CHICAGO POLITICS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF FORGETFULNESS
By Robert Klein Engler (06/16/06)
CHICAGO (29 May '06)--In his masterpiece, The City in History, Lewis Mumford writes, "The chief function of a city is to convert power into form..." In my lifetime the urban Democrats in Chicago have held power for more than fifty years. It is the same in New Orleans and other American cities. What kind of form have they made with their power?
The story of Chicago's politics is written by its buildings. Come to Chicago and look around. You will see a city of many faceless skyscrapers and segregated neighborhoods. Assimilation and integration are only given lip service here. Real assimilation and integration of minorities would spell the ruin of urban Democratic politics in Chicago. In Chicago, segregation is good for those in power.
Look around as you walk north on Clark Street in Chicago's Loop. Are there any forms that show how power is used in Chicago? In fact, the documents to answer this question are right in the open. Hidden in plain sight, these documents are seldom read. To see what has happened to our republic we should look at the public architecture around us. In Chicago the stones of our past have been transformed into the steel and glass of a doubtful future.
We learn by walking the downtown streets of Chicago that in public architecture the modern is really the mundane. Modern buildings in Chicago show the beauty of geometry, but not the beauty of humanity. To look at the public buildings Democratic politics has built in Chicago is to look at the architecture of forgetfulness.
When you stop at the corner of Clark Street and Washington you see this forgetfulness rise up in glass and steel. To your left is City Hall and the County Building designed in the classical revival style. Here is a stone structure with relief sculptures over the doorways and Corinthian columns reaching up the facade.
The City Hall-County Building was dedicated February 27, 1911. The architects were Holabird & Roche. It is an eleven-story building that takes up an entire city block. Flanking the LaSalle Street entrance are four relief panels by John Flanagan that exemplify four aspects of municipal government--city playgrounds, public schools, the park system and the water supply system. According to CityofChicago.org, "the exterior of the present structure, which was designed to be a functional and efficient office building, symbolizes the strength, dignity, and vigor of the governmental functions it contains."
Cook County shares the other half of City Hall. The entrances to the county offices on Dearborn Street are graced above with sculptures of nude youths by Carl Beil, Leon Hermant and Hermon A. MacNeil. MacNiel's nude youths stand supporting the seal of Cook County. Lorado Taft believed them to be "among the best things that MacNeil has ever done." Many have forgotten what they symbolize and how beautiful they are. Others walk by and never notice the sculptures above their head. If they did, then they might remember a time thousands of years ago when the seeds of democracy were scattered in the soil of Athens.
Before I left Chicago for the University of Illinois at Urbana, I used to work downtown in an office with a woman who was in a concentration camp. She could not walk outside without dragging her hand across the stone and bricks of a building's walls. Touching a wall gave her security. After her wartime experience, she always felt she was in a strange place and needed something to hold on to. The fingernails on her hands were worn down from this sad scraping against stone.
I remember following her one day as she walked from the office. She trailed her hand across the stone of the County Building, then turned and went west along Washington. It never occurred to me then, that the past of many others in Chicago would be pushed aside by the city's Democratic politics of urban renewal, the same way her past was pushed aside. I just looked up and noticed the young men in stone above the entrance to the County Building.
Across the street from City Hall and the County Building is Daley Plaza and the Daley Center. This building, which used to be called the Civic Center, reaches for the sky with rusted walls of glass and steel. The value of decoration is forgotten in this skyscraper. There is no sign of humanity or nature on this facade. It is all cold abstraction. Without nature and humanity it is the face of death.
The Thirty one story Civic Center was dedicated On May 2, 1966. There is not one statue to be seen here at this $87 million project. Nor is there the security of stone to rub your fingernails across. Clark Street makes a gap between the Civic Center and City Hall. In that gap we make the transition between the old politics and the new. Here is the gap of forgetfulness. Crossing Clark Street to Daley Plaza is like crossing the River Lethe. Once on the other side of the street a citizen forgets the past that is held in stone at City Hall.
In dedicating the Civic Center, Mayor Richard J. Daley noted that the new building had just been awarded highest honors for beauty and utility by the Chicago Association of Commerce & Industry and the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The Chicago Civic Center was renamed the Richard J. Daley Center on December 27, 1976, in honor of the late Mayor who died in office.
The exterior of the Daley Center is glass and a special steel alloy metal that develops a permanent russet-colored oxide coating. In the plaza before the building there is a fountain and a sculpture by Picasso of what some see as a distorted face. Look at this face and then at the faces of the young men on the building across the street. Which one of them would you like to know? Which one is a better image of a citizen, the nude youth, or the other one across the street with a rusted, crescent eye and dowel rod ribs?
The Daley Center represents much contemporary skyscraper architecture in Chicago. It also represents the unconscious death wish of liberalism. It is an architecture that shows us power but not grace. The point of this architecture is forgetfulness. Looking at the old City Hall you may remember the human ideals of ancient Greece and hear an echo of past virtues. Looking at the high walls of the Daley Center, the heart is rendered blank.
Let the Chinese tourists come to wonder at the Picasso in Daley Plaza. They won't ask questions about what neighborhood was ground to dust to make a flower bed. Let the skateboarders slap their wheels against the plaza's stones. What do they have to remember in their random lives but graffiti? Yes, here is globalization and open borders at its best, our urban planners think!
Chicagoans like to believe the skyscraper began here. So did modern, Democratic urban politics with its architecture of forgetfulness. All across the city old buildings have been torn down and replaced with the modern boxes of architectural amnesia. The past had to be obliterated so that no one would question the future. Modern architecture puts us in a strange place where there is nothing to hold on to. Not even a decorative vine or leaf reminds us of what we left behind.
The old Chicago Federal Building, down the street on Dearborn and Jackson, with its post office and magnificent dome is torn down, too. What is there to remember when you look at the shear walls of glass and steel there? Here are geometric shapes and exploited materials. Steel and glass and straight lines recall nothing that is human except detached reason whose purpose is death to memory.
If you ever mailed a letter at the old Chicago Federal Building, the way our mothers did, then the memory of its interior would haunt your dreams. In its place, cliffs of glass and steel that are the walls of the Kluczynski Federal Building, tower upward. Bending your neck back to look up at this obelisk designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, do you need any more proof that less is simply less?
The Italian community that used to be where the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago now stands was destroyed and replaced with acres of concrete and steel. The Solider Field renovation made no attempt to integrate the past with the present, either. At this stadium the metal of forgetfulness is imposed from the top down.
The neighborhood at 63rd and Halsted with its department stores that rivaled stores in the Loop also was left to fall into ruin. Even the high-rise housing projects along State Street are being leveled, now. The son makes sure we don't remember the mistakes of the father. In Chicago the sins of urban renewal do not have to be forgiven if they are forgotten.
To manage urban minorities, the Democrats must manage the past. To do this, they will tear down the old and put up the faceless new. The faceless new will not speak of what came before. It will not ask why this neighborhood went from good to bad in the first place? All the better if people stay home and do not ask questions or vote, anyway. As the percentage of citizens who vote in Chicago's mayoral elections goes down, the more stark the public buildings are that go up.
Now, walk east on Washington to Millennium Park, and Lake Michigan. Look past the Loop L tracks. What do you see? The rolled back lid of a giant sardine can? An imago of stainless steel, or the chaos of the future, a future where segregation drives politics and the faceless masses collide? Listen! Is that the screeching of gulls overhead, or the lamentation of Jeremiah, when he wrote, "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people, how is she become as a widow!"
What is the purpose of a continuous urban invasion and succession of minorities and immigrants, where one group erases the history of another? It seems all this is done so a corrupt family and their friends may hold on to political power and rise up buildings with their name on them.
A glimpse of what this corruption brings may be seen as you walk farther east on Washington. Ahead you will see the form of an unconscious wish for chaos. The closer you get to the twisted shapes designed by Frank Gehry in Millennium Park, the more you realize the madness our elites let lose.
The Pritzker Pavilion is in metal what Milton's Pandemonium is in words. In spite of this, a prominent Chicago civic leader, perhaps not having read Paradise Lost said, "Millennium Park will be a worthy creation for all time. It will define Chicago to the entire world as America's greatest city."
Voters who live in many of the suburbs that ring the city are hardly troubled by such rhetoric or the architecture of forgetfulness. Where these voters live, most things are new. Few young people in the suburbs have seen something they love and lived with torn down. Others have forgotten the agora or prefer The Mall of America, instead. They remain unaware that liberalism is now married to the death instinct. Who cares if they tear down a marble dome to put up a steel box, they think.
Millennium Park stands as an example of urban architecture that not only hates our republic, but hates humanity. Here is a vision of America that comes with segregated cities and gated communities. If there is a vestige of the human or natural here, it is only in the image of broken bones.
The Pritzker Pavilion gives form to power, but it is not the form of liberty and justice. It is not the form of assimilation and integration. It is not memory in stone. It is an impulse to power and the miasma of multiculturalism. It is a symbol of doom at the lake shore, where bent wing gulls glide in circles over trash.
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