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Sullivan sullied
Is our obsession with the past ruining Chicago's cityscape?
No doubt Louis Sullivan made a beautiful building or two in his lifetime. Nearly every day I pass the empty Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building, née Schlesinger Meyer Department Store, and salivate over its foliage-covered, green cast-iron columns. The architect also made some so-so work—the inoffensive 15–17 South Wabash Avenue, which now houses a dreary fast-food cafeteria. But you’d never guess that Sullivan created anything short of genius judging by two major exhibits—“Looking after Louis Sullivan” at the Art Institute of Chicago (which, strangely, resembles a 2008 Crown Hall photography exhibit) and “Louis Sullivan’s Idea,” curated by comics genius Chris Ware and city historian Tim Samuelson at the Chicago Cultural Center. Both come only four years after the city celebrated Sullivan’s 150th birthday in 2006 with a deluge of activities, leading me to wonder, Are we too obsessed with Louis Sullivan?
What would Sullivan think of the city’s sanctification of his work, down to its lacy elevator grilles (their modern uselessness noticeable in a photo on display in “Looking after Louis Sullivan”)? Lucky for us, he answered this question while alive: According to a text panel in “Louis Sullivan’s Idea,” a reporter asked Sullivan what he thought about the demolition of his work. His lackluster response: “Only the idea was the important thing.” More than a century later, Sullivan would surely feel the same way about our overzealous preservation of all things Sullivanesque and turn-of-the-century.
At the very least, Sullivan’s sentiment seems to go against our hero worship of him. The ultimate deification: In 2009, Preservation Chicago put Richard Nickel’s house on the list of 7 Most Endangered because of his association with Sullivan. You might be asking, Richard who? Was Nickel part of Sullivan’s cadre and worthy of having his work saved? Actually, Nickel was neither architect nor artisan. He was a photography student turned preservationist who died while photographing Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange building during the 1970s “urban regeneration”—a sad period that led to a Loop full of bland parking lots (and so-called business incentives). And it’s this association with Sullivan that puts Nickel’s drab 1810 West Cortland Street storefront apartment under the eye of a powerful preservation group.
Don’t get me wrong—I understand what Nickel was trying to save when a balcony collapse killed him. Turn-of-the-century Chicago must have been a truly magical place. Great buildings rose up from the ashes of the Chicago fire; offices marked by gold-leafed business titles, theaters glowing in the soft gold haze of early electric lighting, heavy foundations floating on a sea of fire debris and lake muck. Without the fire, there would be no great city. There would be no Auditorium Theatre—made in 1887–1889 by Sullivan, Dankmar Adler and a young Frank Lloyd Wright. The city’s tallest building at its time, the theater now stands misshapen, its sunken load-bearing walls causing theatergoers to walk up staircases that tilt sideways at about a 30-degree angle.
One hopes that we don’t need another destructive fire to build another great theater, or a great house for that matter. A few years ago, two of my friends, partners—and one an IIT student and emerging architect—attempted to buy a lot bordering one of Chicago’s old Victorian parks, a quaint harborer of lovely gardens and chess-playing vagrants. The couple planned to knock down the lot’s rickety Victorian house and build a great, cube-shaped contemporary fortress. But two opposing forces stopped them from creating their dream home: (1) the rickety house (where they would’ve slept while forging their glass cube) was moldy and unlivable, (2) a neighborhood committee working to “preserve artistic character and architectural heritage” protested new construction on the block. Years later, the lot and its rickety shack sit empty, decrepit, dangerous and still for sale.
Clearly not everything from the turn of the century was grand. My favorite display in “Louis Sullivan’s Idea” reveals the alarming number of Sullivan knockoffs built in the early 1900s. A few years after a tough 1894 recession (which partly contributed to Sullivan’s declining career), a local factory began to reproduce the architect’s sculpted leaf embellishments down to the last symmetrical pair of thorns. A similar “knockoff” terra-cotta panel sits atop the doorway of my apartment. And it always surprises me when someone nostalgically refers to that ancient embellishment as part of the city’s artistic character and architectural heritage. I didn’t know that intellectual property theft gave a structure character. As Sullivan said, it’s the idea that counts, and we’re stuck praising the new and novel ideas of the distant past, which aren’t so new or novel anymore—and, in some cases, never were.
