Don’t You Forget About Me: Chicago’s Anonymous Buildings
The city stretches for miles, a Cartesian fabric of right angles only occasionally interrupted by an errant diagonal. The grid is bound by Lake Michigan to the east, and glacial till to the north. The flat, the prairie to the west and south is endless. The warp and woof of concrete and asphalt is lined by miles of buildings infilling the space between them. The buildings stare at each other across the traveled voids of the roads. We pass through the history of modern architectural history. Late nineteenth century buildings huddle next buildings from the twentieth century, and now the twenty-first.
[caption id="attachment_241" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Exterior view of the Marquette Photo Supply. Photo by Aron Gent"]
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The story of North America’s modern architecture’s birth springs from the ashes of 1871’s great fire. The juxtaposition of readily available raw materials, the emergence of heavy industry, the railroad, and a city on the make made Chicago the right place to produce building types and technologies not seen before. The balloon frame for residences, as well as heavy metal framing for commercial buildings, spread from Chicago. The proud list of architects who influenced the western world, from Sullivan to Wright to Mies, produced not one, but two Chicago schools of architecture that fascinated and fascinate the world. But along the course of these streets, many buildings with stories to tell remain outside of the canonical texts, and thus anonymous.
Marquette Photo Supply on the Southwest side is one of these buildings. Joseph Herbert built it in 1956. The area was called Chicago Lawn at the time, and was considered one of the neighborhoods to move up to if one had been living to the northeast, in the Back of the Yards. Families fled the stench and filth of the stockyards made infamous in Upton Sinclair’s’ novel The Jungle. The neighborhood boasted two theatres and had numerous shops. Among the shops was Herbert’s father’s barbershop, which, now idle, lies dormant and looks as though someone stepped out during the Great Depression and forgot to come back. Across the street was Marzano’s Palace of Pleasure, a two-story bowling alley with pool hall and a dancehall. “They used to throw people off the mezzanine, down to the pool hall,” Herbert reminisced. A streetcar ran down 63rd from Kedzie, bringing people to Midway Airport so they could watch planes take off and land. It was lively neighborhood with full sidewalks, streets, and even airspace.
When it came time for Herbert to build his store in the empty lot next to the barbershop, he contacted John Bartolomeo. John Bartolomeo was a young architect who had started his firm in 1949, after graduating from Notre Dame. His education was classically Beaux Arts, an apprentice-and-master-system imported from France that gave students a firm basis in art, and taught them to draw, paint and sculpt. Students were well versed in the classical roots and proportions of western culture. But in the design studio, their work was contemporary, competing with the design talents of other Midwest schools. World War II had destroyed Europe, and a generation had learned about the misappropriation of historical and cultural precedent.
Bartolomeo prides himself on having run an innovative, research-oriented practice for forty years in Chicago. The office looked to Wright for residential, and the Europeans, Mies, Le Corbusier, and Breuer on larger scale projects, for direction when beginning a design. They were one of the firms that created the southwest side, extending the city’s grid by planning subdivisions, schools, churches, banks, shopping centers and high-rises. They drew inspiration from Bartolomeo’s quick trips around the country. At the time, planes and pilots were reasonable enough to rent at nearby Midway airport. He could jump a plane with clients, to educate both himself and them on what was going on around the country. He would photograph the work he visited, and present it to his staff. These flights were not only design-oriented, but also they were arranged to witness the latest in post-war building techniques and mechanical system innovations.
Is this how the client/architect relationship was born for the camera shop on 63rd?
The small shop, twenty-five feet wide and one story tall, reads as more of a loose, abstract composition than as a static building façade. It is a series of collaged shards that tenuously rest between its neighboring facades. The laminar stone volume and horizontally banded brick volumes begin to ground the façade, but the thrusting and swaying wood panels bring it back in motion. These elements and materials owe a debt to Wright’s Usonian houses and his work at Taliesin West in Arizona, or “those canvas things out in the desert,” as Bartolomeo referred to them. Wright’s triangulated dynamics are internalized and reconstituted by Bartolomeo and his staff to create a collage of subjective non-platonic geometries for the building’s facade. The building’s good repair is a testament not only to the owner’s care, but the careful detailing of the architects.
There is a striking collision at the site, between the façade and the enormous Kodak sign above. The sign and its structure are an engineering expose by themselves. The sign is also an icon from another time, and a referent to the store’s purpose of providing the new families of the time with the materials to document their personal histories on a wide scale. Thousands of Kodachrome-hued children in bright swimsuits jump up and down on the building’s roof. Today, the sheer size and added nostalgic weight seem almost to crush the building below, further emphasizing its ambiguous relationship with stability. John Bartolomeo, 82, is now making jewelry and forging metals in Arizona, after working as a sculptor and painter for the last 20 years. Joseph Herbert, 84, is still selling cameras in the shop. Their meeting provides us with just one story hidden in the thousands of buildings in the city.
Their chance meeting produced an optimistic act of architecture. For the last fifteen years, the city of Chicago has undergone its largest building boom in history, primarily through the rebuilding of residential neighborhoods and their commercial districts. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the work’s historicist formalism reads our history superficially. These bad copies of a past that never existed, this dictatorship of the red brick, cynically deprive us all of what we deserve: an architecture that responds to the subtext of our architectural history, the subtext of innovation and daring. A story of what could and can be.
by Randy Kober
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The story of North America’s modern architecture’s birth springs from the ashes of 1871’s great fire. The juxtaposition of readily available raw materials, the emergence of heavy industry, the railroad, and a city on the make made Chicago the right place to produce building types and technologies not seen before. The balloon frame for residences, as well as heavy metal framing for commercial buildings, spread from Chicago. The proud list of architects who influenced the western world, from Sullivan to Wright to Mies, produced not one, but two Chicago schools of architecture that fascinated and fascinate the world. But along the course of these streets, many buildings with stories to tell remain outside of the canonical texts, and thus anonymous.
Marquette Photo Supply on the Southwest side is one of these buildings. Joseph Herbert built it in 1956. The area was called Chicago Lawn at the time, and was considered one of the neighborhoods to move up to if one had been living to the northeast, in the Back of the Yards. Families fled the stench and filth of the stockyards made infamous in Upton Sinclair’s’ novel The Jungle. The neighborhood boasted two theatres and had numerous shops. Among the shops was Herbert’s father’s barbershop, which, now idle, lies dormant and looks as though someone stepped out during the Great Depression and forgot to come back. Across the street was Marzano’s Palace of Pleasure, a two-story bowling alley with pool hall and a dancehall. “They used to throw people off the mezzanine, down to the pool hall,” Herbert reminisced. A streetcar ran down 63rd from Kedzie, bringing people to Midway Airport so they could watch planes take off and land. It was lively neighborhood with full sidewalks, streets, and even airspace.
When it came time for Herbert to build his store in the empty lot next to the barbershop, he contacted John Bartolomeo. John Bartolomeo was a young architect who had started his firm in 1949, after graduating from Notre Dame. His education was classically Beaux Arts, an apprentice-and-master-system imported from France that gave students a firm basis in art, and taught them to draw, paint and sculpt. Students were well versed in the classical roots and proportions of western culture. But in the design studio, their work was contemporary, competing with the design talents of other Midwest schools. World War II had destroyed Europe, and a generation had learned about the misappropriation of historical and cultural precedent.
Bartolomeo prides himself on having run an innovative, research-oriented practice for forty years in Chicago. The office looked to Wright for residential, and the Europeans, Mies, Le Corbusier, and Breuer on larger scale projects, for direction when beginning a design. They were one of the firms that created the southwest side, extending the city’s grid by planning subdivisions, schools, churches, banks, shopping centers and high-rises. They drew inspiration from Bartolomeo’s quick trips around the country. At the time, planes and pilots were reasonable enough to rent at nearby Midway airport. He could jump a plane with clients, to educate both himself and them on what was going on around the country. He would photograph the work he visited, and present it to his staff. These flights were not only design-oriented, but also they were arranged to witness the latest in post-war building techniques and mechanical system innovations.
Is this how the client/architect relationship was born for the camera shop on 63rd?
The small shop, twenty-five feet wide and one story tall, reads as more of a loose, abstract composition than as a static building façade. It is a series of collaged shards that tenuously rest between its neighboring facades. The laminar stone volume and horizontally banded brick volumes begin to ground the façade, but the thrusting and swaying wood panels bring it back in motion. These elements and materials owe a debt to Wright’s Usonian houses and his work at Taliesin West in Arizona, or “those canvas things out in the desert,” as Bartolomeo referred to them. Wright’s triangulated dynamics are internalized and reconstituted by Bartolomeo and his staff to create a collage of subjective non-platonic geometries for the building’s facade. The building’s good repair is a testament not only to the owner’s care, but the careful detailing of the architects.
There is a striking collision at the site, between the façade and the enormous Kodak sign above. The sign and its structure are an engineering expose by themselves. The sign is also an icon from another time, and a referent to the store’s purpose of providing the new families of the time with the materials to document their personal histories on a wide scale. Thousands of Kodachrome-hued children in bright swimsuits jump up and down on the building’s roof. Today, the sheer size and added nostalgic weight seem almost to crush the building below, further emphasizing its ambiguous relationship with stability. John Bartolomeo, 82, is now making jewelry and forging metals in Arizona, after working as a sculptor and painter for the last 20 years. Joseph Herbert, 84, is still selling cameras in the shop. Their meeting provides us with just one story hidden in the thousands of buildings in the city.
Their chance meeting produced an optimistic act of architecture. For the last fifteen years, the city of Chicago has undergone its largest building boom in history, primarily through the rebuilding of residential neighborhoods and their commercial districts. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the work’s historicist formalism reads our history superficially. These bad copies of a past that never existed, this dictatorship of the red brick, cynically deprive us all of what we deserve: an architecture that responds to the subtext of our architectural history, the subtext of innovation and daring. A story of what could and can be.
by Randy Kober
