Category Archives: Architecture

The Heinz Memorial Chapel

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Chapel has a cozy connotation: little chapel in the woods, wayside chapel, goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t find some sizable edifices that are chapels all the same, such as the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, or the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

Late on Friday morning we arrived on campus to see the sizable chapel, funded by condiment money in the 1930s.
More specifically, the will of ketchup baron Henry Heinz (d. 1919) vaguely provided for the development of a building for religious training and social events at the university. His children and the university administration ultimately decided on a soaring neo-Gothic structure, designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder, who was known for his university work. Apparently the chapel was nondenominational from the get-go.

Looking toward the sanctuary.
Toward the back of the nave. The organ has 4,272 pipes, and when we were in the chapel, an organist was filling the space with soft practice notes.
Both transepts feature dual banks of some astonishingly tall stained glass windows: 73 feet tall, designed by Charles J. Connick’s Boston studio.
I found a pamphlet that tells me that the four tall windows each have a theme: Temperance, Truth, Tolerance and Courage. Some of the characters depicted in those windows are religious figures, as you’d expect, such as the Virgin Mary, Moses, King David, St. Francis, St. George and Joan of Arc.

Others are less expected, such as Sir Isaac Newton. With Edmund Halley down in the corner, helping prove Newton’s laws of motion.
Or President Lincoln.
Or Dorethea Dix.
That’s just a small sample. “The windows, which highlight an equal number of women and men, contain sacred and secular figures from history, literature, and science,” the chapel web site says. There are 391 figures in all.

Indianapolis Artsgarden, 2014

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Easter fell fairly late five years ago, April 20, and we traveled that weekend as well. That time to Indianapolis, where we saw the Eiteljorg Museum and ate at Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles. A good little trip.

We also spent part of that Saturday afoot in downtown Indianapolis, including a short stop at an interesting public space: the Indianapolis Artsgarden, a large domed structure built over a major intersection.

Besides connecting the adjacent Circle Centre Mall to a nearby hotel and other buildings, the Arts Council of Indianapolis — which owns the space — holds public performances there, along with art exhibitions.

Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects (now part of Perkins Eastman), who designed Circle Centre, did the Artsgarden too in the 1990s. Actually not so much a single dome as a series of glass vaults. Makes for a light, open space.

Even when occupied by fully grown trees.

No event was going on when we were there, but it was a pleasant place to hang out. I did that while everyone else went shopping at the adjacent retail. If I remember right, they found some spring clothes.

Notre-Dame

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First heard about the Notre-Dame fire on the car radio late yesterday afternoon. Wish I could report some kind of transcendent experience at the cathedral during our visit years ago, but no. Other people’s accounts along those lines are being posted with great speed.

We were duly impressed by the stained glass, the flying buttresses and the overall sweeping majesty of the exterior. But sad to say, what I remember most was that the cathedral interior was dark.

I understand the reason. Lighting is expensive. So the cathedral wasn’t much illuminated on an ordinary day in November 1994 for the ordinary tourists who were visiting. The thing to do would have been to attend a service, but we thoughtlessly did not.

Among all the pictures I took in 1994, I have exactly one of Notre-Dame. Of course it was one of the Rose Windows. I didn’t want to use film anywhere too dark. Not that I had the equipment to take a very good image anyway.

Maybe we were lucky to be able to see it at all. Whether you credit Dietrich von Choltitz with not burning down Paris in 1944, or think that’s nonsense, the Germans could have certainly done a lot of damage before liberation, including dynamiting something so quintessentially French as Notre-Dame du Paris. Such an act would have been in character, after all.

I’ve read today that, at least, the flying buttresses did indeed buttress the walls, though the roof was lost, including wood lattices made from trees cut down between 1160 and 1170. The Rose Windows seem to be intact.

Naturally, the building will be restored. I wonder whether there will be arguments about rebuilding the completely lost spire. Considering the long history of the cathedral, it counts as a late addition.

The Whole World A Bauhaus

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After a pleasant weekend and a warm Monday and Tuesday — lunch on the deck is my benchmark for warm days — the hammer dropped on Wednesday. Mostly we got cold rain, but I also saw flecks of ice on the deck and in the greenish grass today.

I’m pretty sure that the first time I ever heard of the Bauhaus, or Walter Gropius for that matter, was ca. 1977 listening to Tom Lehrer’s That Was The Year That Was album. One of the songs, “Alma,” was about Alma Mahler, who had died during The Year That Was, that is, 1964.

Walter Gropius was Alma’s second husband. In amusing Lehrer fashion, he made a rhyme of “Bauhaus” and “chow house” in the verse about Walter and Alma.

But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only come home now and then
She said, “Vhat am I running, a chow house?
It’s time to change partners again!’

This is an interesting video about Alma. Nearly 55 years after her death, she still inspires strong opinions, pro and con; see the comments section. I think my opinion about Alma will be, I don’t care.

We went to the Elmhurst Art Museum on Saturday to see The Whole World A Bauhaus, a traveling exhibition mounted for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus. Elmhurst, it seems, is its only stop in the United States.

Blair Kamin did a good write-up of the exhibition in the Chicago Tribune: “Amid the show’s 400-plus objects,which include photographs, works on paper, architectural models, documents, films and audio recordings, are classic chairs by Mies and Marcel Breuer; geometric wall tapestries and carpets by such Bauhaus masters as the textile artist Anni Albers, wife of painter Josef Albers; and curiosities like a yellow, blue and red cradle and flyers for Bauhaus designs.”

Curious indeed, that cradle.

It looks like with a vigorous push, you could roll it completely over, throwing an unfortunate infant onto the floor.

But never mind that. At least it’s a Bauhaus object. Kamin calls the exhibit “overstuffed,” and I’ll go along with him. It’s overstuffed with photos and documents and other Bauhaus ephemera.

For true Bauhaus nerds, this might be exciting, but the minutiae was a little much for me. For a school that produced a wealth of artful objects, or perhaps elegant industrial objects, The Whole World A Bauhaus had relatively few of them on display. Fewer pictures of Bauhaus types at work and play and more Bauhaus output to examine in person would have improved the show.

Even so, I learned a fair number of things — such as how the Bauhaus formed factions almost immediately, as you might except from a group of people with talent, strong opinions and high ideals.

One example, as Kamin tells it: “One was the charismatic Swiss artist Johannes Itten, who shaved his head and wore rimless round glasses and gurulike garb. Itten made his students do breathing exercises to improve their powers of concentration. When the school’s founding director, the urbane German architect Walter Gropius, shifted the focus of the Bauhaus’ workshops from distinctive crafted objects to design for mass production, the idealistic Itten left the school in 1923.”

I also enjoyed much of what I saw. Such as the model of the Dessau Bauhaus building.
I wondered whether it, unlike the school itself, survived National Socialism, or the war or the DDR for that matter. Yes, it turns out. In reunified Germany, the Dessau Bauhaus is a big-deal tourist attraction.

I consciously looked for works on paper that would make good postcards. I found a few. Such as “Construction for Fireworks” by Kurt Schmidt.

I’m not the only person who thinks a line of Bauhaus postcards would be just the thing. Gropius himself apparently thought that.

“In 1923, the Bauhaus was preparing for its first exhibition, where Walter Gropius, the school’s founder, would extol the benefits of industrial mass production,” notes Wired.

“To publicize the events, the Bauhaus mailed out beautiful postcards.”

Here’s one more. Who needs a course catalog when you have this?

I wondered for a moment how the Elmhurst Art Museum bagged the only U.S. visit by this exhibition, and figured there were a few reasons. The Chicago area has strong ties to modernism, for one thing, but a few rooms of Bauhaus might get lost in a larger venue like the Art Institute.

Besides, the Elmhurst has its own ties to modernism. Namely, the main display space is adjacent to the McCormick House, a single-family home designed in 1952 by Mies van der Rohe, last director of the Bauhaus 20 years earlier, and moved to its current location from elsewhere in the village of Elmhurst.

The house was restored to a more original appearance recently.
The house is open, so we wandered in for a look. Not quite as striking as the Farnsworth House, but definitely Miesian.

Along E. 57th Street, Chicago

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Our stroll through a small slice of the Hyde Park neighborhood on Sunday took us westward on E. 57th St. for a few blocks, roughly between S. Kenwood Ave. and S. University Ave. As you head west, small businesses and flats give way to university property.

Mostly. This is the 57th St. side of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago.
According to the AIA Guide to Chicago, the church, which was completed in 1931, is a “textbook example of English Perpendicular Gothic design [that] fits in easily with the limestone facades and Gothic ornament of many Hyde Park residences and university buildings.”

Denison B. Hull did the design. “The son of a five-term, Republican U.S. representative, Morton Hull, he grew up in the Hyde Park area that his father represented in the 1920s,” the Chicago Tribune said in his 1988 obit.

“After serving as an officer in World War I, Mr. Hull was graduated from Harvard University. In 1922, he won first prize in an architectural design contest conducted by the university.

Among his noted architectural work, besides the First Unitarian Church, were the restoration of Old Church and the expansion of the historical museum, both in Bennington, Vt…

Mr. Hull was noted also as a scholar of ancient Greek and Greece.”

They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

I’ve never been able to see the inside of First Unitarian. Services are at 10 a.m. Sunday, and if I ever happen to be in Hyde Park then, I will attend one. Not just to see the interior, but also to see whatever it is Unitarians do during their services.

At 1219 E. 57th St. is the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. More simply, the Neubauer Collegium.

According to a sign in front, exhibits can be seen inside, but not, as it happens, on Sunday. I wondered just what the organization was, and why I’d never heard of it. To answer the second question first: it was founded only in 2012, and makes its home in the former Meadville-Lombard Seminary Building.

As for what it does, the Neubauer — as best as I can describe it — is a humanities think tank.

UChicago News says: “The Neubauer Collegium will unite scholars in the common pursuit of ideas of grand scale and broad scope, making the University of Chicago a global destination for top scholars engaged in humanistic research while also pioneering efforts to share that research with the public.”

Here’s the view of the Reynolds Club bell tower from near 57th St.
As probably no one calls it: the John J. Mitchell Tower of the Joseph Reynolds Student Clubhouse. These days, the clubhouse, completed in 1903, is a student union. Joseph “Diamond Jo” Reynolds was a Gilded Age steamboat and railroad magnate whose bequest paid for the building; I believe John J. Mitchell was a Chicago banker who seems to have died in a road-rage incident.

As Time reported in 1927:

Near Chicago last week death came to banker John J. Mitchell, and to Mrs. Mitchell. They were driving in an open motor car from their country home at Lake Geneva, Ill., to Chicago for the funeral of their elder daughter’s father-in-law, when their machine met a roadside brawl. Two motor cars, going in opposite directions had tried to pass a hay wagon at the same time. Both cars went into a ditch; the drivers jumped clear and fell to words and fisticuffs. The haywagon stopped as did several machines. Their drivers wanted to see…

To read more, I’d have to subscribe, but I’d rather leave the story at that.

Here’s the view of the tower from inside the quad formed by the Reynolds Club and some other buildings.

Designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, the building was “derived from St. John’s College at Oxford, and its domestic feeling is enhanced by a stair hall that could have come straight out of an English manor house.”

Also inside — behind the row of windows to the left of the tower, above — is the Charles L. Hutchinson Common, which SRC did as well. Hutchinson, better known as founder of the Art Institute of Chicago, ponied up for building the hall.

It’s also like stepping into Oxford. According to Wiki, anyway, “The Harry Potter film series has used the original hall at Christ Church in each of its films, imparting a tourist interest in its American replicate.[citation needed].”

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

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If you want to see artful concrete, Tadao Ando is your man. I came to a fuller appreciation of that when we visited the 659 Wrightwood in Chicago late last year. On exhibit at the 659 were images of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, an Ando design that looked pretty artful, too.

As it is.

Modern Art Museum of Fort WorthThat’s the back of the structure, or at least the side facing the water feature and a scattering of outdoor sculptures, and sporting the museum’s distinctive Y beams.

The front, or at least the side facing the parking lot and a public street, isn’t quite as distinctive, but it is handsome in a modernist sort of way.
Modern Art Museum of Fort WorthAndo’s design is apparent not only in the exterior, but in the smooth concrete walls that form parts of the interior.

The Modern is one of a cluster of art museums in Fort Worth that also includes the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (designed by Philip Johnson) and the Kimbell Art Museum (Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano). The last time I spent a day in Fort Worth, early in 1990, I visited both of those. The Modern didn’t exist then, opening only in 2002.

How best to approach a museum whose collection is as eclectic as the Modern? Wander around and look at things. Some works will be interesting, some less so. I try to wander around upper-end grocery stores with the same attitude in mind, if I have time.

The usual modern suspects were all in evidence at the Modern: Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rothko, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollack, Josef Albers, Henry Moore and more. Worth seeing, but it’s also good to see interesting works by artists that aren’t quite as well known.

Such as “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” by Martin Puryear (1996), a wooden ladder-like structure fixed to the floor that winds its way upward. It doesn’t merely appear to shrink in size as it rises, it actually does. The surrounding Ando-style concrete walls add to the effect.

Or the curious “Camouflage Botticelli (Birth of Venus)” by Alain Jacquet (1963-64), an image of Venus on a cockle shell merged with a Shell gas pump.

For something newer, and more kinetic, there’s “Kind of Blue” by Jenny Holzer (2012), an array of nine LED signs with blue diodes fixed to the floor, emitting blue words that appear to flow along. As far as I could tell, there was no direct reference to the Miles Davis album of that name, but I could easily be wrong.

The video also offers a good look at the tall glass windows that overlook the museum’s shallow water feature — essentially a field of rocks covered by a little water.

Photography is part of the Modern’s collection as well. One wall sported a number of gelatin silver prints of water towers in France, Germany and the U.S. by Bernd and Hilla Becher. How is this tower in Dortmund-Grevel, Germany, anything but a delight?

Near the museum’s front entrance is “Vortex” by Richard Serra (2002), who is best known to us rubes for the notorious “Tilted Arc” in DC.
Vortex Richard SerraOn the other side of the museum, beyond the water feature, we took a look at a familiar figure.

"Conjoined" by Roxy Paine

“Conjoined” by Roxy Paine (2007), done in stainless steel. I remember seeing his work at the National Sculpture Garden and, I believe, at the Denver Art Museum, the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MOMA and the Hirshhorn. Cool. But does lightning strike the Modern piece?

Cable House & “Victory”

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Catercorner from the Dreihaus Museum on the Near North Side of Chicago is the headquarters of Dreihaus Capital Management, which is in the Cable House, an 1886-vintage Richardsonian Romanesque mansion.
In the late 19th century, it was probably the biggest thing on the block. Now tall structures look down on it.

“Its distinct peach-pink façade is Kasota stone, a sedimentary rock from the upper Midwest,” the Dreihaus Museum web site says. “That soft, radiant hue, along with steep gables and abundant ornamentation, are distinct contrasts to the sterner gray of the Samuel M. Nickerson Mansion on the opposite corner.”

“Ransom Reed Cable (1834-1909) commissioned the mansion from the firm Cobb & Frost in 1885. Cable… served as president of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway for 15 years.”

Cable went the way of all flesh and then, for much of the 20th century, undertakers John Carroll Sons occupied the house. Now modern office space, the interior isn’t in a 19th-century style any more, according to the museum.

Dreihaus Private Equity is in the Cable House’s former carriage house and (I assume) the small office building next to that.

Standing on a column in front of the office building is a sculpture I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before: “Victory” by Daniel Chester French.
Some closeups are here. According to a nearby plaque, it was cast by the D.C. French Roman Bronze Works, NY, in the 1920s from a working model for the First Division Memorial in President’s Park in Washington, DC.

I don’t remember seeing the DC memorial. Maybe I did. But I’ve definitely run across Daniel Chester French before, besides the Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial: a statue that evokes the 1893 Columbian Exposition here in Chicago and some allegories in Lower Manhattan, among others.

The John B. Murphy Memorial Auditorium

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Between the holidays one day, when it was cold but not too cold, I found myself on Chicago’s Near North Side, just west of Michigan Ave. At the corner of N. Wabash Ave. and E. Erie St. is the Driehaus Museum, otherwise known as the Nickerson House at 40 E. Erie St., the Gilded Age palace we visited a year and a half ago.

I didn’t stop for that this time, but headed east from there and immediately saw this structure, which is the Driehaus Museum’s next door neighbor.

I stood thinking for a while. Who was John B. Murphy and why did he rate such an imposing memorial? Why can’t I ever remember seeing this building before? I must have. I must have seen it, but maybe I didn’t see it. A strange lapse.

This is the age of computers in our pockets, so I stood on the sidewalk across the street and looked up John B. Murphy.

Dr. Murphy he was, a prominent Chicago surgeon of the late 19th/early 20th centuries (1857-1916). Among other things, he “was a pioneer in recognizing the symptoms for appendicitis, and he strongly urged immediate removal of the appendix when this symptomatic pattern appeared,” Britannica.com tells me.

Someone had to think of that. Dr. Murphy also clearly had friends with means. The web site of the Murphy Chicago — as the space is now known — says that “ground was broken on the John B. Murphy Memorial Auditorium in 1923, and construction was completed in 1926.

“The Auditorium was built to serve as a tangible memorial to the great Dr. John B. Murphy. Shortly following Dr. Murphy’s death, his friends sought to honor him by forming the John B. Murphy Memorial Association.

“The architects for this gorgeous building were Marshall and Fox. The architectural design of the Auditorium is in the French Renaissance style and is reminiscent of the Chapelle de Notre-Dame de Consolation – the Commemorative Monument to the Bazar de la Charite Fire, located in Paris.”

The American College of Surgeons owned the property from day one and still does. The organization formerly hosted ACS meetings there and used it for surgery education, but in the 21st century, it’s a rentable event space. Weddings are a specialty, apparently.

The Boarded-Up St. Boniface and the Resplendent Holy Trinity

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At the intersection of Chicago Ave. and Noble St. in Chicago, you’ll find a word you don’t see that much: natatorium. It’s attached to the Ida Crown Natatorium, a unit of the Chicago Park District.
The facility has an entry in the Atlas Obscura, which notes that “its most arresting feature is the swooping, gently curved ‘barrel shell’ roof that arches over the pool, resembling in the words of one critic ‘a wave of concrete about to crash onto the shore of Chicago Avenue.’

“Mayor Richard J. Daley himself presided over the pool’s dedication in 1961, which was named for one of Chicago’s most prominent philanthropic families.” (Actually, Ida was a member of that family, the grandmother of this wealthy fellow.)

The natatorium is at the south end of the mid-sized Eckhart Park, which is otherwise an open area of playing fields. Rising over the north end of Eckhart Park, along W. Chestnut St., is the shuttered St. Boniface Church, originally built in the early 1900s for a primarily German Catholic congregation. Presumably they didn’t want to share a church with the surrounding Poles, and vice versa. St. Boniface, of course, led the effort to Christianize the Germans and is highly regarded in that country.
Given the Chicago Archdiocese’s history of knocking down splendid Chicago churches because money is tight (and these days, there are other bills to pay), I’m surprised that the shell of St. Boniface, which closed in 1990, is still standing.

This summer, the city approved plans to redevelop the structure into condominiums, including a new building as well as units in what used to be the sanctuary. That’s better than razing the grand old church. To the side of the boarded-up structure, I noticed a construction site in its early stages.

The redevelopment is slated for completion in 2020, but for now St. Boniface still has that abandoned look. Inside, even more.

While standing on Noble St. near the hulking St. Boniface, I noticed another church not far to the north. A large-looking structure. When I was looking around Google Maps a few days ahead of my walk, I hadn’t noticed it. But there it was. The church looked to be about five minutes away, so I went.

Soon I was in front of Holy Trinity Church.
Definitely built for a Polish congregation and still very much a Polish congregation. The church is run by the Society of Christ Fathers for Poles Living Abroad.
Polish Independence Day is the same as Armistice Day, incidentally. Same day, same year. The war was over and everything was up for grabs, including self-determination for formerly partitioned places.

Completed in 1906, Holy Trinity’s design is attributed to a Chicago architect named William Krieg, who (according to one source) mostly did more modest buildings in Chicago — a lot of them. Another source calls Krieg “little known” and a manufacturer of terra cotta as well.

I wasn’t expecting the interior to be quite so ornate. I gawked at the column-free space for a while, looking at the murals covering the walls and ceiling, the stained glass, the statues and other ornaments.
A baptism was in progress, but no mass, so I moved around the sanctuary. Here’s the baptism party in front of the altar.
Later, as I read about the church, I can across this bit of information at Wiki about the space underneath. The article calls it “catacombs,” but that seems like a misnomer. Rather, the space is “beneath the area formerly occupied by the lower church, and consist[s] of a winding path lined with niches containing saintly relics…”

A little like the space for relics found at St. Josaphat in Milwaukee, perhaps. Intriguing.

Holy Innocents Church, Chicago

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A block south of Chicago Ave. on N. Armour St. is Holy Innocents Church. Since I was already taking a walk on that part of Chicago Ave. in the city on Gaudete Sunday on a clear and practically warm day for December, I figured I’d take a look.

Holy Innocents is yet another of the city’s grand churches built in the early 20th century for Chicago’s enormous Polish population, and yet another design by Worthmann & Steinbach. Like St. Mary of the Angels, Covenant Presbyterian, First Lutheran of the Trinity and St. Barbara — all in Chicago.
Romanesque Revival with Byzantine elements, the building was completed in 1912 and renovated in 2005.

I arrived not long after the beginning of a mass in Polish. I sat in for part of it. The crowd wasn’t massive, but a number of congregants were scattered around the sizable interior of the church.
Unlike the Latin mass at St. John Cantius last year, I couldn’t pick out any words at all, so unfamiliar am I with the Polish language. No matter.

Besides Polish, the church offers masses in English and Spanish as well, which seems only fitting considering the modern population. Since the service was in progress, I wasn’t able to poke around the church, but I did notice — they’re hard to miss — a shrine devoted to Our Lady of Częstochowa on the left side of the church (as you face the altar) and another devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe on the right. Also fitting.