Category Archives: Architecture

Tri-State Summer Solstice Weekend ’14

Posted on by

Late on Friday morning we drove west for a few hours – and enjoyed a remarkably long in-car conversation among ourselves, no radio or other electronics playing – and by mid-afternoon arrived at Mississippi Palisades State Park, which overlooks the Mississippi River just north of Savanna, Ill. The plan included bits of three states in three days. My plan, really, since my family humors me in such matters, and lets me think up the details of little trips like these.

Friday was Illinois. We camped at Mississippi Palisades, which is an Illinois State park and incredibly lush this year, and we spent time in Savanna, a little river town on the Great River Road, mostly to find a late lunch. Toward the end of the day, we made our way to Mount Carroll, Ill., which is the county seat of Carroll County and home to a good many handsome historic structures.

On Saturday, we ventured into Iowa – it really isn’t far – and first saw Crystal Lake Cave, just south of Dubuque. In Dubuque, lunch was our next priority, followed by a visit to the Fenelon Place Elevator. Which is a funicular. When you have a chance to ride a funicular, do it. The last time we were in Dubuque, I remember the Fenelon Place Elevator being closed for the season (uncharacteristically, I don’t remember when that was — the late ’90s?). Anyway, this time I was determined to ride it.

Afterward, we headed west a short distance to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, home to the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, but better known for The Field of Dreams movie set, which still draws visitors. We saw both.

Today was mostly about getting home at a reasonable hour, but I had to add a slice of Wisconsin by navigating a number of small roads until we came to Dickeyville. It would be just another rural Wisconsin burg but for one thing: the Dickeyville Grotto, which actually includes a main grotto, smaller grottos, shrines, a church and a cemetery (and a gift shop, for that matter). Like funiculars, grottos demand our attention, especially such as striking bit of folk architecture as the Dickeyville Grotto.

A Small Sample of Aggieland

Posted on by

Texas A&M University is a big place. I looked it up: the main campus currently occupies 5,500 or so acres, and accommodates 56,000+ students. Systemwide – because there are other campuses – the school boasts an endowment of $7.6 billion. It also seems like a lot of construction is going on, so those figures will probably be outdated in a few years. A&M’s pretty much the main industry in the twin towns of Byran and College Station, Texas, which also have the distinction of not being on an Interstate, though I-45 runs fairly close.

Jay and I took a stroll around campus for an hour or so, which is time enough to see a small fraction of the buildings, as well as a lot of Aggies. They look pretty much like college students anywhere in North America, except for Corps of Cadets members mixed in, who are easily distinguished by their uniforms, which have a remarkable resemblance to WWII vintage U.S. uniforms, in as much as I’m familiar with them. Membership hasn’t been mandatory in 50 years, but the Corps is still a defining tradition at the school. But of course there are many Aggie traditions, some of which are common knowledge among Texans.

If we’d done much planning, we might have been able to see a building or two dating from the time our grandfather attended A&M (again, he was Class of 1916). Mostly, though, we came across buildings dating from the 1920s and ’30s – there seems to have been a large building boom then – as well as some remarkably brutalist structures from more recent decades. Of the structures we saw, I most liked the Civil Engineering Building, built in 1932.

The plaque on the building describes it this way: “A classical revival two-storied stone structure is faced in brick, with cast stone and ceramic tile ornamentation.”

Texas A&M April 2014Note the ornamentation here: two Hermes figures, a cow, a couple of horses, and a couple of dogs. Elsewhere, pigs.

Texas A&M April 2014The reason for all of those animals on the Civil Engineering building? The plaque again: “Originally used as a veterinary hospital with two additional buildings in the rear, used as [a] stable and anatomy laboratory.”

Not far away we happened on the Cushing Memorial Library, where there’s an exhibit for the centennial of the opening of WWI: “The Great War: Memories of Service and Sacrifice, A World War I Exhibit Featuring the Aggie Experience.” Just the thing to see – free, not too large, and connected to our family’s experience. Class of 1916 meant that it wasn’t long before Grandpa was in the Great War. We told a woman behind the desk at the entrance about him, and she seemed pleased to hear it.

The displays featured some material from Aggies who’d been in the war, but the exhibit had more than that, including wartime posters, photos, letters, everyday items, and more, and not just from American soldiers, but also British, French, German and Italian. (What, nothing from little Montenegro?). The material is from the Ragan Military History Collection at the library.

“A enlarged image of the tattered Gold Star service flag that most prominently captures the World War I Aggie experience will also be exhibited,” notes the A&M release about the exhibit. “Part of a national tradition that began with World War I, the service flag contains approximately 2,000 maroon stars honoring those Aggies who served, and 50 gold stars memorializing those Aggies who gave their lives in the war.”

Fortunately for him and his 13 descendants (so far), Grandpa came back from France, though as an engineer, unexploded ordnance — and the Spanish Flu — were likely the main dangers he faced.

The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Posted on by

Nearly 11 years ago, I wrote, regarding the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago and clearly impressed by its size, “John Rockefeller thought big. The structure is huge. A big Gothic thing. I knew that, of course, having passed by it a number of times over the years, but it hit home when I wandered inside. I was the only one there. The glass is mostly clear, so the angled summer sun lighted the place. Several doors were open, so there was a breeze — unusual in such a large church. For large it was, as large as many cathedrals I’ve seen.”

None of that has changed in 11 years, except there was no summer sun or warm breeze last Friday.

Some vital stats, to save a Google search: The chapel is 265 feet long and 102 feet wide at its widest point. The tower, towards the northeast corner, is 207 feet high and can be ascended via a spiral stone staircase of 271 steps. The chapel weighs 32,000 tons, and 56 concrete piers carry the foundations down to bedrock 80 feet below the floor. Its design includes no structural steel.

This is the chapel from the front.

Rockefeller Chapel 1 March 2014From the back, which shows the 72-bell carillon.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd inside.

Rockefeller Chapel-2 March 2014The organ is sizable, too. According to the chapel’s web site, it’s an E.M. Skinner creation, vintage 1928, that originally “included four manuals, and had 6,610 organ pipes in 108 ranks; since its 2008 restoration, it now has 8,565 pipes in 132 ranks.” It was quiet when we saw it, but it can make a mighty sound.

Rockefeller Chapel OrganStill fairly light inside for a cloudy day in late March. We spent time looking around and resting on the pews. I took note of the handful of plaques along the walls. Two of them told me that a fair number of U of C men died for their country in both WWI and WWII.

I also noticed a plaque dedicated to U of C academic Ernest DeWitt Burton (1856-1925), a professor of New Testament, director of the University Libraries, and ultimately president of the university. The plaque lauds him highly: His scholarship enlightened religion; his energy completed this chapel; his vision led the university forward.

Naturally I had to look him up. No doubt the professor would have disdained an open-source encyclopedia, but never mind. I can’t help feeling that the groves of academe don’t produce scholars like that anymore.

The Frederick C. Robie House

Posted on by

It was a little hard to get a full picture of the Frederick C. Robie House, which sits horizontally on a 60’ x 180’ lot on the South Side of Chicago. At least it’s hard if you don’t feel like backing up into the street, and I didn’t. The wind was brisk and everyone wanted to get inside.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAs usual with a Frank Lloyd Wright work, it’s just as useful to think of it as a complex work of sculpture as much as a dwelling place, maybe more so. Something you might create with large, very expensive set of Legos, and which needs to be sustained with an IV money drip. The place was expensive from the get-go: the 1910 cost was about $60,000, or roughly $1.4 million in our dollars. For that price Robie got not only the lot and the house, with its long, lean lines, but also the furnishings, which were provided by the architect. And at least FLW didn’t run off with his wife.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAYou pick up your tickets at the gift shop (the entrance is pictured above), a space that was originally a garage, since Robie had a fascination for early auto-mobiles, as some wealthy men of the time did. The shop is stocked with architectural-themed books, videos, clothes, games and knickknacks, many associated with FLW, but not all. It included a Lego set – see, you can build architecturally significant Chicago-area houses from Legos – that looked awfully familiar.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe tour started in the lower level, adjacent to the gift shop-garage, which our guide called the Children’s Playroom, which is habitable but not yet restored. We saw a short video there about the house, including its bumpy history – Robie only lived there a bit more than a year before financial troubles obliged him to sell, to a guy who died shortly after moving in; later, when the Chicago Theological Seminary owned the house, it was nearly razed twice, including a 1950s threat that inspired a 90-year-old FLW to show up to protest.

But of course the building survived, and has even influenced its immediate surroundings . After the video we went outside and took a look at things from the entrance plaza of the Harper Center of the U of C’s Booth School of Business, which is across E. 58th St. The 215,000-square-foot Harper Center, completed only in 2004, references the Robie House with its horizontals and cantilevered elements (a Thornton Tomasetti design: more here).

The house’s entrance is tucked away under one of the large horizontal elements, making it hard to see from the street. The entryway is also only a few inches higher than my height, which makes me speculate that FLW wanted to make it even shorter – why should anything be taller than what he, a short man, needs? If so — and you certainly get that feeling at Taliesin sometimes — WTF, FLW?

But he wasn’t The Genius of later lore quite yet, so he didn’t win on that point. Or maybe it’s that he didn’t really see the design all the way through completion, since he skedaddled to Europe around then.

The second floor, barely visible from the outside through the seeming simple but elegant windows, is an impressive space. The great open room sports interesting glass and wood and lighting features, and I thought it would been a swell place for a swank party – during any decade from the 1920s to the 1950s, since swank was pretty much dead after that. Not sure it would be all that comfortable for daily living, not without more comfortable furniture and more clutter (comfortable for me, at least. What’s life without clutter? Drab.)

Most of the bedrooms aren’t visible on the ordinary tour because they’re on the third floor, which has only one way in or out. For a tour of a dozen or 15 people, apparently, the Chicago Fire Marshall insists on two ways out. So the third floor is accessible via small-group tours that cost more. I didn’t need to see the additional space that badly. We saw one second-floor bedroom, intended to be a guest bedroom, though at the moment it’s devoid of furnishing. I noticed in that room that the electric lights – even though brought up to code by the renovation – are operated by a two-button system, which I don’t see often.

In the not-yet-refurbished kitchen stands a conventional refrigerator, and it doesn’t go with the design at all. But mainly that’s because it stands in front of a dwarf-sized door that leads to a servants’ staircase. That door, the guide pointed out, was for the delivery of ice, and the spot where the refrigerator stands was for an icebox. I hope a little bit of our admission price goes to the purchase of a 1910-vintage ice box, because that spot cries out for one.

Hyde Park ’14

Posted on by

On the northeast corner of S. Woodlawn Ave. and E. 58th St. in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago, is the Frederick C. Robie House, on that site for more than 100 years and best known as an exemplar of the Prairie School of Design. Next door to its north, at 5751 S. Woodlawn, is the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, though new to the site. One block west of the intersection is the Oriental Institute Museum, repository of Near Eastern treasures, most of which they’ve dug up themselves. The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel rises to the southwest of the intersection, an ornate, soaring structure. That’s a lot within a short walk.

Last week was spring break for Lilly and Ann. Last year I took them to Texas for the occasion, but for various reasons this year, the idea of going anywhere never really took root. Still, I wanted to go somewhere – even if only a few miles away and for a few hours – and see something new if possible. In the summer of 2003, I wrote, “I walked by the Robie House, a creation of Frank Lloyd Wright. Him again. One of these days, I will take the tour, but not today.”

I didn’t know at the time that renovation of the Robie House had barely started, and hasn’t been completed even now, though mostly it has. The main goal last Friday was to tour the Robie House, which we did. Afterward we walked over to Rockefeller Chapel, and then spent an hour or so in the Oriental Institute Museum.

It was still fairly cold, but at least the sidewalks were clear of ice, and we didn’t have far to walk. Street parking always seems to be available next to the Midway Plaisance, just south of our destinations. In 1893, the Midway was briefly the focus of the world’s attention as part of the world’s fair, but now it’s a little-known urban green space, at least outside Chicago. That’s too bad, because it’s certainly interesting, if you know what was there.

We didn’t go into the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I was astonished to see its new location, which I hadn’t heard about. Until a year and a half ago, the store was snugly located in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, at 5757 S. University Ave. Turns out the seminary has moved, too, and now the building is home to the U of C’s Dept. of Economics, so famed in free market song and story.

Wiki, for what it’s worth, says: “The seminary move was controversial: it involved the disinterring of multiple graves.” I didn’t know anyone was buried there. Who was buried there? I’ll have to look into that sometime. Once upon a time, I did enjoy the Thorndike Hilton Memorial Chapel and the collection of rocks embedded in the seminary wall. I assume those are part of the Chicago School of Economics now.

Currently the streetscape between the Robie House and where the Seminary Co-op Bookstore used to be – which is across the street from the Oriental Institute Museum — is under construction.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI was surprised to see the bookstore’s new location, which even seems to include a café, like you might see in a Barnes & Noble. It didn’t seem right. At the basement location, there was no room for anything but books and more books. This video, at least, assures us that the new location still has a “maze aspect” and that Stanley Tigerman did the design (himself or Tigerman McCurry Architects staff?), which I guess counts for something.

But how could the new site have the book-cave charm of the old? Next time I’m in Hyde Park, I’ll take a look, to see if the new can hold a candle to the old.

A Ride on the Paternoster

Posted on by

Here’s a term I’d never heard before: paternoster elevator. Or, as Wiki defines it, in part: “a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping.” The site has a helpful illustration.

The term was new to me, not the thing itself, because Yuriko and I rode one in Prague almost 20 years ago. We were astonished to find such a contraption. I never knew it had a special name, but I didn’t forget it.

This YouTube posting gives something of the sense of riding one, and since it was filmed in Prague, that might have been the very one we rode on. Here’s one in Copenhagen that I would have ridden if I’d known about it. I’m astonished that they’re still around even now.

As usual, I came to the term in a roundabout way. After proposing a coffee table book about dirty ice mounds, I remembered another one I came up with years ago, Great Elevators of Europe. For fun, I Googled that term, and the video about the paternoster came up.

The Elks National Veterans Memorial

Posted on by

“The elks live up in the hills and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come down to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find that it’s only a water hole. What they’re looking for is elk-ohole.”

 – Capt. Jeffery T. Spaulding

I was winding down by around 4 p.m. on October 19, but I wanted to see one more place. It wasn’t far north of Mother Cabrini’s shrine, and also at one of the edges of Lincoln Park: the Elks National Veterans Memorial. I could see its Roman-style dome from quite a distance in the park.

After the Great War, the Elks wanted to build a memorial to their members who had died in the conflict, which numbered more than 1,000, as well as space for the org’s national headquarters. The main rotunda of the Elks National Veterans Memorial was the most ornate space I saw during Openhousechicago, though Mother Cabrini’s shrine was a close second.

This was no accident. The Elks War Relief Commission, which was tasked with supervising the building’s construction, wrote in its  recommendation to the Grand Lodge in 1921 that: “The suggested building be made definitely monumental and memorial in character; that the architectural design be so stately and beautiful, the material of its construction so enduring, its site and setting so appropriate… that the attention of all beholders will be arrested, and the heart of every Elk who contemplates it will be thrilled with pride, and that it will for generations to come prove an inspiration to that loyalty and patriotism which the Order so earnestly teaches and has so worthily exemplified.”

The order picked New York architect Egerton Swarthout to design the memorial. He had a predilection for Beaux-Arts, which shows in the Elks memorial. More than shows, it overflows. I wouldn’t want everything to be done in that style, but it has its place – such as in massive, ornate memorials completed in the 1920s.

My camera, and my skills, aren’t remotely up to capturing the marbles or the soaring murals or even the gilded allegorical statues of the rotunda, which depicted Elk-approved virtues (Brotherly Love, Charity, Fidelity, and Justice). Better to see them with the eye, or failing that, at the memorial’s web site.

By contrast, I gave picture-taking a go at the Grand Reception Room at the Elks National Veterans Memorial. It too is ornate to beat the band.

I was especially taken with the allegorical painting called “The Armistice,” which of course references November 11, 1918. Eugene Savage did that work and others in the room, and I thought that style looked familiar. Like a WPA work, but before that agency existed. Sure enough, Savage was an important player in the WPA Federal Arts program, so I guess that was no accident either.

The National Shrine of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini

Posted on by

I expected to see interesting architecture on last week’s Openhousechicago. I didn’t expect to run across the humerus of a saint. But the relic arm bone’s behind glass and under the altar of the National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, which is just west of Lincoln Park.

The shrine itself is magnificently ornate, done in a “modern Romanesque” style. Mosaics and frescoes on the dome overhead illustrate the life of the saint; the stained glass all around tell of the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, the Apostles, and more, even including the seal of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was founded by Mother Cabrini; there are four side chapels and four side altars; and the shrine has a Tamburini Pipe Organ, an Italian variety that I’ve read is rare in North America.

This is the view of the dome from the front pews, and a part of the baldachino (canopy) over the altar.

I’ve been in a fair number of ornate churches, but what struck me about this place was how new it feels. Not just new by the standards of European sacred spaces – which might be 100 years or less – but new by American standards. This iteration of the shrine was only opened last year.

A predecessor shrine was part of Columbus Hospital, an institution founded by Mother Cabrini (d. 1917) at this location in 1905. All together she founded 67 hospitals, schools, and orphanages in the Americas and Europe. I’m pretty sure I knew about the Columbus Hospital before it closed in 2002, but never ventured into it or the original shrine.

A condo tower was eventually developed on the site of the hospital – an extremely valuable piece of land, with its immediate access to Lincoln Park and views of Lake Michigan – but part of the deal was that the shrine had to be redeveloped on the site as well. So the floors over the shrine, which is a separate entity within the structure, are residential condos. An unusual arrangement.

The shrine also includes offices and a small museum about the saint. Among other things, the room in the hospital in which Mother Cabrini lived until her death is re-created, and on display are a habit she wore, her bed, an address book, and a to-do list (“continue work on that fourth miracle this week”).

The Moody Church

Posted on by

Put this in the semiliterate headline file: Kim Kardashian, Kanye West engagement doesn’t phase Kris Humphries’ dad. That was the head brought up for a New York Daily News article by Google News last night at about 10:20 pm CDT. Normally, that isn’t a story I would click on, but I wanted to see if the error was on the web site. It wasn’t.

Across the street from the Chicago History Museum on Clark St., just south of Lincoln Park, is the Moody Church. The current building dates from 1925 and it’s an impressive pile o’ bricks. The AIA Guide to Chicago puts it this way: “According to the dedication-day program, the church was inspired in part by the Byzantine Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; the offices and meeting rooms on the LaSalle Blvd. side were based on various Romanesque churches from Lombardy. A brick structure with sparing use of terra-cotta ornament, the building provided a large gathering place at a limited cost.”

The Moody Church was another place on the openhousechicago list that I’ve passed by many, many times – when going to the museum, or on the Clark or Broadway buses, or when visiting Lincoln Park – but never entered. So I went in.

This is looking toward the front, where the focus isn’t an altar, but a pulpit. Or maybe a lectern. Not sure what they call it.

And looking toward the back. All together there are hardwood seats for 2,270 people on the main floor and 1,470 in the balcony. It must be quite a sight when the seats are full of – Moodyites? – members of the Moody Church. Must be quite a sound when they sing.

A spot of background: Moody’s Church is an independent evangelical Protestant organization, founded by Dwight Moody, a 19th-century shoe salesman from New England who found another calling, beginning with organizing a wildly successful Sunday school. His original church in Chicago, not on this site, burned down in the Fire in 1871. Later, after Moody himself had died, his organization tapped a Scotsman named John Harper to be its pastor. Coming from Britain in 1912, he booked passage on a certain steamer later famed in books and movies for sinking in the cold, cold Atlantic. He didn’t make it to his new flock.

Those are just some of the more dramatic moments in Moody history, entirely unrepresentative. Its own account of its history is here. There’s also the Moody Bible Institute (with campuses in Michigan and Washington state, and in the news lately for dropping its ban on alcohol and tobacco for its employees), as well as publishing and radio arms (it’s the owner of 36 stations nationwide).

I’m sure the church wanted people to see the inside of the fine structure in which they worship. But of course they also wanted to proselytize just a wee bit. Upon entry, I received a DVD guide to the church, a pamphlet with a message from the current pastor, Erwin Lutzer, a schedule of upcoming events, the Order of Service for Oct. 20, 2013 (the sermon was to be on “Recognizing False Prophets”), and a small booklet by Dr. Lutzer called “One Minute After You Die.”

View and No View

Posted on by

The Cliff Dwellers have a swell view of the eastern reaches of Chicago, Millennium Park, Grant Park, and the expanse of Lake Michigan beyond. The northeast vista looked like this on Saturday, October 19, 2013, at about 12:30, before the clouds and wind blew in.

The southeast vista was even better, but my photography skills weren’t up to the task. With the eye it was clear enough to see the structures of East Chicago and Gary, Indiana. The view is the from the 22nd floor of 200 S. Michigan Ave., a building across the street from the Art Institute. My photography skills were up to the task of capturing an aspect of that museum that few pay any attention to: its multi-surfaced roof.

Not a bad roof, I guess, but it seems like the Art Institute is missing an opportunity. It ought to commission a few brightly colored murals that, like the Nazca Lines, can best be appreciated from the air. Or large pieces of sculpture likewise fixed to the roof for distant viewing. The museum could then lease small spaces high up on the surrounding buildings and install telescopes for viewing, maybe for a small extra fee. That’s got to be pushing the conventional boundaries between art and life, or exploring the relationship between physical distance and the aesthetic experience, or beating up some kind of pervasive assumption about art, or something.

The Cliff Dwellers is a private club. I wanted a look-see because I’ve seen parts of other Chicago clubs’ spaces – the Rotary Club, the Union League Club, the University Club, the Metropolitan Club – but not the Cliff Dwellers. “The club exists as a cultivator for the arts, welcoming working writers, painters, musicians, and others as well as affluent art lovers who want to act as patrons,” explains Michigan Avenue magazine. “Though the clubhouse itself is modest, with a bar, dining room, and reading nook (in addition to a breathtaking aerial view of the waterfront and sprawling greenery of Grant Park), the society’s roots are far from low profile, with names like Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and Carl Sandburg marking its pedigree.”

I imagine the Cliff Dwellers would be happy to mount a big brass telescope to view Nazca Lines on the top of the Art Institute. That would be cultivating the arts.

Moving on, I soon found myself at the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, a round structure at Wabash and Wacker, very near the Chicago River. It’s a Harry Weese design, completed in 1968.

I used to have an office across the street in 35 E. Wacker. I’ve walked by this church countless times. I’d never been inside.

Most of the roundness of the structure is filled by a 764-seat auditorium with a focus on the “readers’ platform,” which is backed by a 3,316 pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ. Supposedly the inspiration for the auditorium is the layout of a Greek amphitheater, but I couldn’t help being reminded of a meeting room at the UN. It has no windows, the better to keep ambient noise from the city from intruding. That works pretty well – I couldn’t hear anything identifiable as noise from the surrounding streets.