Jay Pridmore is the author or coauthor of many books, including Chicago Architecture and Design; The University of Chicago: The Campus Guide; Shanghai: The Architecture of China’s Great Urban Center; and The American Bicycle. He has worked as a journalist in Chicago and has written extensively about architecture. Tom Rossiter is a photographer and filmmaker as well as a registered architect and fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

BUILDING IDEAS

AN ARCHITECTURAL GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

By JAY PRIDMORE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-04680-8

Contents

Map of Selected Architectural Landmarks on Campus……………………..viForeword by Robert J. Zimmer………………………………………..xixONE IDEAS AND ARCHITECTURE………………………………………….1TWO THE GOTHIC CAMPUS………………………………………………17THREE THE OLMSTED EFFECT……………………………………………41FOUR THE EXPANDING ENTERPRISE……………………………………….61FIVE EMBRACING MIDCENTURY MODERNISM………………………………….79SIX THE ARCHITECTURE OF SCIENCE……………………………………..97SEVEN BUILDING IDEAS WITH MODERN ARCHITECTURE…………………………115Epilogue by Steve Wiesenthal………………………………………..137Acknowledgments……………………………………………………141Sources…………………………………………………………..145Index…………………………………………………………….151

CHAPTER 1

IDEAS ANDARCHITECTURE

The University of Chicago originated not as a small college as did most universitiesin the East, but rather with the full-blown ambition of a major university—onethat was unique in reflecting from its beginnings the American ideals of opennessand accessibility based on merit rather than social position. Just as Chicago is thegreat American city, so the University of Chicago is the great American university.

—ROBERT J. ZIMMER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO’S LEAFY, sprawling campus in Hyde Parkis one of the world’s great intellectual destinations, and its complexity and diversity arevividly reflected in its architecture. The campus in many respects appears venerable andrich with tradition, and in other ways it seems fresh and mutable as a new idea.

Today, the original quadrangles remain as the founders intended, with gardenssurrounded by limestone buildings that feel as ancient as the hills. Yet the courtyards,towers, gates, and gargoyles engage in continuous dialogue with more modern neighbors,the newest among them transparent, seemingly weightless, and gleaming with light.Together the buildings reinforce the university’s message that it honors the past evenas it gazes into the future.

Architecture has been central to the university’s identity since its founding in 1890.By then Chicago had already earned a reputation for innovative architecture. The city’searly architects included those collectively known as the Chicago School, famous forcreating the modern skyscraper. In the shadow of the nascent university, Chicago hostedthe 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and created the grandiose White City, America’sfirst major example of City Beautiful urban planning. These and other achievements sethigh standards for architecture on the University of Chicago campus.

The university has long shown its desire to meet if not exceed those expectations.In the beginning, the founders debated the merits of the chosen site, not just where it waslocated but how it should be configured. They considered the architectural styles thenin vogue—Classical, Romanesque, Gothic. They remained vigilant in guiding the earlycampus design, and they were generous with their money and their personal engagement.The founders believed that the architecture of Chicago’s university should bespeak aninstitution that exuded ambition and vision.

CHICAGO’S RENAISSANCE SPIRIT

The university’s aspirations were fueled by the times. When the institution was founded,the United States was completing its conquest of the frontier, mastering industrialization,and believing fervently in manifest destiny. Chicago, as a new city of immense importance,served as more than a major hub and staging ground for commerce. It became a symbolof the nation’s future. Chicago’s wealth outpaced its rapid population growth, and itsself-regard often outpaced its wealth. In the early twentieth century, novelist TheodoreDreiser described Chicago as the “Florence of the West … a hobo among cities, withthe grip of Caesar in its mind.” City fathers treated cultural development with the sameentrepreneurial drive that they applied to business concerns, and the university benefitedfrom this thoroughgoing spirit.

Like the notion of manifest destiny, Chicago’s greatness was considered a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even the Great Chicago Fire became less a setback and more anopportunity to reclaim open spaces. In the fire’s wake, the city attracted a wave ofarchitects and builders willing and able to reconceive Chicago. “The flames swept awayforever the greater number of monstrous libels on artistic house-building,” declared alocal publication at the time.

Sensing this as a rare moment, the architects who would make Chicago famousmostly came from elsewhere for the chance to build as no place had been built before.Henry Ives Cobb, William LeBaron Jenney, John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan, andFrank Lloyd Wright migrated here looking for ways to engage in new ideas and torealize high ambitions.

Downtown, the Loop prospered as steel-frame structures scraped the sky, dazzlingthe world with their lofty heights as well as their returns on investment. Surroundingareas prospered too, as railroads collaborated with real estate interests to develop outlyingneighborhoods and communities. Indeed, when the university’s founders chose HydePark, it was a marshy, largely undeveloped southern outpost. But it had rail service and thepromise of an active future, so acres of land were drained and reclaimed. To the foundersof the university, the less-than-bucolic property around 57th Street represented a slate atleast as clean as that provided by the fire.

A CITY’S UNBRIDLED AMBITION

The earliest proponents of the University of Chicago were churchmen who wantedto expand the Baptist Union Theological Seminary. The church organization showed aninterest in establishing “a great college, ultimately to be a University, in Chicago,” wroteFrederick T. Gates, a high-ranking Baptist clergyman from Minneapolis. “Betweenthe Allegheny and the Rocky Mountains there is not to be found another city in whichsuch an institution as we need could … achieve wide influence or retain supremacyamong us.”

The idea attracted the attention of another Baptist: John D. Rockefeller, a manwho knew something of big plans. Rockefeller required some convincing, but ultimatelyhe pledged $600,000, an amount that would swell over time to $37 million. A wealth ofcorrespondence ensued, debating what kind of an institution there should be and how itmight address the problems of the growing metropolis, become a laboratory for researchacross disciplines, and bring the uplifting influence of a large university to a city that didnot have one within its limits.

Rockefeller’s interest, indeed his strength, lay in the realm of brick and mortar, andhe exhorted the founders not to think small. “Do not on account of scarcity of money failto do the right thing in constructing new buildings,” he wrote to Thomas Goodspeed, atrustee and secretary to the board. “We must in some way secure sufficient funds to makeit what it ought to be.”

Local collaborators shared Rockefeller’s interest in a new university. Many were non-Baptists from families whose viewpoints were shaped by the risk and drama of acquiringsignificant wealth in a new city. Charles Hutchinson, a banker and trader, was illustrative.He left a successful career in business to concentrate on building cultural institutions inChicago. Hutchinson assumed a pivotal role in the creation of the University of Chicagoand, along with his friend, steel magnate Martin Ryerson, persuaded the newly recruitedboard to acquire a four-block site.

Another key player in the conception of the University of Chicago was WilliamRainey Harper, who came to the Midwest from Yale. He shared the high aspirations ofChicagoans to create an original, fundamentally new enterprise. Harper envisioned acollege, graduate schools, an extension division, and publishing house that would growunder the same umbrella. He insisted that it be a university (not a mere “college”) ofdiverse parts, unified by the spirit of inquiry, of Socratic debate, of shared purpose andoutsized ambition. He and the other founders were convinced that the university wasan essential engine of the city’s social and intellectual advancement.

HENRY IVES COBB’S CHICAGO GOTHIC

For the physical plan and architectural design, the founding trustees considered six localfirms. Chicago’s architectural talent was adept at executing large projects, maintainingbudgets, and creating designs that consistently impressed (albeit grudgingly) the criticsfrom the East Coast. Chicago School architects designed for a demanding city: fordevelopers who craved square footage, for building occupants who loved abundant naturallight and fresh air, and for Chicagoans who aspired to distinctive and occasionally sublimearchitecture. The trustees appeared determined to create a campus as emblematic ofthe university mission as the downtown skyscrapers were of the city’s soaring economicambitions.

The winning proposal was submitted by Henry Ives Cobb, whose portfolio in Chicagoincluded tall office buildings along with well-appointed residences. Cobb’s was not themost beautifully rendered entry, but the relationship he had formed with Hutchinsonand Ryerson—Hutchinson was a member of the Chicago AthleticAssociation, which Cobb had recently designed to significant praise—mayhave helped him secure the university commission.

Cobb’s original proposal for buildings in the Romanesque stylewas quickly revised to the Gothic, which lent the campus an air ofdistinction and erudition—this in a city that had often defended itselfagainst an image as hog butcher. Not long after the first buildingswent up, the magazine and arbiter Architectural Record endorsed theuniversity’s campus in conception as well as execution. The Gothicstyle was “selected as far as possible to remind one of the old EnglishUniversities of Cambridge and Oxford; in fact to remove the mind of the student from thebusy mercantile conditions of Chicago.”

The choice of Gothic offered other advantages as well. Among them was the timelessquality of the buildings, which “struck Gothic notes of permanence and immortality,”as Harper and his compatriots desired. The style harkened to medieval times, a periodromanticized as the antithesis of industrialization, impersonalization, and the oppressionof the working classes. That bygone age of chivalry, noted for artisanship and individuality,had inspired writers such as Walter Scott, John Ruskin, and William Morris to revivemedieval customs, including architecture. On a practical level, Gothic’s asymmetricalmassing enabled numerous building types—libraries, classrooms, and laboratories amongthem. The style’s endless variations of detail assured that the campus would remain unifiedeven as it grew over time.

EMBRACE OF SUITABLE TRADITIONS

There were dissenters, naturally, who found the style distasteful, but they did not numberamong the trustees or others who could block the decision. Thorstein Veblen, the eminentsociologist, saw the campus where he worked as out-of-date, and derided “the disjointedgrotesqueries of an eclectic and modified Gothic.” He believed that it would end up aregrettable choice when the style fell out of fashion.

Frank Lloyd Wright was also dismayed by the theatricality of the Gothic style,modern 500 years earlier, for an institution that aimed to offer the most up-to-datelearning in many fields. In 1930 he wondered aloud why “an American University in aland of Democratic ideals in a Machine Age [should] be characterized by second-handadaptation of Gothic forms.”

Veblen’s denunciation is easy to dismiss, for he was a social scientist, not an architector designer. But Wright’s critique is not discounted so readily. He himself had beeninfluenced by Gothic architecture, which, like the prairie style, was grounded in organicand natural forms. Indeed, Wright possessed a genius for geometric harmonies andasymmetric massing, features that also made Gothic a durable and influential style.

It is intriguing to imagine the University of Chicago as designed by Frank LloydWright. His famous Robie House, on the edge of campus, might seem an implausibletemplate to line the quadrangles; a more likely one may be Hitchcock Hall, which was builton the quads in 1902. Hitchcock is Dwight Perkins’s blend of Wright-inspired organicdesign and Gothic revival. It features unique floral ornamentation, inspired by Wright’smentor Louis Sullivan, and a prairie-style-like floor plan more intricate, even labyrinthine,than that of most Gothic revival buildings on campus.

But as far as Wright is concerned, he would have been much too cranky to design inthe collective environment of a university. Cobb, in contrast, was a brilliant collaborator.As for the suitability of Cobb’s influence in the ten years and sixteen buildings of his tenurefor the university, we can defer to no less an arbiter than Eero Saarinen, who took onmaster planning for the university around the time he designed the Law School, completedin 1959. He observed that the university’s Gothic style was used not just by Cobb but by asuccession of later architects for almost forty years. Saarinen judged the result “a beautiful,harmonious visual picture” and implied that early choices, not just of the Gothic stylingbut of uniform materials (Indiana limestone) and thoughtful proportions, inspired laterarchitects to build agreeable neighbors.

As we’ll see, the design decisions that informed the university’s architecture wereprescient and influential. Their long-standing emphasis on public space, both as a planningmotif and to encourage intellectual collaboration, has been manifest in new sciencequadrangles, in the winter garden of the Booth School of Business’s Charles M. HarperCenter, and in other places that encourage interaction. In many ways, innovative buildingson campus heed the university’s vivid past as much as they reach toward its future.

The university’s Gothic revival may have had its heyday in the early twentiethcentury, but it has been influential well beyond that period. Other styles have also left theirown stamp on the Hyde Park campus as it has expanded with the times. Many so-calledmodern buildings may even appear at odds with the carved towers and turrets of old.But in them we detect an architectural tradition—and a consistent eye for interpreting it—that runs deeper than styles or superficial appearance.

Today we see contemporary buildings through a lens colored by history. In newarchitecture, like the old, the best buildings deftly incorporate the site, scale, and spiritof the institution. The long-term beauty and suitability of any single building on campusreflect not only the skill of the architect but the character of nearby buildings as well—structuresthat harmoniously define and affirm the university’s identity.

The Robie House Symphony

CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR BLUE BALLIETT and her familylive within walking distance of Robie House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie stylemasterpiece in Hyde Park. Of her fascination with the house, Balliett has said,”I love the idea of something made of brick or stone or wood, something thatis not supposed to be alive, communicating…. Although, of course, that’simpossible … or is it?”

In The Wright 3, Balliett draws from the history of Robie House,imagining that it is once again under threat of demolition. A group of sixthgraders decides to try to save it, and the students learn to appreciate thehouse not only as architecture but as a work of art. Mrs. Sharpe, a formeroccupant, describes the features of the house that bring it to life:

Living in that house felt a bit like living in a slowly turning kaleidoscope. The light capturedby those windows changes by the hour, and sometimes even by the second, and yet what yousee always fits perfectly with everything else. It’s almost as if Wright managed to set up aresonance between the structure itself and all of the details—art glass, ceiling grilles, rugs,lamps, balconies—that changes continuously and yet remains seamless. I’m not sure anyonehas ever been able to figure out exactly how he did it. A symphony, that’s what the place islike—a complex Bach symphony that sharpens your mind even if you can’t comprehend everystrand of harmony. And when you stand inside, it’s almost as if you become part of the artyourself, an instrument in Mr. Wright’s hands. There’s the feeling of belonging to someoneelse’s imagination.

CHAPTER 2

THE GOTHICCAMPUS

The choice of Gothic for the University over the popular classicism of the Expositionhad its sources deep in the University’s conception of itself…. Classicism stood for theburgeoning materialism of the Renaissance, Gothic for timeless religious values.

—JEAN BLOCK

THE TRUSTEES OF THE NEW and as-yet-unformed University of Chicago werein a hurry. In April 1891, they invited six architectural offices to submit proposals tobuild on the four-block site assembled just a few months before. Among the competitorswas Adler and Sullivan, the best-known firm in Chicago at the time. Within weeks thetrustees chose Henry Ives Cobb, architect of Loop skyscrapers, country houses, and a fewyears later the Newberry Library. By early June, the trustees most involved in buildingconcerns, Charles Hutchinson and Martin Ryerson, visited Cobb’s studio to discuss thedrawings he had submitted.

Like the other architects vying for the commission, Cobb had proposed buildingsin the then-fashionable Romanesque manner, the style made popular by the prominentBoston architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Richardson’s rusticated walls and heavyarches were admired throughout the country for their strength and frank expressionof underlying structure—and by extension their American character. Yet, once settledin Cobb’s office, the trustees expressed doubts about the architect’s initial scheme forsprawling, fortresslike buildings. They wondered whether they might take the architecturein another direction.
(Continues…)Excerpted from BUILDING IDEAS by JAY PRIDMORE. Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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