HOUSE OF LONELINESS: BUILDING CONTEMPORARY CHICAGO
By Robert Klein Engler (01/29/07)
Forms of building tell us as much about ourselves as forms of worship. This becomes evident after leaving McCormick Place, Chicago's great exhibition hall by Lake Michigan. We leave a house of loneliness through glass doors for an expanse of sidewalks bordered with stone benches, backless and without shade.
It is only a few miles from McCormick Place to Jackson Park, site of Daniel Burnham's 1893 World's Colombian Exhibition. Today, this park is the proposed location of the 2016 Summer Olympics. The plan is to make something new in Jackson Park again, but it is not new anymore to build with variations on the theme of a box.
Although the White City of 1893 located in Jackson Park was made mostly of staff and sometimes appeared worn while still new, this grand expression of Classicism remains Chicago's swan song to an urban vision built to human scale. "But it was all a dream, anyway," many said about the White City, and then echoed the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca: "Life is a dream, and our dreams are dreams."
Not everyone admired the Classical references displayed in the architecture of the World's Columbian Exposition. Louis Sullivan remarked that "the damage wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a century from its date if not longer." When the influences of the fair were incorporated into other Chicago buildings, Sullivan was so turned off by the design of Continental Illinois' Grand Banking Hall that he proposed the bankers should wear togas and speak Latin.
In a review that almost makes one ashamed of their history, Julia K. Rose claims the 1893 fair was, "A cultural statement, an argument for power, a societal influencer, and above all, a reflection of the confusions, fragmentations, and hopes of a transitional age."
In place of the confusion and fragmentation of Ms. Rose's review, Henry Adams' opinion of the fair seems as if he were looking at something altogether different. Adams was moved by the fair when he wrote, "I am puzzled to understand the final impression left on the average mind...as to the inward meaning of this dream of beauty. Of course, I don't understand it, but then I don't understand anything..."
There was another Chicago that existed alongside the White City. Some referred to it as the Black City. This was the Chicago of vice and corruption that William T. Stead railed against. It was the Chicago that the sociologist Max Weber saw upon a visit and described as "a human being with his skin removed." Even the English author Rudyard Kipling, who visited the White City and made a point of touring the Chicago Stock Yards, wrote of Chicago: "Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is dirt."
Nowadays, tourists still come to Chicago's lake front. They often come to see the silver Bean in Millennium Park. Here is another contemporary structure made not to live in but to look at. Ironically, when they look at the Bean they see a distorted reflection of a skyline and themselves looking back.
Few tourists go inland to visit a neighborhood bungalow, perhaps the only expression of the local in architecture that remains in Chicago. This is because often the local is destroyed here, not for some ideal or the greater public good, but it is destroyed, instead, to keep a political party in power as it plays a game of chess, using ethnic groups as pawns on a board that is the grid of Chicago's streets.
no heroes, only victims
There is so much to dislike about contemporary Chicago architecture. It does not seem to be a dream of beauty any longer. In these arrogant skyscrapers a fitting music is not the organ, but the songs of Appalachia, sung in shape notes. From an isolated valley or across the midwest prairie, bits and pieces of European culture are assembled. Hope cut off from the source of hope is still hope, but like the halls of McCormick Place, there remains a haunting worry of a greater world left behind.
Perhaps, in spite of Frank Lloyd Wright's influence, it is the absence of organic decoration that makes us feel lonely in the confines of contemporary, Chicago buildings. We feel lonely in these faceless corridors because we are the only human thing that moves behind their walls of glass. With soaring walls of steel, geometry trumps nature in the corridors of power.
Contemporary architecture is faceless because the face of individuality troubles contemporary architects. Such architecture also abhors natural decoration, because nature is always a reminder of the limits placed on reason.
In the past, Gothic cathedrals aspired to reach new heights, too, but in their aspiration, nature and the supernatural were always evident. It is part of human nature to take pleasure in representations of the natural world. It is a desire for such pleasure that called twenty-seven million visitors to Chicago's 1893 World's Fair.
The facades of contemporary buildings cannot be decorated with representations of heroic exploits, either, because heroes take sides. Today's architecture shares the relative assumptions that multiculturalism supposes. There are no heroes expressed in art, today, because there are no right and wrong sides. There are just victims or the formulas of geometry imposed upon the limits of materials. If it were not for gravity, then these buildings, drawn to an international style, would float on a sigh of despair.
Still, we could ask what have we transitioned into, if the classical architecture of the World's Columbian Exposition is ignored? Certainly we have not transitioned to an American architecture, a form of building that is rooted in the local and attempts to express shades of the infinite in the New World. We put up buildings now that are multicultural and irrelevant to the traditional aspirations of Western Civilization.
Some of today's architects sense they are irrelevant and at a creative impasse. They are mesmerized by materials and lost by formulas. The University of Virginia's school of architecture notes that, "The places where we live, work, and conduct business are becoming more and more alike and more and more unlikable. People are put off by their environment and feel powerless to change it."
A reason for this feeling of powerlessness may be that just like many academics, architects have lost faith in American Civilization. By favoring the international style that abolishes historical and cultural references, these architects are cut off from both the roots of the nation and its civilization. Yet, even in the face of this rupture, many will maintain it is a good thing that modernity is abolishing nations and patriotism.
what do they believe?
The world is simultaneously new and old for every generation. I wonder, now, about the generation after me. Let's imagine a young man born by artificial insemination into a family headed by a single, professional woman. Educated without a father into political correctness, he knows nothing about what his mother calls, "The bigoted and misogynistic religion of old Europe."
Let's imagine, also, unlike others of his generation wired for success, this young man walks along the streets of downtown Chicago eighteen years from now, and looks up at the Sears Tower. Human nature being what it is, something in him may ask, "What did the people who built this believe?"
If this young man has any intelligence, then he will conclude the builders believed nothing. They believed nothing because nothing is evident on this building's facade. Certainly the builders did not believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. If they believed in anything at all, it was in reason without emotion, an intellect like glass, or it was in abstract concepts over history. They may have believed also in abolishing history in favor of political correctness. In short, they believed in money.
The ancient world that the Columbian Exposition imitated is in ruins, and someday our world will lie in ruins, too. Even the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, while it was still new and brilliant in the sunlight, was prophesied. "Lapis super lapidem" was not left standing there.
Yet, it seems unlikely that what we build will last as long as Notre Dame of Paris or the Acropolis in Athens. It has hardly been ten years since the overpass leading to Roosevelt and State Street has been put up in Chicago, and already salt and the elements are wearing it down and milling it to sand. It's obvious, a civilization that does not build to last will not itself last.
the temporary as a style
After the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11, many thought the skyscraper was doomed by international terrorism. We would have to build deeper instead of higher to house our treasure. As it turns out, the only thing that will doom the skyscraper is what lies beyond it, yet no one can imagine what that will be except barbarism. Postmodernism has reached an imaginative dead end. That dead end seems to be exactly what it was building towards in the first place.
It is difficult to imagine beyond the world of contemporary architecture to what will be the next style. Have we reached the end of style? Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Modern, Postmodern and then what? Just as it is difficult to imagine how we will travel beyond airplanes, so the skyscraper seems a dead end. Walking gave way to the cart, then the horse, then the steamship and railroad, and then the jet plane. Beyond jet travel all we can see is more of the same. Beyond McCormick Place is likewise more of the same.
Perhaps the new style of building in Chicago will be called the Temporary Style. Buildings are put up to be used up. There is no sense of building for the ages, and no sense of the ages. McCormick Place is just temporary. It will last long enough, perhaps a generation, and then a new style will come to pass. That new style will be the Neo-Temporary, and on and on into the frozen, foreseeable future.
Architecture took a turn in Chicago from the White City to a city built of rebar, glass and steel. As building styles went from load bearing walls to internal skeletons, the politics of Chicago began to resemble more and more the politics of communist Eastern Europe. One party rule leads to one style building.
After 1900, Democratic politicians in league with big business allowed this turn to continue unchecked. As one observer of Chicago noted, "Limited as to the ground, business sought the air." In their quest for money and power, business in league with government erased our past the same way they plan to erase their recent mistake of housing projects along State Street.
Helmut Jahn's 1985 public building known as the Thompson Center, with its attending sculptures by French artist Jean Dubuffet, is a good example of the Temporary Style. Here is a conceptual building decorated by conceptual sculpture. What could be worse than having to wind your way past these obstacles, to work in a cubicle that is cold in winter and warm in summer? Looking down into the vast interior of this building, there is little decoration to remind you about the history of Illinois.
Outside the Thompson Center, Dubuffet's "revolutionary anti-cultural beliefs" about art troubles few. Most people try not to think about his black and white monsters on their way to work, the same way they try not to think about selling their integrity for a city or state job. Perhaps a monument here to Captain William Wells, one of the heroes of the Fort Dearborn massacre, would inspire a few passersby to something other than conformity.
The next generation that must work and live in faceless buildings may prefer the false promise of affirmative action to the truth of excellence. This accommodation is the final face of liberalism, a politics aptly suited to the sculpture we put on display and the skyscrapers we build, today. Many in that generation agree that if politicians want to airbrush out the warts of history, then so be it. They will do anything to keep their political party in power. "But it won't be so bad," this timid generation replies. "There'll be parking, and a nice view across the lake, too."
If we try to imagine all that has come before but is no longer part of Chicago; the chutes at White City amusement park, the hall of mirrors at Riverview, the art nouveau Sears store in Englewood at 63rd and Halsted, then we realize what stands fifty stories above our head now, our topless towers of Ilium, will also someday fall. That day may be sooner then we imagine, for if we do not care for the past, we will not care for the present.
Who casts an anchor on this ocean of prairie? Not those transnationals passing through our dizzy cities where airports and office towers everywhere appear the same. Where are they going, these nomads of multiculturalism? Why did the spirit flee from here to settle in Schaumburg?
Images in stone or plastic cannot keep the values of a culture alive. These values must be embodied in living human beings. Yet, to live in a city that erases images of our past is like walking while asleep. Furthermore, when we replace our past with public images that are monstrous, how then can we encourage men not to become monsters? A neighborhood abandoned to barbarians is not redeemed by a skyline of towers pressed from steel and glass.
The ideals our ancestors lived by are forgotten in barren halls that circulate manufactured air. In Chicago, we learn neither history nor virtue from Dubuffet's or Picasso's sculptures. Where are the acanthus leaves? Where are the heroes, the eagles, or the patriotic gesture towards civic responsibility? When the symbols of our republic are no longer seen, then the Republic no longer exists.
After the storm, rain washes dust from the air. The eye looks up and follows a flock of sparrows flying from one pile of jutting girders to another. Across the prairie there is a flap of wings like the sound of rattles.
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