There are no secrets, you know, in an office of fifteen people. We had a lot of discussion, meetings, talking it over. I was going up and down in that office, you know, thirty times a day. And there was a dialogue each time, between whoever worked on the drawing and me. Either they asked me a question, or I happened to look at their drawing and say, "What the hell are you doing?" This is one of the things that the computer totally killed, by the way.

Blum: The dialogue in the office between co-workers?

Macsai: There is no exchange, you don’t know what’s going on. A guy is sitting, he’s moving the mouse; he has a little screen which is good enough for his distance. As a supervisor, as a colleague who walks through the office, you can’t see what’s going on. A drawing, I could stop and look at. Computer screen is not large enough. I talked to a computer expert, and he agreed fully that this is the biggest shortcoming of CAD. It could be rectified. You know how? Have a projecting screen, the size of the drawing, above the guy who

128 works, so when you walk by you can see it.

Blum: So other people could enter in the design?

Macsai: Exactly, exactly. Well, that’s pretty expensive nowadays, I mean, still. Eventually, it might work out. So anyhow, my office always worked in a very loose fashion.

Blum: Sounds like it was a democratic office.

Macsai: Well, it wasn’t totally democratic, because, you know, I owned majority shares, and ultimately, I had to make the decisions. But I got everybody involved in it. I’d like to spread the guilt, you know? And the nice thing in the office was I clearly told everybody, "You don’t punch a time clock here. You come and go when your work tells you. So if you have to stay home because of a baby or whatever, just call in and say, ‘Don’t expect me till noon.’ If you have a meeting, that’s your problem to make it. I mean, I don’t want to know about it. You have to be there. But otherwise, you come and go when you want." I had a large number of people who came down Saturday, on their own. Our rule was we do not pay overtime, unless the client pays us. If you have to put in overtime the way you’ll be compensated is when the office is slow or you are not that busy, and you want to take off—besides the three weeks or two weeks vacation a year—you can take off an extra two days or an extra morning, you just do that. Settle it with the secretary; I don’t even need to know that. So it was very free, which was nice. And, you know, wherever it was possible, I put the younger people on our stationery, so they had some recognition. And when I sold my practice to OWP&P, I made sure that my entire office—including my secretary—is employed, is coming with me. I mean, that’s, you know, one of the two reasons I really sold the practice and became an OWP&P partner. One, I mentioned, because the insurance tail was too expensive. The other was, I figured, I’ll retire, whether it’s now or ten years from now, doesn’t matter. What am I going to do with these wonderful people who work for me: one for thirty years, the other for twenty, and the young ones, six, eight, ten years? I can’t let them go. We didn’t have a

129 pension system. So I figured, At least if I sell the practice, they will, each one will have a job. And the deal with OWP&P was that I became a full partner, my two partners became senior associates. And by now, all the people who I went with became senior associates, and one became a partner.

Blum: So the partners share in the profits. Is that the system? And the associates share a little bit in the profits.

Macsai: Exactly, exactly. So OWP&P had a very good deal with my office. These are the best people they have.

Blum: You said when you were teaching, "Teaching is my literate involvement." What did you mean?

Macsai: Well, you know, in your architecture practice, most practicing architects are not well read about architecture history; they are not at all well read on architecture theory. They are kind of good architects, but illiterate, a lot of them. I’ve met a lot of them. If they read, they read novels, you know, fiction, which I read, too, but teaching forces you to a level of intellectual involvement. Now, in that respect, deconstruction and the emulating of philosophy was a godsend. It was wonderful. It raised the ante, you know? In one word, the greatest merit of Stanley Tigerman at the school was that he raised the bar. And that’s to his everlasting credit. And he did that in many different ways. For me, it was inspiring. For some people, he cajoled them in doing reading, or threatened them. Now, the interesting thing is that Stanley himself really is not an intellectual giant. He’s a typical postmodern man, who knows very little about a lot of things, not really in depth. You know, he taught a course once where people had to read opposite authors and argue it in class. He never read those authors, he learned about them by the students reading and arguing in class.

Blum: And did he tell you that?

Macsai: No, but I figured it out. One of the classes was Martin Buber against some

130 opposite philosopher. So Stanley was carrying Martin Buber's I and Thou under his arm, [and he] came in the studio, and everybody was very impressed. And Stanley had to go to the bathroom, so I took his copy, and it was curious…

Blum: What was curious?

Macsai: I noticed the introduction was underlined and color-coded, but only the introduction. The rest of it was probably never read, but that’s Stanley.

Blum: What was in teaching for you, besides a pension? What were the satisfactions…

Macsai: The love. Being loved.

Blum: You felt loved?

Macsai: By being loved by my students. I mean, I told them jokes. In fact, I got a letter from the dean to stop telling dirty jokes. So you know what I did? It was the last year of Whitaker here. He wrote a letter that we have to be careful. You know, it was couched in nice terms but, "Watch the language."

Blum: Were many women in your classes?

Macsai: Mostly women in graduate courses. Oh, listen, [a] classic thing—one year I had this absolutely gorgeous tall blonde, Candice Shaeffer, and [she] walked in the class, [and] I said, "Candy, you look so gorgeous today. What would you do if I make a pass?" And she says, "I’ll bring you a foot stool." The footstool in our kitchen was her gift to me when I retired.

Blum: She had a nice sense of humor.

Macsai: Now, so I’ll tell you what I did. Next class, I walked into the studio, I said, "Guys, you have two choices. I can eliminate all vulgarities, all jokes,

131 everything, and we’ll just be very dry. Or you can sign this." It said, "I hereby release from any responsibility the chancellor, the trustees, the Board of Higher Education, the entire faculty, including administrators, from responsibility for Professor Macsai’s jokes, vulgarities, et cetera, and I accept whatever…." They all signed, I photocopied it, sent it to the dean. I never heard from the dean again.

Blum: Was this was a joke?

Macsai: It wasn’t a joke. It was a release.

Blum: Well, I understand, but I’m saying you did it in a humorous way?

Macsai: In a humorous way, but it meant that no goddamn dean or chancellor is going to tell me what to do, if my students agree to what I am doing. Don’t tell me I am a chauvinist or a harasser or whatever, [or that] I’m improperly dealing with these people if they agreed to it, they bought into it. They enjoyed the jokes. A very interesting thing occurred. I was giving a lecture on apartment buildings by poor architects in the city. And that used to be considered "Macsai’s Shit List." I showed slides of the bad buildings; because that’s a wonderful learning experience, to look at slides of buildings, and here is your hero, your professor, telling you, "What a piece of shit this building is."

Blum: For instance, what was on your bad building list?

Macsai: Oh, a lot of A. Epstein buildings, a lot of housing by Solomon and Solomon, their early housing, before Cordwell got involved, and before Buenz; a lot of Loewenberg and Loewenberg buildings, buildings by Jerome Sultan, or this horror by Martin Reinheimer, who was the worst. He did the Doral Plaza at Randolph and Michigan. And Epstein did the other horror across the street—you know, the one which has diagonally… I call that the diagonally- circumcised building.

132 Blum: It was fun probably for you to poke fun at bad buildings, but did it really help students develop an eye?

Macsai: Tremendous… Absolutely. So I am talking about Macsai’s Shit List, and showing the slides. And there is great laughter, what they are laughing at? So one of the kids comes to me after class. "Professor Macsai, you were talking about Epstein buildings. One of the Epstein partners’ son is in the class."

Blum: Ooh.

Macsai: So I found out who. I asked him, I said, "Look, you have to know that I mean what I say. Your father’s firm does crummy work. Tell him. Tell him to improve, hire some good people." So next class, the father came.

Blum: Which Epstein was it?

Macsai: It wasn’t an Epstein, it was Amstadter—he was one of the partners, Larry Amstadter. So Larry came [and] he was very good-natured about it, really, very good-natured about it. Unfortunately, you know, you don’t win always. The kid, who was sitting in the class, is really a very poor architect. He does crummy work. Well, you know, you cannot make good architects out of people who don’t have the talent. The interesting feeling I always had [is that] the top 15-20 percent of the class will be good architects in spite of you. You know, they don’t need you. You can’t ruin them. The bottom 15-20 percent, a total waste. They shouldn’t be there. The greatest challenge is to take that middle 60 or 50 percent and improve it and raise the intellectual level and practice and everything. And many times you fail, you know. There are too many bad architects, but…

Blum: What was the challenge for you, when you entered a classroom?

Macsai: I mean, sure, you want to be loved. But when you find architects who were your students and they do good work, that is exciting. That is an unbelievable reward, when you see they do good work. And I had some of

133 those. See, one of the big problems is that you cannot see that soon, because kids get out; by the time they have an opportunity to do their own work, under their own name, maybe twenty years. Certainly, at least five or ten before they can do that. But it’s nice to know. The other great advantage of teaching is—and being in good relation with your students, if you are in practice—you get a lot of help. Because in every organization, you have a built-in spy. In City Hall building department, Board of Health building department, downstate, Zoning Board of Appeals. One of my best students, wonderful lady, is on the Zoning Board of Appeals. I don’t abuse it, but I feel if I would need a little favor, I could always call. Now that I am not practicing, I don’t even have that chance.

Blum: You were planting seeds for the future?

Macsai: Absolutely. Placing spies.

Blum: Placing spies. During the years you were teaching you were also practicing in your own firm. And you were writing.

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: It seems to me that, from what I’ve read of your writings, you began to publish when you began to teach and extended it over the duration, practically. You’ve already said why you decided to write the book on housing.

Macsai: Because I needed instruction material.

Blum: But there were many other things that you wrote.

Macsai: I wrote extensively; a lot of articles in Architecture magazine about turn of the century architecture in Europe.

Blum: Did you begin to write because it was an academic necessity? You know,

134 publish or perish?

Macsai: Well, it was a mixture. I did enough buildings that I didn’t need the writing for being promoted. In fact, I was a full professor very early, you know? I became a full professor in 1974.

Blum: Which was only four years after you began to teach as a lecturer.

Macsai: Which was a miracle, right? I was a lecturer for a year, and one of my colleagues said, "Why don’t we put you up for permanent status? We’ll put you up for it. You’re too old to be an assistant, how about associate professor, which is tenured?" I said, "No. Put me up for full professor. I’m forty-five years old. I have a lot of buildings behind me. I don’t want to start going up on the rank ladder. If they want me, I want to be a full professor." So they said, "Okay, but you’ll be turned down." And I was turned down. So next year, they put me up again, and I was lucky. The chairman of the promotion committee was one of my closest friends.

Blum: Was Stanley in on this approval system?

Macsai: No, no, Stanley wasn’t, at that time.

Blum: Because other architects remember problems they had getting promotions when Stanley was there.

Macsai: Well, promotion was always a difficult thing at the university, because the liberal arts people never truly understood architects. To them, when you write and publish the stupidest book, you are important. And if you are mentioned in people’s articles and… They didn’t realize that architects, by and large, are not writers, you know. Anyhow, writing, besides my textbook, was part of my teaching, yes.

Blum: You did a lot of writing: either a chapter in a compilation of essays on housing or your own housing book. And then there was a time in the eighties

135 when you wrote several articles on Hungarian architecture.

Macsai: Yes, the turn-of-the-century Hungarian architecture and current Hungarian architecture. How did that start? You have to know this. My mother, whom I brought here, my widowed mother, didn’t like it here in 1956, so she went back and settled in Vienna. And I had to visit my mom. You know, the good Jewish boy, and the only son of this Middle-European elderly lady. I visited her once a year, at least. And, you know, to spend two weeks with my mother was rather boring. And Vienna and Budapest were loaded with interesting buildings, so I had time and used it as an excuse. "Mom, I’ll be back. I’m going out to photograph some buildings." Gave me some freedom. So I did. Also, I figured, Now, if I can get all of this knowledge I’m gaining, and get it somehow out to the public, I can make my trips tax-deductible. And that was the way it originated.

Blum: And that was what motivated you to begin this long series of articles.

Macsai: Yes, yes. I got turned on by this entire turn of the century National Romanticism. It was so fascinating to me, that I got a Graham Foundation grant, which unfortunately, never became a book, but it became five important articles. So I didn’t let the Graham Foundation down, in that respect; you know, the money was well spent. And then that led to being co- author on a book on Eastern European Modernism, which unfortunately, is not very popular, didn’t do very well.

Blum: You wrote a chapter.

Macsai: I wrote a chapter. Not only wrote a chapter, the book doesn’t mention it, and I don’t need to get public credit for it, the Hungarian chapter, which was written by a colleague of mine, was translated into English by me.

Blum: Oh. I see.

Macsai: And where do you find here a translator who understands architecture

136 terms, understands Hungarian architecture, speaks adequately English?

Blum: Well, at least you should’ve been entitled to a byline.

Macsai: I didn’t want to.

Blum: Was there any sense or feeling, as far as you were concerned, when you were doing these studies of some rural architecture in Hungary, that this was a road you hadn’t traveled in your own life?

Macsai: Absolutely. This was not my road.

Blum: In looking at Hungarian architecture and writing about it and becoming so submerged in it, was there any sense that…

Macsai: I missed out?

Blum: Yes, you chose to stay in the United States and not return to Hungary. And was this maybe a return, a filling-in for you?

Macsai: Well, no, but it gave me some thoughts about that. You know, it made me wonder, What would have happened if you stayed around? Would you have totally subsumed yourself and let the Communists dictate the kind of architecture you do? Would you have been rebellious? A lot of questions came up by that.

Blum: So there was a personal inquiry?

Macsai: Yes, and it was very logical to ask these questions. I never knew the answers. You never know the answers. It’s easy to give an answer, but—until you’re there, until you experience it, I have no judgment of anybody who became a great supporter of the Communist Party. Listen, I probably would have joined, to get the business. It’s like in Chicago, if you’re involved in any city politics, you better be a member of the Democratic organization, and not a

137 Libertarian or a Communist, or even a Republican. That’s perfectly fine. So I don’t know what I would have done in Hungary, as far as architecture was concerned. This particular kind of organic architecture, you call it, National Romantic architecture, was used as a means of opposing the political regime, by a small number of very talented and very courageous architects, okay, whose work today in Hungary is not as good. You know, when they were inspired, when they were in the minority, and they had to oppose the regime, they did better work than now, when everything is allowed.

Blum: Well, it seems to me that you were very much involved with the folk art of Hungary.

Macsai: Well, the folk art just was one of the roots of this particular architecture. And, yeah, I got involved in it, but I never really studied it for its own sake. It was just one root, which led to what is called in Hungary "Organic Architecture." There is no good name. They call it National Romantic architecture, whatever it is. And it’s not transportable to anybody anywhere else. Every country has its own unique expression. Probably the only way you could call it is vernacular architecture. I don’t know. We don’t have it in the United States. We are too urbane, too new a country. Though, I guess Colonial architecture or log cabin architecture would be examples of this.

Blum: What about barns and things of this sort?

Macsai: You know, the red barns, absolutely, which by the way, very interesting, you can find them all over in Norway. Probably, it was brought over by some Nordic early settler, who knows?

Blum: Did this experience of delving so deeply into Hungarian architecture, did it reflect itself in any way in the work you did?

Macsai: Not at all.

Blum: It was strictly an intellectual pursuit?

138 Macsai: Strictly. In fact, one of the problems that those architects face in Hungary currently, it works well in very small commissions—in size, small—on a house, on little buildings. But when you get a bigger commission: a factory, a hospital, a hotel, you cannot do that highly crafted architecture. And certainly, in American practice, it’s not translatable. But it was a very good intellectual, tax deductible exercise.

Blum: And did you get some academic credit for all this publishing?

Macsai: I got a lot of academic credit for it, you know. But, I didn’t need the credit; I was a full professor already.

Blum: What role did writing play in the scope of things for you?

Macsai: It improved my English considerably. Using the thesaurus is a very useful thing.

Blum: That was a time when you were teaching, you were writing, and you were building.

Macsai: Exactly. And by the way, that’s exactly what they mentioned when I got my fellowship in the AIA. Teacher, writer, and designer.

Blum: Well, you’ve had a multifaceted career. And now you’ve added a few more facets to it.

Macsai: But I dropped some, too. I dropped practicing architecture and I dropped teaching. I do archeology a little bit, I do painting a lot, and do a little bit of writing. But the writing is mainly about being angry.

Blum: Could we go back to cover events at the university?

Macsai: Yes.

139 Blum: You described what students were after in 1980, and that was to be employable. In 1990, there was an article in which you were quoted. You were speaking for the pragmatics, saying they should not be ignored. So your position throughout the years was consistent and practical.

Macsai: My position was always clear. It takes two people to dance. Okay? One is practical technology, and the other is esoteric, dreaming, art, whatever. Practice and theory must be hand-in-hand. It’s like a couple dancing. Architecture without practice becomes paper bullshit. Architecture without theory is just building, it’s not architecture. It’s nothing. So both are absolutely needed. Now, that doesn’t mean that the more theory I read, I will be a better architect. But I might be. In most great architects, the two work together, that’s what happens. And not only that, I think theory is an underpinning to what we do in practice. It’s a very enriching thing.

Blum: Well, for you to have said that the pragmatics should not be ignored leads me to believe that many theoretical things were taught.

Macsai: Yeah. Now, the pragmatic part of architecture started to be totally, not only ignored, but looked down on in the latter years of Tigerman’s regime at the school. And I resented that endlessly, because I thought it’s going to water down architecture instruction. Certainly, it demeans my position, who was teaching a very pragmatic studio. And we’ll turn out a bunch of idiots, who don’t know what architecture is, and they are not going to be employable. And it, by the way, happened in a little bit. And we went way too far.

Blum: With theory?

Macsai: In the theory, yes. And Stanley had the cruel or devious ability to pair people together. Jim Nagle was teaching design studio, together with Catherine Ingraham, who’s not an architect, who was a writer. And Jim hated it, hated it, and constantly complained. The worst experience in his life. And one day he turned to me, and he says, "John, the problem with that," and I won’t

140 quote the expression he used, "is that she has no eyes." No eyes. How can you teach architecture when you are blind?

Blum: Well, I think other people on the staff had problems with being paired with someone they just didn’t understand.

Macsai: Well, my last year of punishment by Stanley was when he took Dean Whitaker—who by now, he didn’t like—and me, and Roger Whitmer who he also dislked and put us to teach first year, which I never taught in my life, to a class of a hundred students under the supervision off Lily Zand, a totally inexperienced young architect. And normally, we would divide the class, four of us teaching twenty-five students each. Stanley says to Lily, "You only supervise them and let each have a third of the students"

Blum: Lily supervised the three of you?

Macsai: Yes. Here is the dean and two tenured professors and she is supervising us. And we have to have thirty-three students each. So Lily Zand was basically a nice person, inept, but nice. By the way, I read Stuart’s comment that Stuart thinks she was great. I think Stuart is full of shit, doesn’t know what he’s talking about, never experienced what I did.

Blum: Oh, he thought she was very good but inexperienced.

Macsai: What was she good at? Philosophy, she was good at. In architecture, she wasn’t good. I mean, I would argue that Stuart had that wonderful ability to be enthused about things without really investigating. Anyhow, Lily was so upset by this unfairness, that we have thirty-three students and she has none, she went to Stanley, said, "Stanley, this is not working. They are over- worked, these people. How about dividing the class evenly among the four of us?" Stanley says, "No." She says, "Well, it makes them suffer, with thirty- three students." Stanley’s eyes lit up and he said—because the secretary was telling me this later—"I want them to suffer." And that’s what started the rebellion. No, Lily was totally inexperienced. A very nice young girl. Studied

141 architecture at the most theoretical place in the world, at, you know, New York—what’s the name? Hejduk was the head of the school.

Blum: Cooper Union?

Macsai: Cooper Union. And she never learned how to put a building together. Okay. Whitaker taught aesthetics and I taught drawing to these first-year students. I don’t know what Whitmer was teaching. Lily gave them the first problem—a problem for the whole semester—to build a mask.

Blum: A face mask?

Macsai: Yeah.

Blum: Is that equivalent to a façade of a building? I don’t understand the connection.

Macsai: She would say, "That’s an interesting question, try to answer it."

Blum: How did you satisfy yourself with an answer?

Macsai: I told my students that, "This is total bullshit. You guys do whatever you please. Don’t ask me for criticism. Go to her. I’ll teach you drawing." I mean, I thought it’s berserk. It has a very high philosophical correlation, but nothing with architecture. Is the mask, which I experience from inside, in a way, showing on the outside? Does the building which I see on the outside reflect on who they were inside? These are very deep philosophical questions. Does Robert Taylor Homes any way express the tragedy that is happening behind the walls? These are important questions—for a sociologist, for a philosopher—but not first-year architects. They may be asked, on a high level, when we cogitate about architecture; but not when we start learning architecture. You know? Anyhow, one of the reasons bright people escaped into this kind of approach to architecture, I’m convinced it’s because they didn’t know how to make architecture. It was an escape mechanism. And

142 they never learned how to do it, so they have to talk about it. Here is Lily, you know, never built a building. First year in her life she’s given a teaching job; what is she going to do?

Blum: Well, it seems to be that something was askew there.

Macsai: Yes, something was askew.

Blum: Do you want to talk about the palace revolt?

Macsai: I’ll be happy to talk about it. You know, the revolt really started earlier. When Stanley’s five-year review came up, a lot of us, including me, voted against him. It was supposed to be a free and secret election. Somehow or other, this got back to him. I don’t know how.

Blum: Did others know how you voted?

Macsai: They knew it. Unfortunately it was not truly secret.

Blum: You said it was a free election; I don’t know what you mean by free.

Macsai: It wasn’t a secret election. We gave our opinion to a council consisting of Dean Whitaker and two others from the university administration and, I am sure, they talked. Anyhow, a lot of faculty did not want him to be renewed. Then the dean called the faculty together and told us all about Stanley’s shortcomings, but he decided that we have to give him a chance, [Stanley] promised to be good. You know. It’s like telling Israel that the PLO promise not to have any more suicide bombings. Well, you know, Stanley promised. It was the biggest lie in the world. So Whitaker reappointed Stanley. Stanley realized his popularity is waning. Who knows? He might have had problems at home—I don’t know, whatever bugged him—but he started to be very, very mean and nasty. And he picked for victims, early on, [people] who were very easy to victimize, good people: Ezra Gordon, Ed Deam. I mean, there were awful things. I don’t want to go into detail. The kind of things he did

143 made people cry. Just terrible, terrible, on a human level. And it was so bitter. Besides the students complaining… I, for instance, had one of the brightest students, from Israel. I was the studio head, but Stanley periodically came in and didn’t like what he was doing.

Blum: What the student was doing?

Macsai: It wasn’t theoretical enough. And Stanley said to him, "I want you to change this and do it my way." And the student didn’t want to do that. And Stanley came back the next day and said, "Listen, if you don’t listen to me, I’m not going to give you a recommendation to Harvard." So the student was very upset and came to me. And he said, "What am I supposed to do?" I said, "Look, you have to be very practical. You know your convictions, but you also want to go to Harvard. As long as you’re aware of it, I don’t care. Do whatever is necessary to kiss Stanley’s ass, so you can get in Harvard. That’s my advice to you. But don’t tell him I told you that." And he came back the next week, and he said, "I thought about it, and I rather don’t go to Harvard." I said, "Matt, you are a man. You proved it!" We became good friends.

Blum: He was principled person.

Macsai: But to do this to a student? I’ll give you one more example, and that finishes it. I had a student, a mediocre woman. Not bad, not good, uninteresting. And she’s on crutches, you know, she’s in my studio. I’m teaching this studio together with Stanley, housing studio—the last year we taught together, so this is 1991, I think, or 1992. So I asked her what’s the problem. And she had a replacement of a bone with some metal, which didn’t take [and] had to be operated again, and now they are waiting till the winter. If it doesn’t take again, she might lose her leg. So Stanley is going to Japan—he was doing a building there—and he said, "Johnny, I would like to see the work before I go to Japan, because [for] four weeks, I won’t be around." I said, "Okay." So he looks at this girl’s work and says, "You’re not only a poor architect, but you lack taste. This is terrible." And she is in tears, okay? Now, he does that a lot, makes people cry. So at intermission, I go to him, I said, "Stanley, you saw

144 her on crutches. Do you realize that she might lose her leg? This woman is in no shape right now to produce anything very good, in her current mindset" He says, "Johnny, what do you think? Is this a school of architecture or a fucking hospital?" So he left the next day to Japan. I went to the girl and I said, "Look, I will do something which I never do in my life. Can you stay down here in the evening?" "Yes, I can stay down. Not Monday, but Wednesday." I said, "Okay, we are going to rework your design. I’m going to help you. You keep your mouth shut, don’t tell anybody." I reworked the entire problem, I did the drawings for her, all she had to do is copy it. When Stanley came back we had another pin-up. He looks at her work and turns to me, "See Johnny, it pays to be tough."

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Blum: So how did Stanley actually get ousted? It was published in the paper that he resigned, but I know he was fired.

Macsai: Two of us, Mike Gelick and I, independently from each other, went to the dean, except I asked the chancellor to attend, too, and leveled with them, what’s going on in the department, that it’s a nightmare. The dean was brand-new, Bebe Baird. That was our salvation. I’m not so sure if she had guts or wanted to make her name, whatever. She said she understood the problem. She asked me, "What can we do?" and the chancellor and I said, "You don’t reappoint him." "Well, you have to show cause." I said, "We’ll show cause." And then nothing happened. The was like in September, October… One of my colleagues, Lloyd Gadau, and I met at a party in Evanston and we were complaining to each other. "Hey, why don’t we do something? Let’s call a faculty meeting next week. Stanley is in Japan. This is the time to get rid of the sonofabitch." Called a faculty meeting after my class, and a lot of people came. And I took notes, we went to the dean, and the dean says, "Okay, I want to meet with the entire faculty. I’ll call a meeting." Now everybody came. [She] heard all the complaints, was astounded, decided, "Before I act I want to further investigate. You have to give me two months. By December I will have a decision." She met with each faculty

145 member, made them give her personally their vote. The vote was something like fifteen or sixteen out of a permanent faculty of eighteen against Stanley. Come November and no decision. So I called her, I said, "What’s happening? Do not let upper administration influence you. They love Stanley because he’s famous, he’s notorious, he’s published. Don’t let that frighten you." And she said, "I don’t think it’s going to frighten me. I don’t think the upper administration is that fond of him." I said, "Really? Why not?" She says, "Well, you know, your Chancellor Stukel, when he was reappointed, there was an opposition candidate, Paula Wolf, who was supported by Stanley. So I don’t think that Stukel is that fond of Stanley." Anyhow, she said, "In order for this to stick, I have to have facts. And I can’t just talk to the faculty, I have to talk to students, I have to talk to staff. I have to really cover my steps." She did. And came January and she called a faculty meeting. And it was the most interesting meeting. She announced that Professor Tigerman is an excellent teacher, a charismatic leader, but there are enough complaints on the human level that she decided not to reappoint him.

Blum: Was he at the meeting?

Macsai: No. And at that point, one of the faculty members next to me, quite loud, said, "And there is a god." Catherine Ingraham was furious, and some of the young faculty were furious, Somol and Garofalo. And then they started to write the letters to prominent architects asking them to write in behalf of Stanley.

Blum: Well, it seems that Stanley has brought forth the best and the worst in some people.

Macsai: You can say that, you can say that. He is a little bit Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde, because he can be, or can seem to be, a loyal, caring friend, when at the same time, he can put a knife into you. He can be a theoretical, esoteric architecture thinker; at the same time, he can do the most banal buildings. You know, it’s an interesting duality in Stanley. And it’s very hard for me to know when he is the genuine person. I mean, his dancing around John Zukowsky when he

146 arrived in Chicago was the classic example. And I’m curious what is he doing to Blair Kamin, who is a very good architecture critic, that Blair considers him a little god, you know? I mean, it just amazed me how Blair came in as a great supporter of Stanley.

Blum: Stanley can be a charmer.

Macsai: He is a master manipulator and marketer. He always said, "I don’t use marketing, Johnny. I don’t use that shit." His whole existence is marketing!

Blum: Well, he left, and you stayed. And you continued to teach and to write. I noticed in your writing about housing that a new element began to appear; and that was housing for the elderly and housing for the handicapped.

Macsai: Mostly the elderly; I’m not involved that much with the handicapped.

Blum: Where did this interest come from?

Macsai: There was no interest; it was forced on me, interestingly.

Blum: Because of your back?

Macsai: No, the Council for the Jewish Elderly wanted to build a new nursing home. They interviewed about ten firms in Chicago. And Ezra Gordon’s partner, Jack Levin, was on the board. So they invited me to be interviewed. And they asked me and all of the other architects. By the way, thank God they weren’t all Jewish architects, so they didn’t make that mistake. They asked me what do I know about elderly behavior in the built environment? And I said—I was the only one who said, "I know nothing about it, but I am willing to learn." So they said, "Well, how willing are you?" I said, "Tell you what, give me $20,000 and a year, and I’ll spend it doing research in all my free time; use my classes to review it." So one of the board members said, "How about six months and $10,000?" I said, "You’ve got a deal." So I went to England to look at good facilities. Traveled in the U.S. to look at famous facilities. I collected

147 blueprints of a lot of them. I analyzed them. I interviewed at least forty people, from podiatrists to geriatricians to nutritionists. And came out with a report. I don’t think anybody has done a better report on the general state of elder care and how the built environment affects the behavior of the elderly. And they loved it. And I got the job to design the building. I’m not so sure that the building is as good as the theory behind, because in a sad way, aging is not a reversible process. And while architecture and the built environment can be supportive, you know, when you become demented, there’s not a goddamn thing the building can do for you. It’s a little bit depressing, you know, to see… I’ll give you an example. We tried, at the Lieberman Centre, to have all private rooms, which works wonderfully. Twelve rooms are around the common living room, so they hopefully draw the people out, instead of just sitting in their room. The healthy ones are drawn out, and they use the living room. The ones who are much more mentally or physically handicapped, they stay in their room. And also, they are resented by the healthy ones. The healthy ones are frightened, because they see what happened to the others. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time with somebody who’s crying and hollering, "Let me out, let me out," or who is, you know, incontinent. So they take the ones who are much more debilitated, put them on a different floor. Visitors usually go to the good floors. Unfortunately, many things which we were so optimistic about, don’t work. Many things do work; and that’s a very exciting thing. You can create a space for somebody who’s handicapped with arthritis or has a vision problem or back problem, where he or she can manipulate much easier; that can be done. You can use colors, you can use public spaces, to support the shortcoming of the elderly; but you cannot really solve the problem.

Blum: And often, the elderly become the handicapped. Do you see elderly and handicapped as two separate conditions? Or do you see it on a continuum?

Macsai: Well, being handicapped is very different. A young person in a wheelchair… I had [in] a wheelchair, one student; I learned a lot from him. He was twenty- some years old, an architect. And he was so open about his handicap—he could talk about it, okay? And I asked him, I said, you know, "You’re so well-

148 adjusted, such a well-integrated personality. Must be because you experienced proper mobility before you became handicapped." He was eighteen years old when it happened to him. He was swinging on a swing in somebody’s back yard, and the chain broke and his neck…

Blum: Oh, how unfortunate.

Macsai: Yeah. So he says, "You just think so, that I am well adjusted because it happened later in my life. You only know me, you don’t know those who committed suicide."

Blum: How sad.

Macsai: That’s a very telling kind of story. But anyhow, that led to a lot of elderly buildings, my ability to work with… And also some writing. I did a little bit of writing about that.

Blum: Designing Environments for the Aging, was that part of the report that you did?

Macsai: Yes, and then Urban Land Institute published a book where I wrote one chapter. And it gave me an interesting new area with a negative, a serious negative. It’s a very conservative market.

Blum: Buildings for the elderly?

Macsai: For the elderly, yes. The providers are conservative. They are mostly developers. Mostly. The better jobs are the sectarian organizations: the Council for Jewish Elderly, Catholic Charities, Presbyterian Homes, because they don’t have to make every square foot earn money. You know, the private developers build these not just to provide for the elderly, but predominantly to make money on it. The sectarian organization doesn’t want to lose on it, but it’s providing a service. It’s a philosophical difference. So to be working with developers on elderly buildings is not the greatest kind of experience. Budget is usually low. And a very conservative clientele. But I

149 wanted to… I mean, I failed in this. I always wanted to see if a very modern building will be comfortable for the elderly because everybody claims that the elderly want, you know, comfortable, old fashioned furniture. That kind of chair [Mies side chair] even if it would have arms, where they can properly sit?

Blum: And you’re pointing to a Mies chair.

Macsai: A Mies chair, right. Which, gerontologically, is totally wrong—it has no arms, you know. Interestingly enough, Scandinavian countries are doing much more modern work for the elderly than we are doing here.

Blum: Oh, is that what you discovered with your research?

Macsai: Yes. So I talked to one of my favorite Scandinavians, Dr. Alvar Svanborg, at UIC. We became good friends. Unfortunately, recently, he had a stroke. Anyhow, Alvar was the head of the department of geriatrics at the University of Illinois hospital. Absolutely brilliant, brilliant person. Elegant, tall, handsome, sweet. Was in his late-seventies, early-eighties. And he says, you know, it troubled him too, that everything is so old-fashioned. So he took, in one of the places he supervised in Sweden, one particular area of the hall, and put down very old-fashioned overstuffed chairs alternating with very modern looking arm chairs.

Blum: Oh, that’s interesting.

Macsai: And he had some students or nurses, I don’t know, they recorded where the elderly sat. And there were, I think, six of each, but alternatingly, so they’re not grouped. And he says, "I hate to report this to you, but there was an overwhelming preference for the overstuffed ones."

Blum: What did you expect?

Macsai: So I told him, "Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know the truth."

150 Blum: As our population ages and an increasingly larger percentage of our population becomes elderly, isn’t that a glaring need and opportunity for architects?

Macsai: Oh, there is a glaring need. There is not really an opportunity to do a cutting edge modern job. But it’s an opportunity to provide good, tasteful, functional, supportive buildings.

Blum: Bud Goldberg tried to do that in the Hilliard Center in the elderly building. Are you familiar with the ideas behind his work?

Macsai: No, I’m not too familiar with it, Bud’s building, no. But a lot of people have done good work with the elderly. It’s not the AIA award-type of architecture which you can do.

Blum: You did an important building and, I think, it is very good looking from the street, I haven’t been inside.

Macsai: Which one?

Blum: 2960 Lake Shore Drive. Now, wasn’t that originally designed for elderly?

Macsai: It is, it is for the elderly, yes. It is, I would say, one of the better elderly buildings. In fact, it’s one of the most elegant ones. Originally, it was a Classic Residence by Hyatt.

Blum: You mean that building was put up by Hyatt?

Macsai: Hyatt was one of the partners. It’s very luxurious, it really is. I’d say it’s probably the most luxurious building for the elderly in the city of Chicago.

Blum: Did its location on Lake Shore Drive demand a more elegant building?

151 Macsai: Well, unfortunately, it went under, you know, financially. What happened is the developers figured, well, Hyatt name and Lake Shore Drive… In the beginning in order to rent an apartment, you had to cough up a deposit of $35,000 entrance fee. Out of that, ten was returnable when you moved, or died, and twenty-five was the entry fee. Well, they didn’t realize that in the area of Lake Shore Drive, people might have money, but not money to give away. And it was only about 45, 50 percent rented after two years. And Hyatt lost it, and a different company bought it, and they really solved the problem. They eliminated the entrance fee totally, which I think should have been eliminated.

Blum: What does it have specifically designed for the elderly? It’s a high-rise building.

Macsai: Oh, it has innumerable things. Outlet locations are at the proper level, windowsills are lower, so you can sit in a wheelchair and look out, look down. It has facilities for arts and crafts studio, three restaurants, a health club. Every humanly imaginable facility for the elderly is provided. And the whole building was done with a sensitivity, from the lighting level to where the switch is, that it’s relatively easy for the elderly. But you have to remember, that is for the independently functioning elderly, not a nursing home. When you do a nursing home, you have to have far more support than that building provides. So that building is not as elderly-sensitive as you will find, for instance, in an assisted-living facility which is the next phase or in a nursing home.

Blum: Say the design is for the elderly, as it progresses to the nursing home stage, changes, design-wise?

Macsai: Okay, well, take the nursing home, for instance. [In a] nursing home, you are bed-ridden, can’t get out of bed. Doors have to be wide enough so that the bed can roll out, for instance. See? Dining room cannot be only in a main dining room, but the food has to be able to be brought up, because many have to eat, if not in their room, in the little dining area on their floor, because

152 for them to go down to the main dining room, either they cannot do it, or if there is a nurse or somebody who helps them down, it will take forever. You know, how do you move down a hundred-fifty people at a particular time for dinner? You don’t have enough nurses's aides to do it. So they have to bring the food up and feed up there; that’s another thing. There are a whole number of things. While cooking, the ability to have a kitchen and cook, is wonderfully rejuvenating to any person who used to cook, especially women, but at one point, it can also be a danger.

Blum: Leaving the stove on?

Blum: Yes. For instance, upper cabinets can also be dangerous. It’s nearly suicidal. Most elderly women are shorter, can’t reach, they try to stand on a chair or stool. And a lot of people fall because of that. Or the stove that has the controls, instead of on the front they’re in the back. So you have a bathrobe on, and you reach, and it happens to be that the burner is on… I mean, dozens of these minor things, which an architect who works, you know, with gerontological design should be totally aware of. And that was one of the nice things about OWP&P, we had what they called the life-care department.

Blum: What does life-care include?

Macsai: Life-care. Doing all the gerontological work. I used to head that department. They’ve disbanded it recently.

Blum: Why?

Macsai: Because, I think, they are idiots, that’s why. And they have these illusions that they only want to do cutting edge work, you know, very modern work. And elderly work is never going to be that modern. But it’s good bread and butter. Oh, it’s conceit. I wish them well, but I don’t think any architect… Even SOM did a lot of bread and butter work which they never published. There was housing in Okinawa. They even did two buildings at Robert Taylor Homes. Okay? I mean, nobody knew about that. They didn’t have to

153 even design it; the design was given. I don’t know which firm was the designer, but the administration handed each large firm some working drawing jobs. Holabird and Root had the Illinois Bell Telephone Company as a bread and butter account. Most firms need to have, you know, like, I call it class-B buildings. And if you only want to do class-A buildings, well… Also, by the way, gerontological buildings don’t earn a lot of money for the architect. They are low profit work.

Blum: What were some of the other elderly or nursing care facility buildings that you designed?

Macsai: Well, there was the Lieberman Centre, that was the first one. And then I did the 2960. I did Fairfield Court, in Wilmette. I remodeled this building practically next door, the Georgian, for the Mather Foundation. I was the architect on the Lake Forest Place, for Presbyterian Homes. It’s one of the largest, fanciest ever. It was about a seventy-million dollar project. Well, these are the more important ones.

Blum: Did you know that when you were at PACE that PACE did the initial conversion for the Georgian?

Macsai: No, I didn’t know that. Had no idea.

Blum: I thought maybe you were at PACE when it was done.

Macsai: The Georgian originally was a hotel. So it was PACE who turned it into an apartment building, and now as people move out from each apartment, the apartment is being remodeled.

Blum: For the elderly?

Macsai: Well, A, to be more elderly accessible and B, to be more up-to-date. They’re a little antiquated, those apartments. Bathrooms are not good enough—certainly not large enough to turn around. The cooking facility is no

154 good. And we usually make the apartments bigger by eliminating one apartment and making one on each side bigger. But it’s a very difficult problem. Because ideally, we would have to take one tier and remodel it tier by tier. People are living there. Can’t do it. So you only do it when somebody is moving out. I think I have remodeled some twenty-five apartments there. But now I am out of it.

Blum: Well, you did something very different from elderly housing in your own practice; and that was some zoo work.

Macsai: Oh, I loved that, yeah.

Blum: How did you get the zoo work?

Macsai: Well, through political connection. Through political connection with the Park District. The Park District was one of the clients. The Lincoln Park Zoo is owned by Chicago Park District. And you have two clients. You have the Park District and you have the zoo. Well, I got the job through the Park District. But I adored working with the zoo people. They were just wonderful people. And Dr. Fisher, who was the director, Les Fisher was one of my favorite clients. I truly liked him. In fact, I can tell you a cute story. I remodeled the primate house. And it became a totally different environment. And the last year when Fisher was still the director, he called me at OWP&P and he said, "I want some free work from you; it may be a job. And if it’s a job, you’ll get the building. You have to trust me. I have two favorite architects through all these years. One is you, and the other is Myron Goldsmith. I want the two of you to work together." I said, "Well, you couldn’t find a more talented and nicer human being. I love him. If he is willing to work with me, I certainly am willing." He says, "Yeah, I talked to him, absolutely." It was, for a grant proposal to the Kaiser Foundation, for a new great ape house. Well, we didn’t get the grant. But we did the job. And unfortunately, now there is a new great ape house but the new director doesn’t know me. He forgot what we did. So I just saw in the paper two weeks ago that Lohan is the architect for the new great ape house. This is

155 okay. I wouldn’t know how to do it now anyhow; I have not an office. Anyhow, we had an interesting problem. The grant application had to be in by—this was a Friday—the following Friday. I said, "That’s only possible if you do the graphic work. Look, by Monday we’ll have the design ready, if Myron is willing to work over the weekend." He was willing. "And if your own graphic department will put the package together between Monday and Friday." "Absolutely." We had a meeting Friday evening. Everybody was in. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, we worked. Monday afternoon, the drawings went over to the graphic department. Myron lived in Wilmette and since I live closer to the city, he offered to pick me up in the morning. Please, you don’t want to know. To drive with Myron is like asking for a suicide. I mean, it’s more secure to drive with a suicide bomber from Palestine than with Myron. Myron, you know, he had a little bit of a tremor, you know. And he’s holding the wheel, and he’s talking to me. We are driving, and people are honking. He’s moving across a lane. He’s talking to me [about] architecture turning his head while he’s driving.

Blum: That’s an amusing description, but I’ve never driven with Myron.

Macsai: It was absolutely crazy. So Doc Fisher asked, "How are you getting along?" And I said, "I’m still alive," I said, "but, I’ll tell you, I’m driving tomorrow." So I offered to pick him up, and no, he says he’ll meet me there, because he has to go somewhere. I don’t care. I’m not sitting with him. He is such a talented guy. And by the way, everybody accused him of being a very narrow Miesian. Not true at all. This building had to fit in a particular terrain, had to have operable roofs. One of my young people at OWP&P, who used to be my student and worked for me in my office… The three of us were working together, and we realized it has to be a very complex shape, not a simple Miesian approach. And Myron was willing to do it. He was so open- minded, so talented. Came up with a very good solution. Big loss. His death was a big loss for the architecture community. He also was a nice human being.

Blum: Oh, yes.

156 Macsai: See, he, in contrast to Bruce Graham, was the living proof that you don’t have to be a bastard to do good architecture.

Blum: So did your design ever get built?

Macsai: No. I did two jobs for the zoo, not really big ones, the primate house and I remodeled the zoo farm. That was mostly technical work, the zoo farm. The primate house was an interesting job. But it was a totally interior remodeling. We added the open cage for the gibbons outside the building, but we didn’t touch the architecture. It’s a historic neoclassical piece of architecture, so we left it totally intact. But I enjoyed working at the zoo; they are caring people. Anybody who works with animals. And the curator of the mammals was a very nice guy, I remember. I enjoyed working with him. And Les Fisher was just unique. You know him?

Blum: I knew him, years ago.

Macsai: He’s a very, very sweet, nice man. I enjoyed that. And I enjoyed taking my grandchildren to the primate house. "Grandpa designed that." It was a very difficult problem, by the way, to do it, because the original building was built for forty species to be exhibited—forty! They were all in these little cages in a big row, like a big nave of a church, and the side chapels are each for an animal. And we cut it down to fourteen species from forty. But they’re spacious; the habitats look like their natural environment. See, the way they judge whether animals feel good in their environment [is] whether they propagate. My answer to that was that if you base it on humans, all those humans who are screwed up and propagate will absolutely disprove this theory. But generally speaking, in the animal world, when they give birth to the young one, it usually means that the environment is an acceptable one. And a lot of the monkeys actually have had offspring.

Blum: One of the things I read was that when you were in Hungary, you were busy sketching the zoo. Did that have an influence on your design?

157 Macsai: No. No, I visited the zoo in Budapest, because it’s a magnificent turn-of-the- century architecture.

Blum: Oh. I thought maybe there was some carryover between what you saw in Budapest and what you did here.

Macsai: No, the architecture of the zoo in Hungary is uniquely interesting, from the point of view of architecture, not from animal habitat and behavior at all. After all, that zoo was built in 1906 or 1905. Zookeeping and animal habitat, knowledge of animal behavior was minimal at that time. They know much more about it today. I love animals. Unfortunately, in this building, you cannot have animals. We always had either a dog—I personally am very much in love with cats. I adore cats. And I can’t have cats here either.

Blum: Well, you can always go to the zoo.

Macsai: Or, like one of the buildings on Lake Shore Drive which doesn’t allow cats—you go there on a sunny day around late morning, when the sun hits, on the twenty-some floors, you see at least a dozen cats sitting in the windows. But this building doesn’t allow them. They are there in secret. They’re quiet, they don’t need to walk them.

Blum: You were with OWP&P for nine years and were in charge of gerontology?

Macsai: What you could call life-care in housing.

Blum: Well, it was handicapped and elderly.

Macsai: No, just elderly. And straight housing, as well. But they’d never done housing before.

Blum: High-rise housing?

158 Macsai: Yeah. Or any housing. And I brought in some work. But the office was not really set up to do housing.

Blum: What kind of work did they do?

Macsai: They do mostly schools, academic buildings, hospitals. See, to work with developers, you have to know how they think. The fees are lower. You have to work unbelievably economically to make a living with developers. And large offices, like OWP&P, who grew up on public work practice, cannot do housing. Housing is not that difficult, but it has to be done less from the bureaucratic than from the entrepreneurial approach. You know, if a developer says, "I can’t pay you for the preliminary drawings," you have to have an answer. You can’t say, "I walk away from it." So you have to tell him, "Okay, can you pay me when the job goes ahead?" And he says, "Well, in that case, if you’ll gamble with me…" The next question, next thing you ask, "Okay, I’m a gambler, I normally charge 10,000 dollars for the preliminary. I’ll do it for nothing, but if the job goes ahead, you’ll give me 20,000." I had three clients who went along with this thing before, when I was on my own.

Blum: Well, you were very clever about negotiating.

Macsai: I generally was.

Blum: So you know the ways of developers.

Macsai: I know them. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t screw me over many times. Oh, there are some terrible developers in this town.

Blum: Dishonest?

Macsai: Absolutely. But every developer is a little bit dishonest. It’s a question of degree. Because when you sell something, and it’s sold as first-rate, first- quality, you already are dishonest when you say it is first class but it is made by the lowest bidder. You know, if you ask the salesman who sells the

159 apartment, "How is it?" "Perfect. Good. Everything is high-quality." And everything is the lowest acceptable quality. Well, as long as you’re aware of it, you are a realist. But no salesman can say that to people who are ready to buy the house or buy the apartment, they have to be enthusiastic. So already, when you sell a condominium or a house, you really are a little bit dishonest. But then commerce is a little bit dishonest.

Blum: You don’t have a very good opinion of developers.

Macsai: That always was my feeling. Did I deal with developers well? Well, you know, I served them well. I am very proud to say that I was never part of any antisocial, indecent operation. I always tried to do the best I knew how to. But at the same time, I had to close my eyes to their illegal dealing with the city, payoffs, and the over-enthusiasm in selling units, by telling the public that they are better than they actually are. This eventually, might lead to lawsuits, because there are dissatisfied buyers, and they claim they were misled. We had that kind of problem.

Blum: Well, you brought those skills of dealing with developers to OWP&P.

Macsai: Yes, I did. But it was very difficult. A large firm like OWP&P had an organizational structure where everything had to go through committees, you know, all decisions. A, I wasn’t accustomed to that. B, a developer doesn’t operate that way. He cannot wait for a committee to make up its mind. He calls John Buenz or John Cordwell or John Macsai and he says, "Monday I have to make a bid on this property. Can you do some preliminary work for me over the weekend?" And then you cannot sit down and ask, you know, what the fee is going to be and how many people I put on this. You don’t put on any people; you do it yourself Saturday night. And you might even do it free, because it’s at least for a good commission. It’s a decision you can make. At a large firm, you are crippled; you can’t make decisions. It has to go to a committee. So you are not free to gamble.

Blum: Very different from what you were used to. How did you fare in this

160 environment?

Macsai: Unhappily. They, OWP&P, have too many filters.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Macsai: The filter deals with the issue of is this a commission we are willing to take? And what are the filter levels? Can we do good work? Can we do outstanding work? Is the budget high enough? Is the client reliable? Is he going to give us a contract, or are we working on a promise? There are a lot of these things. If you want to satisfy all of these, by the time you woke up, the train left. Developers cannot wait. Developers want fast action. Because for a developer to be able to react fast to an availability of land, or a deal, he needs to act like this [snaps fingers]. So you have to be experienced, you have to have some courage. And sometimes you don’t know for sure. And what do you do? You simply are honest and you don’t lie to a client. Tell him, "Look, I don’t know. That particular part of the problem, I don’t know anything about. Call your lawyer." Or, "Don’t be so cheap; hire a zoning consultant." But for what you know, however, give that answer as fast as you can.

Blum: How large an office is OWP&P?

Macsai: About 300, 320 people—the largest in the city of Chicago right now.

Blum: Oh, pretty big.

Macsai: Yeah, the largest. I think it’s the largest right now, because SOM is down to some 250 people. They have their own engineering, which I think is not conducive for doing the best. Look, I was able, both in the mechanical and electrical and structural engineering, to hire the people who were experts at doing housing. At OWP&P, I had to use our own engineers. And since they were on the payroll instead of getting a fee from me, if they spent more time than they estimated on the job, it went against my account, and it made us

161 look like losing money. With the outside engineer, I had a deal, fixed fee. And a fixed fee was a percentage of what I get. So I used to tell them, "If I get a screwing, you get a screwing. The day I get paid, next day you get paid. I never use your money. If I don’t get paid, you won’t get paid either. You gamble with me. But you’ll get most of my work." And it was working wonderfully, with some very top-notch engineering firms in the city.

Blum: Well, it sounds like what you’re describing is the difference between working with a big firm and a smaller firm.

Macsai: And the flexibility of a small entrepreneurial organization. Absolutely.

Blum: You left OWP&P in 1999. You retired.

Macsai: I went to 75 percent time in 1997. Until 1997, I was on full-time.

Blum: You tapered off gradually?

Macsai: Tapering off gave me enough. And I worked three-and-a-half days a week. And that gave me a little time. I wanted to do some more painting, get into it; I wanted to take some courses at the Evanston Art Center and the Academy of Fine Arts downtown. It was up to me how I spent that 75 percent. There were weeks when I went in every day, but went in at ten o’clock. You know. It gave me total flexibility, which was very nice. And the firm is, by and large, wonderful, nice people, and they’re trying to do good work. And sometimes they do very good work. They have a top-notch chief of design. But they suffer from all the cumbersomeness of a large organization. Very difficult to avoid. Even though the managerial group at OWP&P is very clever, hard- working, know what they are doing financially, in every respect, and they manage their money very well. Still, the size and the organizational structure always gets in the way.

Blum: But was that a good move for you, after closing your own office?

162 Macsai: Well, it was a good move. When they negotiated with me, they asked me, "How many years you guarantee you’ll stay with us?" I said, "Three." "So what’s your intention?" I said, "I stay three years, and then I retire from you guys, and I’ll just teach." That was my idea. Just the opposite happened.

Blum: When did you retire from teaching?

Macsai: 1996. Just the opposite happened.

Blum: Why did it work that way?

Macsai: Because I became very unhappy at teaching. The atmosphere started from the head down. You know, what’s his name—Ken Schroeder, whom I became very good friends with—became the new head. And while Ken was a fair, decent, good administrator and everything, he also did not believe that housing, the way I taught it, should be taught. That is his privilege. And I was supposed to teach an undergraduate course with a couple of other people, maybe housing, maybe this, and I decided, I am too good at what I’m doing to do something where I’m absolutely convinced the students will learn far less than if I do my way. And I felt, Okay, if you guys don’t want me, OWP&P is the nicest place I ever could work, with all the cumbersomeness, so I’ll retire from teaching and I’ll just continue practicing. That’s what I did.

Blum: So you retired from teaching before you left practicing. Any regrets?

Macsai: I retired three years prior to that. And I still regret that I did that, because I miss teaching. I don’t miss practice at all. Not at all.

Blum: Which facet of your career thus far gave you the most satisfaction?

Macsai: I miss teaching far more than practice. Far more. Listen, what priest, minister, or rabbi has, not once a week but three times a week, the total devoted audience I had? It’s a great ego gratification.

163 Blum: That must be one of the important rewards for you.

Macsai: I mean, they love you, they adore you, because you know it and they don’t know it yet; and you can teach it to them, and they believe in you. I mean, it’s a great relation, great relation.

Blum: John, before we get to your retirement activities—painting and archeology—over the weekend, I gave you John Cordwell’s oral history that you said you’d like to read, and you said you had a few comments.

Macsai: Well, my comment was, number one, that John read just like he sounded. I mean, I could see him.

Blum: Could you just sort of picture him saying things?

Macsai: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And he was ornery and genuine as ever. Picked on everybody, belittled everybody, talked about architects like Skidmore. None of them did anything good; it was only he. Which is fine, a little conceit; it’s important in architecture.

Blum: Well, I’m glad to hear you say that it sounded just like he would have spoken it.

Macsai: Absolutely. I could see him sitting there.

Blum: Were there any features of what he said, that would like to comment on?

Macsai: Yeah. You know, the true story of Presidential Towers was not exactly that way.

Blum: Did he clean it up?

Macsai: Well, I don’t know; maybe he didn’t know these things. All I can tell you, to

164 the best of my knowledge, that whole property was slum when I first came to Chicago. It was skid row. Now, one way a politician makes money is, buy slum property with the knowledge that it will be declared urban renewal, and the price goes up. When the city of Chicago found out that that is a designated area, suddenly all the politicians—Shannon and many others—I will not mention names, because they are still around, they were allowed, or encouraged, to buy property there. Chuck Swibel, later head of Chicago Housing Authority, was the front man. He’s the one who picked up the property, and then it was sold to the various politicians. Now, property in itself is not valuable. It becomes valuable when you can sell it. Probably, this is conjecture, these politicians through the years went to Mayor Daley, that they would like to sell it. "Please, sell it, already." And the mayor probably, who had more power than anybody in the city, told him go fuck himself. "You wait till we are ready to do anything." Well, poor Daley died—who, by the way, I had tremendous respect for.

Blum: The father of the current Daley?

Macsai: Yes. I have even more for the son. Anyhow, he died, and then Bilandic came for a very short time. And then Jane, Jane Byrne, came later. Well, Jane needed every bit of support, you know, because, when she was supposed to run for reelection, and the politicians, in order to support her, needed to be paid off. The politicians, whom Daley would not allow to sell the land, finally convinced Byrne to do something. Byrne cannot sell that land. So Byrne went to Dan Levin. I am positive of that, because I was in the next room in a meeting of the zoning committee, on which Dan and I sat. And she told Dan, "I want you to buy the land, and build an apartment complex." And Dan probably said, "It’s a terrible location." "Don’t worry, Rusty is going to help put through…" Rostenkowski, our Congressman.

Blum: Oh. What did you call him, Rusty?

Macsai: Rusty. "Rusty is going to help. He’ll put through some bond issue." Also, it was intimated that if Dan doesn’t develop that property, he’ll never develop

165 another piece in the city of Chicago, so he had no choice. And he developed it, okay? And Rusty put through the bond issue. And there was only one condition. The FHA loan required a certain percent low-income housing. Well, you know, it’s a difficult area; they weren’t sure there will be people who want to live on the Near West Side. At that time, the Near West Side was not popular like it is today. And certainly, 10 or 20 percent low-income would have made it difficult to market to a "yuppie" kind of upward striving population. So they didn’t do it, they cheated. But they were caught. They were caught, and by that time, Harold Washington was the mayor, and they had to pay $17 million to the city of Chicago as penalty, which the city then spent on low-income housing. But it was not low-income housing where the federal government wanted it. So it was outright goddamn cheating. Now, it turned out to be that renting was slow and the project went under. But, you know, when you go under… No, no, no, when you are somewhat crooked, you have to be very crooked. You don’t have to go under with a little thing; you do it with a big end run, you know? So again, the federal government bailed them out.

Blum: So how did they fare?

Macsai: They walked away, the developers of that property made a killing. All the politicians who had money invested in land, among them was the Commissioner of Planning for the city of Chicago.

Blum: Who was that?

Macsai: Lew Hill. I mean, it was an unheard of manipulation. No, it’s not unheard of. Probably, there are dozens like this in the cities of the United States, or in the world. But this, I found out about.

Blum: Well, how does Cordwell come into this?

Macsai: They were the architects. Solomon, Cordwell, and Buenz were the architects for Presidential Towers.

166 Blum: I see.

Macsai: Dan Levin hired them to do the building. Cordwell never liked the buildings, you know, those four massive towers. But my opinion has nothing to do with the architecture, the quality of the building. And actually, the location, it was pioneering, it was good. Nevertheless, they did not live up to the condition of the federal loan.

Blum: Are you inferring that this happens all the time?

Macsai: I’m sure it is. They were lucky they didn’t go to jail. It was fraud, okay? Little people who are caught with federal money, with irregularities go to jail. Big people, they get fined.

Blum: Well, what’s your opinion of the current situation that some old, low-cost housing projects are coming down and being replaced by other housing, sometimes single-family residences?

Macsai: Well, look, you know, public housing in Chicago was so criminally handled. It’s good that many of them are torn down, because that area is kind of hopeless. But in a terrible way, high-rise housing, like Robert Taylor Homes, became the victim of politics, because there’s nothing wrong with high-rise housing. Those Robert Taylor Homes buildings, when they were built, they were no worse than Winston Towers is, on the North Side, except Winston Towers has a middle income Jewish population, and it’s a thriving building. Probably recently, it became condo. Same kind of architecture down there on the South Side. Doesn’t work because they created a ghetto, all black housing. They allowed people without qualification in: a large number of children, no economic screening, dope addicts. I mean, there was no screening of the population. When you have an underprivileged population, you must do some screening; you cannot put them all together. That should have been dispersed. But no alderman wanted it in his ward, okay?

167 Blum: I think Bud Goldberg spoke about a lot of the same kinds of subjects, and held the same opinion.

Macsai: The early head of Chicago Housing Authority, Elizabeth Wood, was a brilliant lady. She was replaced by General William Kean, who didn’t know much about housing. Anyhow, this would not have happened under Elizabeth Wood.

Blum: Did you know Elizabeth Wood?

Macsai: No.

Blum: Well, she left because she had a disagreement with the city.

Macsai: Exactly, with the politicians. Here at that time, the research director, the maven of public housing in Chicago was a close friend of mine. Jimmy Fuerst, this man knows more about public housing than anybody who wrote about it.

Blum: So that’s the story behind Cordwell’s story.

Macsai: Right. The story behind the story behind the story.

Blum: Yes. Was there anything else you’d like to comment on?

Macsai: Well, we were talking about a not entirely kosher approach, like Presidential Towers. I could tell you that I think any significant project undergoes all kinds of wheeling and dealing in a big city, certainly in Chicago. I don’t want to waste our time on it because it’s unimportant; but one has to be aware of it, and it’s very difficult to fight. It’s that simple.

Blum: Do you think that’s a built-in problem in urban centers? Or you think Chicago sort of stands out for that kind of corruption?

168 Macsai: Because we know it. I don’t know about other urban centers, you know? Yeah. On the other hand, there is some advantage. At least you know who to pay off and how much, and things get done. I live in a totally honorable little town, Evanston. Everything takes forever. The citizenry is invited to participate. Democracy is slow, it’s painful. Every ignoramus thinks he has a point of view. My God, the aldermen are, by and large, ignorant.

Blum: Was there any more about your own career with SOM, Holabird and Root, Dunbar Builders, Raymond Loewy, and finally PACE?

Macsai: I moved around.

Blum: You certainly did, before you settled down into your own partnership.

Macsai: And finally, on my own.

Blum: Was here something that stands out in your mind along the way that we haven’t talked about?

Macsai: Let’s see. No, I think we covered pretty well everything. You know about my writings. Through the period—especially through the period of teaching—I did a good deal of writing on a variety of subjects. I did a good deal of lecturing. Probably the most interesting lecture was in Rome. When I was teaching in Rome that half semester, I was invited to give a lecture.

Blum: Where did you teach?

Macsai: UIC has an extension in Rome. For the graduate students. That was a ball. I was teaching. I had six students. Unbelievable. Six guys.

Blum: It was a tutorial.

Macsai: Tutorial. Every morning, my wife and I and the six boys went to sightsee buildings. Because my feeling in Rome was, you are not going to sit and

169 design an elementary school, you’re going to soak up what you see in Rome. Anyhow, one of my friends, acquaintances, became the director of Notre Dame; you know, Thomas Gordon Smith, the classicist. And that was the time I wrote an article on a particular feature of renaissance architecture, and which appeared in the ACSA Journal. And he asked me if I would give that lecture to his students in Rome, because it had a lot to do with architecture in Rome. And I knew that the students were up to here with classicism. I mean, he turned the school into a totally retrograde classicist institution. So I figured, I’m going to surprise the students. I left my classicism slides home, and took my slides of the turn of the century and current Hungarian organic architecture. So there were about a hundred, hundred-twenty people in the audience. I never got a bigger applause than when I got up and I said, "Well, I have a surprise for you. I’m not going to talk about classicism." Huge. I mean, the kids were… Anyhow, I also did give a couple lectures at the Art Institute. You remember, there was a series, "The Great Cities of Europe." And I just finished writing a chapter in East European Modernism, that book. And the guy who was the main author of it, Lesnikowski, Wojciech Lesnikowski, he cajoled, I think, the Art Institute should have a series on the big cities of Europe, so he can talk about Paris or whatever. And I talked about Budapest. Anyhow, that’s about it.

Blum: So you were also a lecturer, in addition to an educator and a writer.

Macsai: Yeah, I like to lecture. After my early, horrible experiences in public speaking, I kind of enjoyed it.

Blum: Did you serve on many architectural juries?

Macsai: Not too many, not too many.

Blum: Through the school?

Macsai: At the school, all the time; and occasionally, an outside jurist, too.

170 Blum: What do you think about the jury process?

Macsai: Juries are not my favorite way of dealing with students. It’s a one-shot deal. The jurors come, they want to live up to the promise that they are big architects and smart people, and they have to talk, right? And they usually monopolize the afternoon. They not always are relevant. And they are there to pick on the student.

Blum: Pick on, or help?

Macsai: By that time, it’s almost too late; it’s all drawn, it’s done. Also, I always found that if the jurors didn’t like my student’s work, it reflected on me. I don’t want to invite people to put a knife in me. I did not particularly love the jury system. I very much enjoyed having other architects come and teach there one afternoon or any time during the preparation of the project. I welcomed, invited people, because that allowed my students to learn from and draw a conclusion, whether they incorporated the ideas or not. But come on the end, you know, it’s like a postmortem; it’s not going to cure anybody. Well, it’s good for the next illness, but it’s simply not my favorite method, the jury.

Blum: Do you belong to the AIA?

Macsai: Yes.

Blum: And you were nominated a Fellow in 1978.

Macsai: No, actually, I was nominated in 1977, then it was turned down. That happens in the AIA. And next year you resubmit. By the way, my sponsor was Stanley. Next year, I resubmitted, and I was accepted. And you know, the AIA fellows have an annual dinner, a dinner of frivolity, where I usually tell dirty stories, and Jack Hartray is the emcee, and we have a ball. And I used this as an example about the value of the Fellowship. I said, "You know, nothing happened between 1977 and 1978 which would justify me getting a Fellowship. But I know what they did." They must have called my internist.

171 And they found out that I have an incipient enlarged prostate, which is a condition when you are getting older. Consequently, I qualified for a fellowship. I was old enough, you know?

Blum: Oh. Only the elders get into the Fellowship?

Macsai: So at that point, one of the architects says, "Hey, how about Carol Ross Barney, or the other female fellows?" I said, "It’s very simple. They have to be menopausal."

Blum: Is that what you think of the Fellows group? It’s just an old age society?

Macsai: Yes. It used to be but not any more. There are a lot of young people getting in. No, in fact, I complained that these young people shouldn’t get it. Up till now we had this wonderful bastion of old farts, okay? And now all these young nobodies…

Blum: Why did you originally think it was important to join the AIA?

Macsai: Oh, I didn’t think it was very important.

Blum: Why did you join?

Macsai: I joined because I wanted to impress the laymen. After my name, there is AIA, you know? It sounds good, like a degree. I had one client, a little developer, he happened to be a little Greek immigrant and he didn’t know what it means. He owed $2,000, the check was made out to "John M. Aia."

Blum: Oh, how funny.

Macsai: The bank cashed it. They knew who I was, et cetera. So no, AIA is… Just only prestige.

Blum: The AIA is a serious organization that some people…

172 Macsai: It’s a serious, humorless organization, slightly impotent, okay? But then I know some people who are seriously humorless, impotent, but I like them. You know, I mentioned earlier that I was the first architect on whose job the Scaffolding Act was rejuvenated, you know?

Blum: Yes.

Macsai: I realized that it is such a tragedy, I called the AIA and I said, "You know, I’m just a starting architect, can’t afford huge legal fees, would the AIA provide legal counsel? Because the entire profession in Illinois will be screwed by this." And they said, "We are not in the legal business." I find the AIA… You know, I got on the board of directors of the AIA; I was dropped, because I didn’t show up at three meetings in a row. Now, I’ll tell you why I didn’t show up, because the bastards charge ten dollars a lunch and they serve chicken each time, and I don’t eat chicken. And I always said, "If I pay for lunch, at least I like to eat what I get. Can I get some vegetarian?" Now, each time they were giving chicken, so I figured I’m not going.

Blum: And for that they suspended your seat on the board?

Macsai: Not suspended, they threw me off the board. In fact, I think John Syvertsen, followed me.

Blum: What about the contracts that they have? The contract forms?

Macsai: They’re wonderful. They are wonderful.

Blum: Well, that is a service to the profession.

Macsai: But I don’t have to belong to take advantage of that service. Anybody can buy. I’m sure. Well, no, I don’t know. I’m not so sure. Anyhow, after a while, I joined the AIA, I succumbed. You know, I don’t even believe in registration of the architect.

173 Blum: Oh, why?

Macsai: Because if you go around and look at every ugly, repulsive, bad building, every one was done by a licensed architect. So what does it prove?

Blum: What do you think it proves?

Macsai: That the licensing does not guarantee good quality architecture. It creates a minimum safety, which I think we need to have, okay? That’s the only purpose, that buildings are not built without stairs, and they hold up, and this kind of thing. But by and large, the amount of anxiety licensing creates in young architects in order to pass the board is too big a toll, in my opinion.

Blum: What was your experience like?

Macsai: Oh, it was a goddamn nightmare. I wanted to take it when I graduated.

Blum: In 1949.

Macsai: I couldn’t. I wasn’t a citizen. Then I wanted to take it in 1951, and still wasn’t a citizen. At that time, they didn’t allow you to take it when you just had a green card; you had to be a citizen. So I had to wait till 1954. By that time, I forgot all the theoretical things, which I didn’t use. So I studied six months, day and night, to pass the goddamn exam. I passed it the first time. I am very good at taking exams, because taking exams is almost more a technique than knowledge. And I passed it. In fact, at that time, they gave you the points you passed with. My highest point average was not in design, not in building technology, but in an area that I know minimally, mechanical equipment of buildings, okay?

Blum: How could that be?

Macsai: Very simple. That morning, I beefed up on it, because I knew maybe one

174 question—or one of three questions—for thirty-three points had to do with something which I know nothing about. But that morning I found sidewalk elevators. I never saw a goddamn sidewalk elevator before. In Oxford, Ohio? In Chicago, we have a few, not too many. But it was in the graphic standards book, and that morning, Bob Diamant and I studied together before breakfast.

Blum: Did he take the exam when you did?

Macsai: Yes, same time.

Blum: Well, you say you belong to the AIA just for the prestige of putting those initials after your name. Were there any clubs or societies that you belonged to for reasons other than prestige?

Macsai: Okay. These were not clubs, they were organizations. When I lived in South Shore, I got very involved in a way to make South Shore a reasonably well and happily integrated area. When blacks started to move in, there was a huge white exodus. And integration wasn’t very popular. And we thought—maybe the timing was wrong—that with enough education and enough preparation and enough help, this can be solved. Well, I was on the board of the South Shore Commission; I was vice-president. As I said before, I was vice-president and chairman of the social action committee at Beth Am Temple. And we had all kinds of projects. We had speaker forums; we had a reading help class.

Blum: Who was your audience? Who were you appealing to?

Macsai: The population in general.

Blum: Did you draw a mixed population, or did you just draw your own constituents?

Macsai: Well, we organized these lectures in the various churches and temples, and

175 as long as that population came, and were convinced that they shouldn’t run, that was some help. We also did a kind of an award for well-kept buildings, I remember; it was a Good Housekeeping award. We checked buildings. We had a plan for South Shore, which we tried to sell the city, and they didn’t buy. Our idea was that the South Shore Country Club, which at that time was for sale, should be bought by the city, and a new college, junior college, should be built there.

Blum: What a spectacular campus that would have been.

Macsai: It would have anchored South Shore. Unfortunately, by that time, the political powers promised the president of the South Shore Railroad that their property, where the Kennedy-King College is now, is going to be bought by the city. The official excuse was that the South Shore Country Club is only, say, sixty-five acres, and they need ninety. So they could have filled, just like Northwestern does. But anyhow, we were politically screwed. And what else we did, you know, we realized that the incoming black students, many of them have not very well-prepared scholastically, so they are not doing well in school. So we had a tutorial program for entering kids. We worked mostly with the Catholic church, the nuns, and many of the temples, the Jewish ladies; tutoring was done mostly by women. I remember going to various churches and trying to sell this program. And the nuns were just wonderful. They rose to the challenge. Then my wife was chairman of the South Shore Open House Committee, See, the real estate community was very tricky; they didn’t want to show property to blacks. But once the tipping point occurred, they didn’t want to show it to whites anymore. Once an area was written off by real estate, they only showed it to blacks.

Blum: So you wanted to hold it in balance?

Macsai: Right. We were even for a quota. I still am for a quota. It doesn’t sound good. You know, for a European Jew who couldn’t go to the university because of the quota, it doesn’t sound good. But ultimately, quota is the only solution. At the beginning, to make integration work, it’s okay. In fact, the school

176 committee on which my wife sat came up with a brilliant idea, which was—I think it was her idea—the petal plan. Petal. Yeah, like flower, petal of the flower. South Shore High School was a recipient of various elementary schools. The idea would have been that when one school has too many blacks—beyond, say, I don’t know, 30, 40 percent—that petal closes and then more kids come from the others. And you manipulate this totally… Well, in many people’s opinion, it’s criminal to have a quota, you know? Because the quota, at one point, keeps people out. But it was necessary in order to keep the area balanced and integrated. Well, eventually, busing did it. Evanston was the first place where busing worked. In fact, just nowadays, I read in the paper, there are many people who think it should be eliminated.

Blum: I realize the activities that you’re talking about, you engaged in for humanitarian reasons. But was there any benefit to you, in an architectural way? Did you meet people that later on became clients?

Macsai: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, not being connected, not having gone to school here, not belonging to any club, not knowing much about marketing, I met a lot of people through social action. And some of them became my clients. It was just wonderful. And interestingly, a lot of people consider me a little bit lunatic, you know, a little bit of an idiot, who is willing to stay in South Shore. I stayed there till 1973. But I moved for economic reasons. I had two kids in Lab School at the University of Chicago, because our schools are by now not great; and two of them were entering college. That’s four private school tuitions. I couldn’t afford it.

Blum: Yes. So you needed to move to an area with better schools.

Macsai: Where there are good schools, free. Well, the real estate taxes which I have to pay in Evanston were still considerably lower than two private schools.

Blum: So that’s why you made your move north.

Macsai: Exactly, exactly.

177 Blum: Were you a member of any clubs? Your office has always been downtown.

Macsai: Just the Monroe Club. I used to belong to the Arts Club on the Near North Side. I left the Arts Club because there was no dinner there, just lunch. And it was too far for me. The best place would have been the Cliff Dwellers. The problem is the Cliff Dwellers, at the time I was thinking of joining, didn’t allow women.

Blum: They resolved that.

Macsai: Well, they got over that, but by that time, however, I realized that I don’t have to belong to eat lunch there, because Ezra Gordon does. You’ve heard the old joke about the guy who says, "Why should I marry, as long as my friends have wives?"

Blum: No, I haven’t heard that, but I have now. Did you feel that you were part of the architectural establishment?

Macsai: Depends on what you call establishment. Not the establishment which got big public commissions, like the Skidmores, the Murphys, the Perkinses, no.

Blum: Are you defining establishment as politically connected?

Macsai: Yes, yes. But I early on gained the respect of the design community, because I did relatively good apartment buildings. And I got a number of AIA awards on it. And some of them were truly deserving, and some were just mediocre, but at that time all the others were even weaker, so I got awards on it.

Blum: I know you’ve taken numerous awards. What award stands out in your mind as having the most meaning for you?

Macsai: That’s hard, because my very best building, Harbor House, which I think is the very best, never got an award. And Evanston Place, I didn’t even submit.

178 Blum: What do you mean?

Macsai: I did not submit it for an award, you know.

Blum: What do awards mean to you?

Macsai: I tell you what is the award that I was most impressed with and that gave me tremendous pleasure; it was from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

[Tape 6: Side 1]

Blum: You said the award that meant the most to you was from the ACSA [Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture].

Macsai: The ACSA has a journal, and all professors, teachers in architecture school are invited to submit articles. It’s a refereed journal. They don’t just publish anything, like the daily press. And it’s seriously refereed. I had an article there on Hungarian architecture, turn of the century and current. It was called Architecture as Opposition, because it was the political opposition which favored this particular style. And I got the award for the best article of the year, I think it was in 1986. I was very proud of that, because I’m not a writer. And I remember how much I struggled with that article—God!

Blum: Isn’t it a little ironic that you, an architect who’s built a lot of buildings, think an award for your writing as the most important?

Macsai: Well, we always want to be something else. I’ve always wanted to be tall and blonde.

Blum: Oh. Do you think that there is anything of your very early experience in Hungary—the labor camp experience, not being welcomed in the local schools because you were Jewish—do you think you brought a lot of that

179 with you and it sort of played out in your career?

Macsai: I don’t think so. Well, yes and no. For a long time, I had certain reservations with gentile clients whom I had to approach cold, whom I didn’t know yet, if my accent or being Jewish—is this going to be counted against me? But I realized that this is a non-issue, by and large. Okay? I mean, sure there is an issue. And it works in reverse, too. Some Jewish organizations insist that the architect should be Jewish, or the contractor should be Jewish. Similarly, I’m sure, whether it’s written or not, other denominations favor their own. I understand that totally. And the inferiority complex, with the accent, was gone very fast, because I realized it’s good to have an accent. In fact, one of my money making schemes was to start an accent school, a reverse Berlitz. In six weeks, we guarantee you’ll have an accent. And you can choose. If you are a lover and you are after some old lady’s estate, South American accent. If you are in cooking business, restaurant, French, you know, nouvelle cuisine. Mechanic? German accent.

Blum: That’s very creative. Well, your next career is all laid out for you, an accent school, After you retired, the career that you followed wasn’t an accent school, it was painting and archeology. Do they work together, in some way?

Macsai: No, archeology started, actually, earlier than my retirement. I love to travel, and do a lot. I sketch. I travel with a sketchbook. And in fact, the Art Institute has some of my travel sketches.

Blum: Yes, we do have some of your sketches.

Macsai: I mean, I have about six, eight books filled. And I always was interested in archeology. In fact, first, in 1968, as a bar mitzvah present for my son, who was at that time thirteen, I took him to Israel—just the two of us—on a dig.

Blum: On a dig?

Macsai: Yes. But most digs don’t take thirteen-year-olds, because they can’t get

180 insurance on them. But this dig had an American director who took his own son. And I wrote to all of them; they turned me down, about ten of them. I got a letter from Dr. Swauger, from the Pittsburgh museum, saying that, "Anybody who’s crazy enough to go on a two-week trip with his thirteen- year-old son, I need to help."

Blum: So he agreed?

Macsai: Yes. We had a ball, the two of us. We had an absolute ball.

Blum: Did you use the dig to just bond with your son? Or did you actually do work?

Macsai: Oh, we did interesting work. Tel Ashdod was the dig and it was fascinating. I always was very interested in history, in the Bible, and biblical archeology. Totally fascinating. So that was the first time I actually partook of it. And then as I was telling you that we love to travel, my wife and I traveled a lot. I used to love to plan my trips, you know. After a while, as you get older, to plan a trip is a pain in the ass. It’s not easy. You know, it goes with a million anxieties. Somebody said, "Why don’t you travel with Archeological Tours? You love archeology." Well, they are an expensive group, but truly first class. And usually, they have a great archeologist travel with you. We went to Turkey with them, and to Egypt. And then we went to Crete and Cyprus. And the archeologist was a man named Dr. Robert Stieglitz. And we hit it off fine, because in the plane we got acquainted flying over. And he says, "You know, I’m going to start a new dig. I just got my license to dig in Israel, starting next summer." I said, "Do you have a staff architect?" He says, "No, but you are hired." And that’s the way our many years long friendship started. He dug at Tel Tanninim—I will spell it for you—and I worked there for four summers. Two summers, my wife worked there too, as a laborer. It’s very hard.

Blum: What did you do?

181 Macsai: I was working as an architect. Now, it’s not the most conducive for marital bliss when the husband works in an air-conditioned office and the wife is sweating in the hot sun, right. But being a staff architect on a dig is wonderful. In the morning you get up at five o’clock, whenever everybody… You measure what they dug the day before. And then around eight, nine o’clock, you’re done measuring. They are still working there in the hot sun till one o’clock. You go back at breakfast, to the hotel or wherever, shower, shave, and sit in an air-conditioned lab, draw up what you measured. Around noon, when they come back, you Xerox it, and every supervisor gets a copy, which they then can update. Archeology is an organized updating of finds. And having a fairly fast drawing architect who can produce the drawings fast, it’s a great advantage to the archeologists. And I truly enjoy doing it.

Blum: Could you have done what you did on the dig without your architectural training?

Macsai: Not really, not really. You know, I drew plans, sections, axonometrics.

Blum: So it was important.

Macsai: Oh, yes. And it’s not easy. Why Dr. Stieglitz jumped with joy to find that I am an architect and would love to do it, is because it’s not easy to find an architect who is willing, who’s physically able—because it’s still strenuous—and who can give up six weeks without pay. Most architects are not only teaching, they’re practicing. And you can’t leave your practice. Especially in the summer, you know, when you don’t teach, you finally pay attention to your practice. You can’t go away for six weeks. And the digs are in the summer because the volunteers are students. So it’s a real problem. Nobody in their right mind would dig under the August sun. But the students are available. And last year we didn’t go to Israel, we went to Greece. But that turned out to be a disaster.

Blum: How many years did you work on the Israeli project?

182 Macsai: Four years. Four summers.

Blum: Four years. Was it concluded, or did you just leave it?

Macsai: It was concluded. But the new one cannot start until the results are published. See, Israel has a wonderful law. An archeologist does not get a license to dig until he publishes the previous dig’s results because archeologists are sloppy and lazy, as far as writing is concerned. [It’s] tremendous work, to put it together and draw conclusions, and the referencing, as you know, from bibliography to all the details of publishing. They like to disregard that and start the next dig. Can’t do it anymore.

Blum: They’re after the adventure, the discovery, the romance.

Macsai: Yeah. So in fact, the archaeologist just e-mailed me. He’s ready. In July he’s coming to Chicago. He’s the archeologist, from Rutgers University, where he is a professor.

Blum: Dr. Stieglitz?

Macsai: Yes. And he is coming, and the three area supervisors are coming, so we are all meeting here in my apartment—in fact, he’s going to stay with us—and try to finalize everything.

Blum: For the last dig?

Macsai: Yes. The Greek dig is off; we are not going back there. I don’t know what he will do next time. I might go, might not go. That depends on the mood. Actually, it’s not physically wearing at all.

Blum: Well, what you were doing didn’t seem difficult, but what your wife was doing sounds pretty strenuous.

183 Macsai: Yes. I mean, she cannot do that. Incredibly strenuous.

Blum: Maybe you could give her a fast course in architecture.

Macsai: That’s one way to do it. If she does not work, she does not like to just hang around even though you pay your way, you know. All volunteers pay their way.

Blum: Do you mean for transportation?

Macsai: No, not only. Room and board, they also have to pay. Yeah, it’s about three hundred dollars a week. And it’s not expensive, but still. And everybody would welcome an extra person, but she doesn’t like to be just a hanger around. What the archeologists could use, but for that, she would need to speak Hebrew—or Greek in Greece—is a manager. Archeologists are terrible managers. They’re great managers of their work, but, please, they are scholars. For them to spend their time arranging hotels, arranging food, arranging flights, solving healthcare problems… And every day an incredible number of problems occur, you know? And it’s mostly improvisation. You arrive like we arrived in Greece. The local archeologist is supposed to arrange where we have a place with a drawing board. Turns out to be it was twenty minutes walk from the hotel. I walked back from the site, that’s about twenty minutes, clean up and walk twenty minutes to where the lab is. Doesn’t work. Doesn’t work. We needed it right in the hotel.

Blum: Closer, yes.

Macsai: Well, there was no place. I gave a watercolor to the owner of the hotel [and] immediately, he found a storage room, which he emptied for me. So it’s a lot of improvisation. The hotel wasn’t air-conditioned. It was too hot; I can’t draw in heat. So we organized some fans. It’s all totally improvisation. No Xerox machine in the hotel. Oh, yeah, I can go to city hall, that’s another twenty minutes walk. I’m not going to spend the day walking. Then I remember, a fax machine can copy, if it’s eight-and-a-half by eleven. As long

184 as I made all drawings multiples of eight-and-a-half by eleven, I could use his fax machine to copy it, naturally for another watercolor. So I learned to do, regardless what size drawing, eight-and-a-half by eleven, cut it with X-acto knife, get transparent tape, and tape it together. Archaeology is the art of improvisation which is unnerving; but it’s very satisfying, once you’ve successfully found the solution.

Blum: You mentioned that you gave watercolors as a—what?

Macsai: As a bribe.

Blum: You have been painting exhibiting for a long time.

Macsai: Seriously, since 1989. Actually, my first show was in 1991, at Gallery 1756, the one which is owned by the Asts, Bruno and Gunduz Ast. They’re architects. I’ve been painting ever since. Most recently, I have a show at the Cliff Dwellers. I also had one at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Blum: I’ve read some reviews of your paintings when they’ve been on exhibit. And something that was repeated several times is that your training as an architect comes through in the way you structure your paintings.

Macsai: Absolutely.

Blum: Is that deliberate, or is this just something that happens?

Macsai: It is deliberate. So is the choice of technique. I mean, why am I doing watercolor, and why not oil? Because oil is, in many respects, easier though it’s a little messier.

Blum: Easier in which way?

Macsai: Easier to do, because it’s very forgiving. You can make mistakes, you can go over it, correct it, work it. Watercolor is totally unforgiving. Totally. Once

185 you’ve screwed it up, 90 percent of the time, you have to tear up the paper and do something else. I’ll tell you why I didn’t do oil. First of all, my cousin is a renowned painter in Hungary. So I never really, subconsciously, wanted to compete with him. I couldn’t. Also watercolor is very much like architecture. You have to plan it out. Because once you put it down, you cannot correct it. You don’t just experiment aimlessly, which you can do with oil, you can do it with other mediums, with tempera, but watercolor, you can’t. Consequently, it’s like architecture, you have to plan the whole thing out in your head, not the whole thing to the last brushstroke, because there is certain serendipity which happens when you paint, accidents. But by and large, 60 to 80 percent has to be planned. And that’s what architecture is, planning every move. In fact, architecture, in my opinion, is the only art where you have to see the entire end product before you do a line. The final you mostly work out before. You do some sketching, but it really starts in your head, you know. It does not start on paper, the paper is the translation.

Blum: Is that true of watercolor, as well?

Macsai: Yes. In my opinion. The way I do watercolors, yes. Not everybody does watercolor. So mine are very planned, very architectural. I also, generally speaking, don’t use perspective in the watercolors. I do head-on views, like architectural views are. By the way, my subject matter always are things which I’m very familiar with. I love to sketch new things. But to paint, it has to be an old friend.

Blum: Such as…?

Macsai: Such as the porches of Evanston, or doorways of buildings around me. Also, I’m lazy. I don’t like to walk too far. Also, I don’t like to paint outdoors. Okay? So it has to be not so far, that I’ll still remember when I come home. Because I like to paint at home; I don’t like to paint outside. People gawk, they look at you. That’s the most unnerving… Mosquitoes come. If you have to pee, you have no toilet nearby. If you want a beer or a cup of espresso, at home I can make it, you know. I want all the comforts in the world. So my

186 watercolors are from memory, from sketches, from notes. Not so much from photographs, though I’ve done that, really because photographs distort the colors. A Kodacolor or any of the other films are not true. The human eye is far more sensitive to color than any film ever can be. But I also paint a lot of stuff in front of my window. The window is my very favorite.

Blum: A critic seems to have had that in mind, when he wrote about your newest batch of paintings.

Macsai: Absolutely.

Blum: He wrote that your scene was through a window. And you included it as part of the frame.

Macsai: Very structured, yes. This is partly because of my background. I’m an architect; I am a compulsive person, organized. And my favorite painter is Richard Diebenkorn, who did these kind of very structured realist paintings, when he was not doing abstract work. But lately, about three months ago, I’ve switched over—just as an experiment—to doing abstract paintings.

Blum: None of these were in your current show.

Macsai: Right. And the next show will include the abstracts.

Blum: Well, you’ve exhibited your travel sketches, as well.

Macsai: Did I exhibit? Is that the question?

Blum: Yes, I thought there was a show that I read about that was scenes in Egypt.

Macsai: Those are paintings, not travel sketches. Also scenes from Israel and another had scenes from Turkey, and another from Rome.

Blum: Did you take photographs of the site, and in the comfort of your studio, you

187 painted it?

Macsai: I took two, three shots of something I wanted to paint. Sometimes I made color notations, because the prints are never true. Sometimes I had enough time to sit down and make a sketch. I always carry a little sketchbook with me, actually, two sketchbooks, one for sketching, and one which fits in the pocket of a jacket. So if you have an idea for a painting, you can put it down there. It’s wonderful. I mean, I got it years ago, from England. And I’m running out. I bought a dozen of these little books, and I have only two or three left.

Blum: Did you find there was a difference in the finished product when you worked from photographs or not?

Macsai: I think the finished product improves when you don’t work from photographs.

Blum: Is it more spontaneous without using photographs?

Macsai: Well, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. But even that is not a general rule, because some of the work, Italian watercolorists, I mean… Let’s put it this way, to work from a photograph of a scene or a building or a forest, which you also visited, and you took the photograph, is okay. What is not okay is taking a photograph of something which you’ve never seen, and do a watercolor. It inevitably loses that dialogue which occurred when you looked at it, whether you paint it then or later. But you’ve seen it, you made mental notes, you actually made real notes that are lost when you only work from a photograph. I never understood that. Some people can do it very well. You know, portraitists many times do portraits for order from a photograph because people don’t have the opportunity to sit. But even there, I think the real good work has to be from somebody who is willing to sit.

Blum: You said that to have a concept of a building in your mind before you start is very similar, in your mind, to having a concept of a watercolor before you

188 start.

Macsai: Exactly.

Blum: What are the biggest differences between, if you were to compare, architecture and painting?

Macsai: Well, number one, nobody’s going to sue you for a painting, okay? You don’t need a license. No liability. That’s a priori. It’s a wonderfully free operation. There is no zoning ordinance, no building code, no budget, no client, no office bureaucracy. You can do whatever you want. On the other hand, it’s a terribly lonely activity. You are on your own. There is no person next to your drawing board to ask, "Hey, what do you think?" No committee helps you decide, no budget or ordinance which guides you, no developer who you can fight with. It’s all you. That’s one problem.

Blum: Problem or benefit?

Macsai: It’s both. Great benefit and great problem. And then comes the other one, which, if you screw up, you can tear the paper up, have a drink, and go to a movie. And then try the next day. If you screw up on a building, it’s there for your lifetime, if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, they tear it down. No, truly, while it’s a great satisfaction to walk by or drive by some of your good buildings, the ones you don’t want to admit you had anything to do with, and you have no partner to blame it on, or client whom you can accuse with it, its yours. You look at it, you say, "How could I do that? Why did I do that? Was I ignorant? Did they force me to? Or was it fashionable then?" Anyhow, it’s a lot of questions. It’s a totally different kind of activity. And also, there is one other thing that architecture does and painting doesn’t. If you do buildings of any size or significance, people will know it. "Oh, you did that blue building." I mean, they might tell you it’s terrible, you know? Very few people will though; either they don’t talk about it, or they compliment you. "Oh, I saw your building, what a great building," this or that. How many people see your watercolor? It’s bigger satisfaction, bigger exposure; also

189 bigger risk, and bigger pain when it’s not satisfying, not successful.

Blum: If you had it to do over, would you reverse the two in your life?

Macsai: Oh, if I would have it to do over, I probably would become an artist or a graphic artist instead of an architect.

Blum: Is the painting you do now in some ways drawing on your unfulfilled desire to be a graphic artist?

Macsai: Well, no, I am not doing graphic arts. Graphic art needs problems, customers. It’s like architecture. You can’t sit down on your own and do graphic art. But I find painting quite satisfactory, although I must be honest with you, I would say whenever I do something, I always feel that the other is not so bad. Okay?

Blum: One makes you appreciate the other?

Macsai: But not looking back. I’m not missing architecture, Teaching, I miss a little bit more. But I look and I say, "Gee, wouldn’t that have been nice to become a historian and an archeologist? You know? Which involves your mind far more. I would have loved to be many things. Sometimes I think I would have loved to be a stage designer, you know?

Blum: What was your greatest opportunity, as you think back along your career?

Macsai: Greatest opportunity I took advantage of, or I screwed up?

Blum: Which ever comes to mind.

Macsai: Well, one was, as we talked about, to go to the University of California at Berkeley and study under Erich Mendelsohn. I mean, that was a great opportunity, where I screwed up. Great opportunity where I didn’t screw up was, obviously, to come to this country. That I took advantage of.

190 Blum: Yes. Yes, yes.

Macsai: And to work for Skidmore Owings and Merrill, yes.

Blum: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Not Holabird and Root? Not PACE? Just SOM?

Macsai: They were all okay. SOM was the formative years. It was really good. I learned a lot. And the other great opportunity was to get on the faculty of UIC. Not just for the pension.

Blum: And the adoration from students?

Macsai: The love. And it allowed me the opportunity to look at architecture with a somewhat more theoretical eye, which a practitioner does not have, getting immersed in architectural history. And the practitioner doesn’t have that opportunity. And that’s always, in any field, it’s wonderful to be able to be both partners in the dance.

Blum: Well, it looks like you haven’t had only one great opportunity, you had many.

Macsai: Yeah, I’m really a happy person. I’m happy with my life, my home life. I love my kids. They are very successful.

Blum: Are any in architecture or a related profession?

Macsai: No, they are smarter than that.

Blum: Anyone in the arts?

Macsai: Three of them. My oldest daughter is a printmaker [Pamela Baumgartner]. And she’s teaching art now at Evanston High School. My next one, my son

191 [Aaron], whom I wanted to be an architect because he can see in space beautifully… And he said, "I don’t want to work as hard as you work." So he now works harder.

Blum: Doing what?

Macsai: He’s a jewelry designer. Does absolutely magnificent jewelry. And my youngest, [Gwen] who worked for NPR—National Public Radio—wrote a book, did essays on radio, but she is in the arts. Not in graphic, not the visual arts, but she writes. She did this book called Lipshtick. It’s a humorous book. So those are three. And the fourth one, who is very successful, and didn’t go into the arts, smartly, is the chief of ophthalmology at Evanston Hospital [Dr. Marian Macsai].

Blum: Well, you’ve got some very accomplished children.

Macsai: Yeah, she is the one I’m having lunch with today.

Blum: But three of them sort of touched shoulders with the arts.

Macsai: Two of them are in the visual arts, and one of them is in the arts, but not the visual arts.

Blum: Well, sounds like there was some carryover from you. Maybe not genetic but some carryover into their chosen professions.

Macsai: Genetic, though—and this is certainly not genetic—recently my wife started to make quilts and is doing high quality fabric art that has been exhibited in group shows. I am proud to think that perhaps my work was an impetus for her. Although she was always very skillful in sewing, her current work is on the level of art.

Blum: When you got out of school, out of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, what was your idea of what lay ahead for you? What were your goals?

192 Macsai: Well, all three—when I decided to come to Chicago—all three turned out to be an illusion. You know, I was coming here to work for SOM, turned out to be they weren’t ready, I had to work for Holabird. I had a girlfriend, whom I hoped would consummate an affair, nothing happened. She was here in Chicago. And I had a college friend who was a very rich man who lived in Chicago, I never got a job from him. These were the three reasons for coming to Chicago, besides great architecture, okay? Now you know the true story, right?

Blum: But this is what happened to you. What was in your head that you hoped would happen?

Macsai: I didn’t have anything planned. I never thought I will have my own office. That is a total goddamn miracle. You know? Never. Never. I mean, life is unpredictable. I was not doing anything purposely. Like, I have a friend who always said he’s going to marry rich. So he joined the country club, couldn’t afford it, but he did. He got on the board, and he, in fact, he married rich. I never had these plans. As much as I like to plan a building or a watercolor, life itself is fun without planning. Well, regrets, I have; every human being has regrets. But I’m pretty satisfied with my career so far.

Blum: Is there anything that you would like to speak about that we haven’t spoken about thus far?

Macsai: Let me think. Not really. I simply want to thank you for putting up with me for four mornings.

Blum: For what would you like to be remembered?

Macsai: What would I like to be remembered [for]? My kids. If they make it and they are happy, somewhere along the line, I didn’t screw up too badly. That’s about all. We are done.

193 Blum: Well, I thank you very much.

Macsai: I thank you. You were very patient.

Blum: Oh, it was my pleasure.

Macsai: Good.

194 SELECTED REFERENCES

"Architects’ Notebooks." Inland Architect 27 (July/August 1983):18-19. Cuscaden, Rob. "An Interview: John Macsai." Building Design & Construction (May 1975):59- 62. "Desert Motel." Progressive Architecture 39 (September 1957):114-121. Doukas, Paul and John Macsai. "Expressed Frame and the Classical Order in the Transitional Period of Italy, 1918-1939." Journal of Architectural Education 40 (Summer 1987):10-17. "Downtown Motor Inn for Chicago." Architectural Record 132 (August 1962):144-146. "Elderly Housing Variations." The Chicago Architectural Journal 4 (1984):95-96. Gapp, Paul. "Hapless Homes, Homely Bridgehouse, Staid Stadiums: Threshold Tells Why." Chicago Tribune (20 May 1984). Hornbeck, James S. "Small Office Buildings." Architectural Record 139 (May 1966):148, 150- 151. "Housing for the Elderly, Wilmette, Illinois." The Chicago Architectural Journal 3 (1983): 116. Macsai, John. "Apartment Buildings, High-Rise." In Encyclopedia of Architecture Design, Engineering & Construction, ed. Joseph A. Wilkes. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1988. _____. "A Paradox: American Housing Since World War II." Threshold, Journal of School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago 2 (Autumn 1983):58-63. _____. "Architecture as Opposition." Journal of Architectural Education 38 (Summer 1985):8-14. _____. "Architecture for Long-Term Care." In Housing for a Maturing Population, 50-69. Washington: Urban Land Institute, 1983. _____. "Between Classicism and Modernism." Threshold, Journal of School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago 3 (Autumn 1985):92-105. _____. "Competing Ideas in Hungarian Architecture." In East European Modernism, ed. Wojciech Lesnikowski, 113-119. New York: Rizzoli International, 1996. ____. Review of Designing the Open Nursing Home, by Joseph A. Koncelik. Journal of Architectural Education 31 (September 1977):48. ____. "Has Ned Hall Let Us Down? An Architect’s View." Inland Architect 20 (December 1976):19-21. ____. Housing. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982. ____. "Hungary: A Design Community of Young Practitioners." Architecture 78 (September 1989):68-71.

195 ____. "Hungary: A New Movement to Reflect Indigenous Forms and Materials." Architecture 73 (September 1984):108-113. ____. "Hungary: A Set of Works that Celebrate a City’s History, Archaeology." Architecture 76 (September 1987):68-69. ____. "Hungary: Community Centers Carry Forward a Vernacular Tradition." Architecture 74 (September 1985):142-144. ____. "John Macsai Speculates on Issues of Theory, Criticism and Pragmatism." Newsletter, University of Illinois, Chicago 5 (Spring 1990). ____. "Letter From Scandinavia," Inland Architect 31 (January/February 1987):13-14. ____. "The Path Between ." The New Hungarian Quarterly (Fall 1989):182-189. ____. "Planning Process for a Skilled Nursing Facility—A Case Study." In Designing Environments for the Aging: Policies and Strategies, 20-39, Chicago: University of Illinois, 1977. Miller, Nory. "Chicago’s City Bureau of Architecture, Expanding in Size, Scope, Activity." Inland Architect 17 (February 1973):8-13. Newman, M.W. "Chicago’s Lakefront Wall: Pathology of the High-Rise?" Inland Architect 13 (October 1969):8-13 "Residential Design: Houses." Progressive Architecture 36 (January 1955):72. Roesch, Madelyn. "Architecture in the 80s." Inland Architect 24 (January/February 1980). Rosenfeld, Steven H. Review of High Rise Apartment Buildings: A Design Primer, by John Macsai. AIA Journal 59 (January 1973):54-55. "Strapping Machine Engineering Facilities." Progressive Architecture 43 (March 1962):167-169. "Wood Bell-Towers." The Chicago Architectural Journal 5 (1985):44.

196 JOHN MACSAI

Born: 20 May 1926, Budapest, Hungary

WW II: Labor Camp, 1944-1945

Education: Atelier Art School, 1941-1942 Polytechnic University of Budapest, 1945-1947 Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1947-1949, B.A.

Work Experience: Holabird & Root, 1949 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1949-1953 PACE Associates, 1953-1954 Hyland Builders (Dunbar Builders), 1952-1953 Raymond Loewy Associates, 1954 Macsai & Diamant, 1955 Stuermer, Hausner & Macsai, 1955 Hausner & Macsai, 1955-1970 Campbell & Macsai, 1970-1975 John Macsai & Associates, 1975-1991 O’Donnell, Wicklund, Pigozzi & Peterson, 1991-1999

Teaching Experience: University of Illinois, Chicago, 1970-1996

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1978

Selected Projects: 1110 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 1150 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 1240 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 1400 State Parkway, Chicago, Illinois 2960 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 3200 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Lieberman Geriatric Health Centre, Skokie, Illinois University of Chicago, High Energy Physics Building University of Chicago, Hitchcock Hall University of Chicago, National Opinion Research Center University of Chicago, Social Services Center Water Tower Inn, Chicago, Illinois

197 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Amstadter, Laurence (Larry) 133 Cordwell, John 90, 91, 92, 102, 132, 160, 164- Anselevicius, George 41 167, 168 Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Crow Island School, Winnetka, Illinois 46 178 Cullerton, P.J. (Parky) 96 Ast, Bruno (husband of Gundoz) 185 Ast, Gunduz (wife of Bruno) 185 Daley, Richard J. 93, 100, 165 Dart, Edward (Ed) 43, 110, 113 Baird, Ellen (Bebe) 48, 145-146 Dawes, Charles G. 40 Barancik, Richard (Dick) 94, 95 Deam, Edward (Ed) 144 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 12 DeCapri, Dennis 97 Barney, Carol Ross 172 DeCapri, Martha Lewandovska 97 Bartsch, Helmuth 19, 30, 31 Despres, Leon 103 Baumgartner, Pamela Macsai (daughter Diamant, Charlotte 69 of John) 192 Diamant, Robert (Bob) 7, 14, 17, 26, 41, 55- Beck, Mr. 39 56, 67-69, 70, 175 Beeby, Thomas H. (Tom) 112, 115, 119, Diplomat Motel, St. Louis, Missouri 76 121 Diebenkorn, Richard 187 Bel Air East, St. Louis, Missouri 76 Donnelley, Gaylord 59 Bennett, Edward H., Jr. 44 Doral Plaza, Chicago, Illinois 132 Bilandic, Michael 165 Douglas, Paul 100 Blackhawk Restaurant, Chicago, Illinois Dunbar Builders (formerly Hyland 59 Builders) 30, 51, 53, 54, 63, 86, 89, 98 Bloom, Lawrence (Larry) 100 Dunbar, William MacLeish 18, 32 Booth, Laurence O. (Larry) 112, 119 Dunlap, William (Bill) 44 Bradley, Bernard 30 Brodsky, David 48 1150 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 71- Brownson, Jacques C. 110-111 73, 75-76 Brubaker, Williiam (Bill) 46 1110 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 80 Buenz, John 92, 132, 160 Epstein, A. 5, 132 Bunshaft, Gordon 56 Evanston Place, Evanston, Illinois 179 Burleigh, Thomas (Tom) 41, 43 Byrne, Jane 165 Fairfield Court, Wilmette, Illinois 154 Farragut High School, Chicago, Illinois 110- Campbell, Wendell 60-61, 96-98 111 Casserly, Joseph (Joe) 30 Firestone, Vesta 42 Chicago Architectural Club 113 Fisher, Lester 155-157 Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Florsheim Shoe Stores 65 Illinois 185 1400 State Parkway, Chicago, Illinois 82 Chicago Seven 109-114 Fuerst, James (Jim) 168 Churchill, Winston 50 Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, Illinois Gadau, Lloyd 145 178, 185 Gans, Benjamin 68 Cohen, Stuart E. 112, 128, 141 Ganz, Herbert (Herbie) 51 Cohen, William (Bill) 31 Garofalo, Douglas (Doug) 124, 146 Colorado Oil Company Station (project) Gelick, Michael (Mike) 73, 145 38 Genther, Charles B. (Skip) 33-34, 92 Georgian, Evanston, Illinois 154-155

198 Giedion, Sigfried 12, 17, 22, 26 Jaffee, Richard (Dick) 87 Goldberg, Bertrand (Bud) 5, 151, 168 Jahn, Helmut 42, 119 Goldsmith, Myron 155-156 Jeager, Thomas (Tom) 114 Goodman, Percival 99 Johnson, Ralph 46 Gordon, Ezra 28, 51, 80, 90, 121, 144 Jones, Lee 87 Graham, Bruce 22, 30, 36, 44, 80, 119- 120, 157 Kamin, Blair 147 Graham Foundation for Advanced Kaplan, Howard N. 106 Studies in the Arts, Chicago, Illinois Kean, William 168 103, 136 Kennedy, George 16 Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Kennedy-King College, Chicago, Illinois Great Lakes, Illinois 38 176 Green, David 44 Korab, Balthazar 105-6 Greengoss, Robert (Bob) 91 Kormendi, Ferenc 31 Gropius, Walter 22 Kovar, Frank 39 Kraft, Fred 45 Hammersky, Al 40 Krueck, Ronald (Ron) 119 Harbor House, Chicago, Illinois 77, 81- 83, 94, 179 Lake Forest Homes, Lake Forest, Illinois Hartmann, William (Bill) 20, 34, 35 154 Hartray, Jack 172 Lake Meadows, Chicago, Illinois 35, 37 Hausner, Robert (Bob) 58-60, 71-72, 79, Lakeshore Management 59, 71, 76, 82 90, 96 Lantos, Thomas (Tom) 16 Hays, George 45 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret Hedrich-Blessing Photographers 106 22 Hejduk, John 142 Lesnikowski, Wojciech 170 Hidvegi, Alfred (Al) 59, 80, 81, 101, 103. Levin, Dan 90, 165, 167 111 Levin, Jack 90, 147, Hill, Lewis (Lew) 166 Lieberman Geriatric Health Centre, Skokie, Hilliard Center, Chicago, Illinois 151 Illinois 88, 148, 154 Holabird & Root 19, 20, 28, 29, 32, 34, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, Illinois 155 48-50, 154 Loebl Schlossman & Bennett 37 Holabird, John 30 Loewenberg & Loewenberg 132 Horn Gerald (Jerry) 34 Loewy, Raymond 51, 61-66 Horthy, Nicholas 8 Loewy, Viola 62 Hotel Maracaibo, Maracaibo, Venezuela Lohan, Dirk 156 20 Lustig, Alvin 2 Hovey, David 33 Lusztig, Margit (mother of John Macsai) 4, Huxtable, Ada Louise 4 8, 16, 136 Hyatt Hotel, Lincolnwood, Illinois 76 Mack, John 59, 71, 72, 82 Illinois Bell Telephone Company 154 Macsai, Aaron (son of John) 192 Illinois Bell Telephone Company, Macsai, Istvan (cousin of John) 2, 3 Matoon, Illinois 20 Macsai, Geraldine (Gerry, wife of John) 26, Ingerbretzen, Sheldon (Shel) 44 69, 170, 176-177, 181, 182, 192-193 Ingraham, Catherine 115, 140, 146 Macsai, Gwen (daughter of John) 192 International Harvester, logo design 65 Macsai, Marian (daughter of John) 192 Ivan, Endre 101 Macsai, Paul (John’s cousin’s son) 2 Malibu East, Chicago, Illinois 86, 98 Jacobs, Jane 25 Manning, Harry 31

199 Markin, Irving (Irv) 91 Raymond Loewy Associates 57-58, 61-67 McCurry, Margaret 49 Reinheimer, Martin 132 Mendelsohn, Erich 15, 191 Richards, James Maud. 12 Merriam, Robert (Bob) 100 Richardson, Ambrose (Am) 22, 31, 36, 38- Merrill, John 32 40, 43 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 11-12, 17, Romanek, Marvin 82, 84 22, 23, 33, 94, 110, 125, 128 Root, John 19 Monroe Club 178 Rosenthal, Herbert (Herb) 53-54, 89, 90 Moutoussamy, John 97 Rostenkowski, Dan (Rusty) 165-166 Mumford, Lewis 25, 26 Rubloff, Arthur 93, 94, 115 Murphy, C.F. 5 Rudolph, George Cooper 21 Myhrum, Arthur 45 Ruedi, Katerina 124

Nagle, James (Jim) 112, 119, 140-141 Saarinen, Eliel 46 Netsch, Walter 45 Sandburg Village, Chicago, Illinois 91, 92 New Town, White Pine, Michigan 51 Schmidt, Carl 89 Newman, M.W. (Bill) 94 Schoenbrod, Roy 53 990 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Schroeder, Kenneth (Ken) 163 94 Shaeffer, Candice (Candy) 131 Shannon, Daniel (Dan) 165 O’Donnell Wicklund Pigozzi & Peterson Shaw, Alfred (Al) 59 (OWP&P) 37, 66, 78, 81, 86, 129-130, Shaw, Metz & Dolio 58 153, 158-162 Sher, Raymond (Ray) 59, 82 Obata, Gyo 41 Sinkevitch, Alice 100 Old Orchard Shopping Center, Skokie, Skidmore, Louis 32 Illinois 37 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 5, 19, Otis, Emily (first wife of Nathaniel 20, 21, 22, 28, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 46, Owings) 40 48, 49-50, 55, 66, 68, 69, 154, 161, 191 Otis, Joseph (father of Emily) 40 Smith, Thomas Gordon 170 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 18, 28, 31, 32, Sollitt, George 87 34, 39, 40, 45, 46 Solomon, Cordwell & Buenz 90, 116, 167 Solomon, Louis (Lou) 91 PACE Associates 5, 21, 23, 33, 50, 92, Solomon & Solomon 132 154 Somol, Robert 146 Park Ridge Inn, Park Ridge, Illinois 76 South Shore Country Club, Chicago, Illinois Passonneau, Joseph (Joe) 30, 41 176 Paul, Stanley and Arlene (house), Stieglitz, Robert 181, 182, 183 Highland Park, Illinois 68 Stuermer, Raymond (Ray) 57-58, 63, 67, 71 Perkins & Will 46 Stukel, James 146 Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 46, 47 Sultan, Jerome 132 Polgar, Franz 70 Svanborg, Alvar 150 Presidential Towers, Chicago, Illinois Swanger, James 181 164 Swibel, Charles (Chuck) 165 Presley, Edward (Ed) 44 Syvertsen, John 173 Priestley, William (Bill) 20-23, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 50 Taylor, Robert, Homes, Chicago, Illinois Promontory Apartments, Chicago, 142, 154 Illinois 21 Tel Ashdod, near Ashdod, Israel 181 Tel Tanninum, Israel 181

200 Tigerman, Stanley 42, 43, 47-49, 93-95, Volkswagen Midwest Headquarters, 102, 114-17, 119, 121, 123-124, 128, 130- Deerfield, Illinois 89 131, 135, 140, 141, 143-147, 171 Train, Jack 45 War Memorial Competition, Budapest, Travis, Diane 97 Hungary 14 1240 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Washington, Harold 166 76 Water Tower Inn, Chicago, Illinois 77 2960 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Waterford, Chicago, Illinois 98 151-152 Weese, Benjamin H. (Ben) 42 Weese, Harry M. 42-43, 110, 113 United States Gypsum Company Weese, John 41-42, 45 Building, Chicago, Illinois 47 Whitaker, Richard (Dick) 28-29, 116, 131, University of Chicago, High Energy 141, 143 Physics Building, Chicago, Illinois 86 Whitmer, Roger 141, 142 University of Chicago, Hitchcock Hall, Wiley, Charles (Chuck) 41 Chicago, Illinois 86 Wiley, John & Sons 103, 104 University of Chicago, National Opinion Wilshire Inn, Beverly Hills, California 76 Research Center, Chicago, Illinois 86 Winston Towers, Chicago, Illinois 167 University of Chicago, Snell Hall, Wolf, Paula 146 Chicago, Illinois 86 Wong, Yau Chun (Y.C.) 32-33 University of Chicago, Social Services Wood, Elizabeth 168 Center, Chicago, Illinois 86 Wright, Frank Lloyd 12

Valerio, Joseph (Joe) 45 Zand, Lily 141-143 Viehe-Naess, Ivar, Jr. 30 Zukowsky, John 147 Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, D.C. 14

201