A daily blog on architecture in Chicago, and other topics cultural, political and mineral.
Click on the COMMENTS link under each post to join the discussion.
It starts out Monday, April 1st with Juhani Pallasmaa at IIT (this is a change of the original playdate), and Jeff Day of Min | Day at the UIC School of Architecture.
Want More? Architects and Designers: Mischa Leiner, Bill Latoza on Walter Netsch, MVRDV's Winy Maas, Project Projects, Patricia Natke, Paul Stoller of Atelier Ten . . .
Academics, Curators and Activists: Michael Webb, Hashim Sarkis, Mark Linder, Alison Fisher, David Van Zanten, John Norquist . . . Places and Procedures: Kind Abdullah Financial District, Revitalizing the Chicago River, The Plant, The Chicago Infrastructure Trust, Pilsen, Chicago's New Eastside, Hairpin Lofts, The Architectural Rise of San Francisco, Unraveling Gridlock, SEAOI's 10th Annual Midwest Bridge Symposium, Working Together Day, Masonry Design and Construction for 2013 and Beyond, Working with a Green Architect, Community Tools for Affordable Housing . . .
New exhibitions:SynergiCity at CAF, Drawing the Future at the Block, Sharing Space and Test Fit at the Art Institute and Model Studies at the Graham . . .
Authors: Timothy Mennel on Jane Jacobs, Edward Dimendberg on Diller Scofidio, D. Bradford Hunt and Jon B. DeVries on Planning Chicago . . .
Preservation Chicago Spring 2013 Fundraiser . . .
And much, much more. I'm sure we'll be adding dates, but even now we've got over 50 great events. Want to know the who/what/when and where? Check out the April 2013 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.
If I told you that Amazon.com and Wal-Mart are mere retreads, you might be skeptical. Yet over a century ago, just one company perfected the underlying ideas that each of these corporations have leveraged to unprecedented power. That company was Sears, Roebuck. Looking at the hapless wreck that is today's Sears after having been “kidnapped by K-Mart” in a 2004 merger, it is easy to forget that, for the better part of the 20th century, it was among the world's most admired and emulated companies.
And if you're up to a little archeology, you can reconstruct for yourself the empire of Sears through the mortal remains of its architecture, in a collection of historic buildings in North Lawndale. The collective memory they contain underscores the fallacy of breaking of modern history into various ‘ages’ - the industrial age, the post industrial, the age of capital, the age of data, etc. In point of fact, stretching back to the moment when mechanical manufacturing first began to displace human labor, we remain within the epic sweep of a single continuous movement: the Age of the Supply Chain.
The Age of the Supply Chain has four basic pillars: automation, standardization, consolidation and, lastly, innovation, in support of the first three. The effects on human beings is variable - they can be liberating or enslaving, degrading or ennobling - but the underlying dynamic is indomitable: producing ever more goods and services with an ever decreasing component of human labor.
The massive complex Sears built around Homan and Arthington in the first decade of the 20th
Century was an explosive punctuation point in the timeline of the Age of the Supply Chain. Its sheer scale and volcanic energy was as destructive and transformative as a meteor reshaping a terrain as it slams into the earth. Today, that once decisive moment is long dispersed, implied by the void where the massive two-block long Merchandise Building once stood, its small, tall tower, still standing in surreal isolation, looking almost like a toy. Some surviving buildings have been repurposed. Others, abandoned and rotting, are like deposed monarchs who have lost their kingdom and now walk the streets seeking alms.
A Brief History of Sears
Railroads - and the way they could
condense time and distance - were the life force of the rise of the Era of the Supply Chain, and they ran deep in the DNA of Sears. Richard
Warren Sears was a stationmaster for the Minneapolis and St. Louis
Railroad. A commodities trader on the side, he came across a shipment
of watches that had been refused by the recipient. He bought the lot at
deep discount, and resold it for a handsome profit, sending samples to
the other station agents down the road and enlisting them as his agents. Within six months, his new
venture had netted him $5,000.
Sears moved to Minneapolis, hired watchmaker Alvah Curtis Roebuck and
founded what would become Sears, Roebuck and Company. After sell-offs,
failures and restarts, Sears hired a young Julius Rosenwald, who
had been introduced to him by a Rosenwald brother-in-law who had made a
killing after securing the exclusive soft drink franchise at the 1893 World's
Columbia Exposition. If Sears and Roebuck were Wozniak and Wayne,
Rosenwald was the company's Steve Jobs, the visionary who would revolutionize mail order. And after that, the iPhone to Rosenwald's iPod, a Robert E Wood, who came to Sears from Montgomery Wards after he became restless with the older company's stagnation, would take Sears towards still one more revolution, this time in retail.
former Sears Warehouse on Fulton Street
By
1895, sales had doubled to $745,000, and the companies 80 employees
worked in four different buildings around Fulton and Desplaines.
Sears did the marketing, Rosenwald, strategy and reforming the company's chaotic administration. Inspired by the mail order business A. Montgomery Ward had
created, he expanded the Sears catalog. It took until 1900 for Sears to overtake Wards in sales - over $10,000,000, By 1901, there were 2,500 employees, and by 1904, it was clear Sears had outgrown its Fulton Market location. Express companies handling shipments threatened to cut the company off, as the ever-increasing stream of wagons were now jamming the streets to the point of paralysis.
The New City Rises
In 1904, Rosenwald
acquired a huge, 41.6 acre tract of land, 537 feet wide and a
half-mile long, five miles west of the Loop, in North Lawndale, described
as “one of the best residence districts of our city.” Rosenwald
enlisted the architectural firm of Nimmons and Fellows, which had
designed his own home on south Ellis, to create a massive complex that
would cost $5 million and house over 9,500 employees. E.C. and R.N.
Shankland were the structural engineers, Thompson-Starrett of New York the contractors.
The site was nestled deeply within Chicago's intricate matrix of rails. For commuters, the Garfield Park branch
of the West Side Elevated ran in an alley a block to the north,
between Harrison and Flournoy, with stations both at Kedzie to the
east, and St. Louis to the west. Within the Sears site, St Louis was
eliminated as a street to provide an uninterrupted sweep for the
sprawling new complex. For freight, the Baltimore and Ohio's Altenheim
subdivision ran at the southern end of the site, connecting the old
Grand Central Depot downtown to the Belt Line Railroad at Chicago's
western edge and beyond, giving Sears access to trains from 30 different
railroads.
On January 24, 1905, construction began,
employing 7,000 workers and artisans. Each day, 60 freight car loads of
materials were delivered to the site - 30 of brick, 20 of lumber, and
10 of sand, cement, crushed stone and other material. 23 million bricks
were used. On one single day, 353,000 bricks were laid.
Sears Power House under construction
The massive Merchandise Building was of timber-frame construction, and the order for yellow pine timber - so slow to combust that it was said to be given a higher rating from insurance underwriters than even concrete - was reportedly the
largest in history. Over 13 million board feet would go
into the buildings, exhausting the capacities of 75 mills in four
different states. Four million board feet were used just for the forms for the 1563 belled caisson foundations drilled down
40 to 90 feet deep. There were nearly 3 million board feet of maple flooring. Up to 7 million board feet were stored on the site at a
given time.
The Tower itself, 50-foot square and 240 feet high, was of steel construction, and completely fireproof, as on the floor just below the spacious, two-level observation floor at the top, were three massive tanks holding 200,000 gallons of water. That room is now empty, but you can still see the outline of the tanks impressed on the concrete floor. Other floors in the tower were taken up with testing laboratories for the company's products.
The
Merchandise Building was completed in October, and on January 15, 2005,
the entire complex was turned over to Sears. Within a week, over 200 wagons had completed the move from the company's previous Fulton Market home.
The
cost was $4,282,000. Factoring in equipment brought the price tag up to $5.6 million. The 366,234 square
feet of ground area was packed with nearly 2 million square feet of
floor space and a total enclosure of nearly 25 million cubic feet. The
Merchandise building was 1,100 feet long, built around a central open
court 230 by 80 feet. At the rear were two annex buildings, and between
them a large rail depot, 60 feet wide, designed to handle up to 200 cars a day brought
in and out of position by electric engines. There were two sets of
switches, one for incoming freight and one for outgoing.
The Supply Chain Explicated: Architectural Fulfillment
Department of Interior, Cut-a-way Axonometric of Merchandise Building
56 different departments were set up within the Merchandise Building, fire walls with double fire doors dividing the building into 12,000-square-foot bays, columns placed at 14-foot centers. The structure and its furnishings were engineered to make order fulfillment relentlessly efficient, a precise science. Two systems - one for bringing goods in, the other for shipping them out - intertwined in a way to insure the “incoming system never interrupts outgoing.” The processing of incoming goods began along the outer edge of the building and moved in, to the appropriate department in the warehouse, where they were stored according to their catalog number. The processing of outgoing orders, received via pneumatic tube from the Administration building, started from the center of the Merchandise Building and moved outward.
A series of
seven spiral chutes, eight feet in diameter, brought merchandise down from the higher
floors in
baskets, using centrifugal force to regulate the speed so that “even
glass wares will go down without breaking.” Items came down onto conveyor belts that ran around
all four sides of the internal court, to be sorted by clerks and placed on another conveyor belt headed to whichever of the three shipping rooms - for mail, for express, or for freight - was indicated on the routing ticket. There the items were placed in a basket marked by order number. The baskets were placed on long rows of shelves until everything required for a given order was collected, at which point it was sent down a slide to a packer, who quickly determined the size box was required, called out its number, and was handed the appropriate container. Empty boxes were brought in overhead, via another system of conveyors.
Orders ran as high as 40,000 a
day, each with one to twenty items. Smaller products were processed in the Merchandise
building, bulkier items and pre-packaged products such as groceries were
handled in the annexes. All order were shipped within 24 hours of receipt.
Across the street, the new power plant had a 6,000 horsepower capacity,
with three giant generators and a massive steam turbine. Subterranean
tunnels were the nervous system of the complex,
bringing both power and water, and tickets and orders via
the pneumatic tubes. Next door to the power plant was the steel-framed Administration Building, originally two stories, containing executive offices and clerical operations.
postcard image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
By 1920, after the structure had been expanded to five stories, fifty 16 to 17 year-old girls opened the up to 180,000 letters received each day. There were 500 typists, and operators at 12 addressograph machines were kept busy preparing mailing labels for 65 million catalogs.
The building had five separate restaurants, and their 100 workers could feed 8,400 employees in an hour and 20 minutes.
image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
To the west of the Administration Building was the Printing Building, of timber framed construction. At its peak, 23 rotary presses produced 40 tons of promotional material a day, including two million catalogs, each of which ran over 1,000 pages and weighed four pounds. The typesetting department, alone, employed 300 workers.
The complex had its own post office, hospital, and in-house medical
staff, a recreation room, a room circulating books from the Chicago Public Library, even its own fire station.
Image courtesy of The Chuckman Collection
Across the street, a 100-foot-long, Doric-styled Pergola fronted a
sunken garden, complete with a lake stocked with goldfish and three
fountains, “so that our employees may be attracted out of doors during
the noon recess, because a change of environment and attractive
surroundings send them back to work again greatly refreshed and
forgetful of the little annoyances of the morning.”
All the buildings were faced in dark red brick with trim supplied by the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company.
As architects Nimmons and Fellows wrote for Architectural Record . . .
Given the material at hand for construction and the structural features for decoration, the brick and terra architecture of Tuscany naturally suggested itself as appropriate . . . [and] suggested the addition of color for backgrounds to accent such decoration. Consequently, the lunettes and frieze of the Merchandise Tower are of glazed blue terra cotta; also the backgrounds of the book marks which decorate the Printing Building and also discs of the Power House are of white and blue glazed terra cotta.
The frieze of the Administration Building is developed but not copied from the scheme of marble inlay of San Miniato at Florence. Decorated moldings were avoided on account on expanse and the ornamentation was so concentrated as to obtain the greatest value possible. The sills and lintels were necessarily of terra cotta, used as fireproof covering for the steel, and these are made the chief features in the decoration; consequently, the horizontal lines are emphasized.
The only places where an elaborate treatment in composition was permitted were the top of the tower and its entrance and the main entrances and vestibule of the Administration Building. When one considers that over seventy-five hundred employees pass through these entrances many times each day, the money spent to make them attractive is well invested.
A quarter-century before, in 1881, George Pullman had built a company town just south of Chicago so large and so impressive that it became a global tourist attraction, and a popular side trip for visitors to the 1893 World's
Columbian Exposition. Now, Sears put it into the shadows. “I believe,”
remarked one observer, “you could bundle the entire Pullman plant,
including not only the factories but the workingmen's houses, the town
market and the theater, into the single Merchandise Building of Sears,
Roebuck and Company and still not fill it.”
image courtesy of The Chuckman Collection
Reaching out to the consumers in small towns and rural areas, Sears offered an alternative that would wipe out the traditional general store with wider selection and often dramatically cheaper prices. The creation of the parcel post system in 1913 further decreased Sears' cost of shipping and made its products affordable to additional consumers. By 1914, sales passed $100 million; by 1919, $234 million, with profits of $18 million.
The Second Revolution: The World's Greatest Retailer
On February 2, 1925, under the direction of Robert E. Wood, Sears opened its first retail store in the Merchandise Building, setting the stage for Sears becoming the Wal-Mart of its day. A second store - which survives to this day - opened in 1928 at Lawrence and Winchester, followed by a growing list of locations in Chicago and beyond. The first year, less than 5% of sales came from retail; by 1931, retail represented half of the company's sales. In 1932, Sears spent a million dollars to make William LeBaron Jenney's landmark 1891 Second Leiter Building its State Street flagship.
More decisively than their downtown locations, which the company shared with old-line department stores conceived back in the time of the horse-and-buggy, Sears new locations grabbed hold of the emerging economy of the car, opening stores in outlying areas with easy access to automobiles. In 1928, Sears began selling tires and auto accessories under a new brand, Allstate, which, three years later, started on the path to becoming one of the country's largest insurers. Over time, Sears became not just a retailer, but a manufacturer of many of the products they sold, creating major brands such as Kenmore applicances, Craftsmen tools, Coldspot refrigerators, which the company brought in noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy to style.
On April 12, 1924, Sears grabbed hold of a revolutionary new marketing medium - radio - through the creation of station WLS (‘World's Largest Store’), broadcasting from the top of the Homan Street tower. A week later, it aired the first edition of National Barn Dance, a country music program that soon became phenomenally popular, most particularly with the rural listeners who were key Sears customers.
Sears' low prices allowed the company to thrive even during the Great Depression. By 1937, sales
had topped half a billion dollars. In 1942, Sears opened a store in Havana, and put itself on the road to becoming a retail powerhouse, not just in the U.S., but throughout the America's. By 1947, sales topped $4 billion. $5.00 out of every $100 spent in the U.S. on general merchandise wound up in Sears cash registers.
Sears created its own real estate division, Homart Development, which was a key player in the boom in shopping malls in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, guaranteeing the store a place next to the most prestigious department stores in every city. In 1964, Sears surpassed A&P grocery stores to become, like Wal-Mart today, the world's largest retailer. In 1973, it had 837 retail stores, 12 catalog plants, and sales over $11 billion. It proclaimed its greatness by building the world's tallest building, Sears Tower, even as it was all about to unravel.
Decline and Fall, Sears and North Lawndale
It had been a long time coming. In the decades after the 1906 completion of the new Sears complex, population in North Lawndale more than doubled, becoming, especially, a center of life for Russian Jews, with the Jewish population hitting 65,000 by 1946. Then the neighborhood was hit - hard - by the white flight of the 1950's. By 1960, 91% of the residents were Afro-American. As population boomed, the housing stock came under increasing pressure. Density increased, the population grew poorer, but no new housing was constructed, and the existing stock was often allowed to decay. Martin Luther King Jr. came to live in North Lawndale for a time in 1966 to bring attention to the substandard conditions.
And then, in 1968 after King's assassination, riots broke out, and fires were set throughout the neighborhood, destroying residences and much of the white-owned commercial district on Roosevelt. Owners could no longer get insurance, and North Lawndale went into a calamitous free-fall. The very next year, Sears announced it would build a sparkling new skyscrapers that would allow it to flee the neighborhood, leaving behind in North Lawndale a wasteland that it now made even more desperate.
Even as it moved into its shiny headquarters, Sears was a company beginning to lose its way. It let new mass merchandisers like Target, K-Mart and, ultimately and most fatally, Wal-Mart catch it unawares. Instead of the innovation and vision of Sears, Rosenwald and Wood, the company suffered through holding-ground managements whose brightest ideas seemed to short-sighted cost-cutting and shaking down governments for tax breaks and financial rebates. Growth stalled, sales slumped.
In 1987, operations at the Merchandise Building ceased. A once great company made the news only for its latest failures. Merged in 1993 with a K-Mart one analyst recently called “terminally challenged”, Sears survives less as a retailer than as a real estate play. In 1990's, it closed out its holdings in North Lawndale. In 1994, it sold off the original Sears Tower, and the Merchandise Building was demolished. Around the same time, another massive Sears complex - a 1920 facility in Philadelphia clearly modeled after Chicago, right down to the central clock tower - was wired with 15,000 pounds of explosives and within mere seconds 25,000,000 cubic feet of construction was reduced to rubble.
In a bit of poetic justice, its former North Lawndale site is actually faring a good bit better than Sears, itself, right now. In 1989, developer Charles Shaw began work with new mayor Richard M. Daley to develop a plan to reinvigorate the neighborhood, rebranding it as ‘Homan Square’. The five-stage plan, calling for the construction of 600 new housing units and redevelopment of the old Sears structures, met with fierce opposition from distrustful community residents fearing being forced out by gentrification.
Shaw died in 2006, and many of the more ambitious aspects of his plan, including converting the 1949 Allstate Building into 238 condos, never got off the ground. Still, there's clearly a new vitality in North Lawndale today.
Streets of old brick and greystone houses look fresh and enduring. The Homan Square Community center opened in 2001. On a former parking lot behind the Pergola, new homes were constructed. In all, over 200 housing units have been added to the community. In 2007, a new school, Holy Family Lutheran, was constructed on the cleared site west of the old tower, and in 2009, Henry Ford Academy opened in the old Power House building.
The Afterlife: Road's end along The Age of the Supply Chain
For most corporations, it's one great idea and out. Sears had two, and could have had more, if their institutional memory had endured rather than simply been discarded. Sears stop publishing their "big book" catalog in 1993. The next year, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com. As Sears started with watches, Bezos started with books, both of them on their way to phenomenal success through a general merchandise catalog, differing only in the way they reached their customers. If an entrepreneurial character had survived at Sears, it might have seen that the answer was moving their catalog - and their amazing fulfillment system - to the internet. Instead of creating Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos might have followed Sears, Rosenwald and Wood in the line of great Sears Roebuck presidents, and Chicago would have been at the center of it, rather than shuffled off to the sidelines. The great Merchandise Building, already paid for, would have found new life as a booming, integral piece in the new hyper-efficient supply chain. That's not the way the world works, of course, but it's still a highly pleasurable - and informative - alternative reality to contemplate.
Instead, when you walk down Arthington today, you feel the unease of the gravesite. The monuments survive; the inhabitation does not. The unease is felt not only through the absence of people but, appropriately for a company that built its success on the automobile, the absence of cars. Sprawling surface lots and multi-story garages, all completely empty.
Large structures - the Allstate, the Printing Building - abandoned. The restored buildings are beautiful but eerily silent. You stand in the lovely Pergola, looking across the garden to the Administration Building, and you have a sense of a once great purpose, now vanished except for the structures it excreted
You stand before the great Tower, now so isolated as to appear stripped naked, and you try to imagine the life it once sustained, the streams of hopeful young women passing through its doors.
image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
You walk just to the south of the Merchandise Building, mingling with the spectators ringing the huge athletic field where a football game is taking place.
You see them watching, laughing, flirting. Some of the men, and especially one young woman seems to see you, seems to be trying to make sense of the strange jeans and sweatshirt you're wearing so different from their own more modest and quaintly formal attire. You can hear but barely the sound of the game and the chatter of the spectators, just beneath the threshhold of comprehension, a butterfly-wings aural blur.
When you walk amidst the surviving buildings on the silent streets, you want to see the ghosts, the ghosts of those who spent so much of their lives here, who gave these buildings meaning. You want them to fill the empty sidewalks once again so you can walk in their midst, to fill in the blanks the now disused buildings have left behind, to experience the vitality and lifeforce that created these coral reefs of the urban experience.
The ghosts linger. They clearly have something to say to us, something
important, not for them, but for us. They try to speak to us, but their words, like their presence, are as elusive as a mirage. In the unnatural silence, we struggle to
hear what they have to say.
Note: This article draws on many sources, but here are three of the most important:
Historic American Buildings Survey
is an absolutely invaluable account on the Sears complex, its origins
and history, as well as its condition in 1994, the year the report was
issued, just before the Merchandise Building was demolished. The report
includes hundreds of historic and current photographs and drawings.
The 1906 Architectural Record also includes two separate accounts of the complex. Designing a Great Mercantile Plant, June, 1906, beginning on page 403, Nimmons and Fellows identified as the authors, with numerous photographs.
I guess it's never to late to add another event to the March calendar.
We received word today that Pritzker-Prize winning architect Wang Shu, who will be lecturing at the Art Institute this evening, will also participate in a panel discussion that will take place tomorrow, March 29th, in the upper Core at Crown Hall, IIT, 3360 South State. The event is free and open to the public.
In a related note, the lecture at IIT by Juhani Pallasmaa, Minding Design:Neuroscience, Design Education, and the Imagination, has been moved up a day, and will now take place Monday, April 1st, 6:00 p.m. at the McCormick Tribune Campus Center, 3201 South State. We're working on the April calendar and hope to have it up soon. (Seriously - no April fooling.)
What started as a simple post on the former Allstate building on Chicago's west side has turned into a full-up consideration of one of the most compelling architectural cities in the city. This is the first of two parts . . .
It's a place where you can read in architecture the entire arc of the
20th century, the former Sears Roebuck complex on Chicago's West side.
It's the story of how an architectural juggernaut arose out the kind of
ruthless innovation that builds cities, of its rise to dominance,
decline, and fall, and of the unsteady phoenix that now struggles,
outcome still uncertain, to rise out of abandoned district time had
passed by.
photograph: Preservation Chicago
Perhaps the best place start is today, at
the 1949 Allstate Headquaters Building. Located just south of the Eisenhower at 3245 West Arthington, it was the last major structure to be constructed
at the complex, and nows stands empty and decaying. A few weeks ago,
Preservation Chicago named it one of its 2013 Chicago Seven list of ‘most
endangered buildings’.
Everyone remembers that the
Prudential Building was first skyscraper erected in Chicago after the
Great Depression. That was in 1955, but the first multi-story building
constructed in Chicago after the beginning of World War II was actually
the ten-story Allstate headquarters, completed in 1949 to a design by
the firm of Carr and Wright.
Never heard of it? Don't
be surprised. Out of sight, out of mind, in a Sears complex that grew
out of the residential North Lawndale neighborhood. It's not a trophy
building like the Prudential, or Inland Steel, which followed downtown
in 1956, but even in its current, derelict state, it's a beauty. Not
steel and glass, but concrete and two-tones of brick, mediating
modernism with the classically-styled original buildings constructed at the Sears complex
nearly half a century before.
The brick and heavy
rectangular massing gives the Allstate a real bulk, while the continuous
strips of metal-framed double-hung windows impart a counterpoint of
lightness, the brick banding floating above bands of windows that wrap
around and dematerialize the corners, holding the entire design in a
kind of visual tension that's very powerful.
According
to Preservation Chicago, the building has been vacant for years. It's a good thing it's no longer controlled by Allstate, spun off by Sears as a separate company in 1995, because it would probably already be nothing more than a vacant lot. In 2012, Allstate announced plans to demolish a half-million square foot building on its South Barrington
campus. The year before, it demolished a 430,000 square foot building in Prospect Heights. Back on Arthington, a 2005 plan to convert the building into 238 condominiums went nowhere.
photograph: Preservation Chicago
Recently, Crain's Chicago Business reported that the Chicago Public Schools was looking
to sell off their current headquarters, the 1907 D.H. Burnham and
Company Edison Building, across from Mies' Federal Center. The
Allstate, close to downtown and both the Blue and Pink lines and
multiple bus routes, would be a great solution, with Rahm dipping into
his infrastructure trust for the rehab.
The Allstate
headquarters was the last major building constructed at the Sears
complex, a city within a city that helped build the City of the Century,
and define the American Century. Looking at today's Sears - both
complex and company - it's hard to imagine that in its time, it was both
Amazon and Wal-mart, and as dominant as either. The true origins of
Amazon are not Jeff Bezos, but Julius Rosenwald. Everything Amazon has
done, Sears did a century before, with far less sophisticated
technology, with an interface, not of a website, but of catalogues.
Some photos from Saturday's ceremony at the John B. Murphy Auditorium at which the 2013 Richard H. Driehaus Award at the University of Notre Dame was awarded to architect Thomas Beeby.
click images for larger view
Richard Driehaus
Demetri Porphyrios
Leon Krier
architectural historian David Watkin receives the 2013 Henry Hope Reed award from Dean of the Notre Dame School of Architecture Michael Lykoudis and Richard Driehaus
a new painting by Carl Laubin depicting work of Driehaus Prize Laureates
And speaking of classicism, here's a preview of what we're working on, a photograph of the original Sears Tower, as seen through the 1906 Pergola of the Sears complex at Homan and Arthington . . .
. . . the brick and terra cotta architecture of Tuscany naturally suggested
itself as appropriate with such restrained use of brick patterns and
terra cotta decoration as would be consistent. Furthermore, the use of
terra cotta decoration suggested the addition of color for backgrounds
to accent such decoration. Consequently, the lunettes and frieze of the
Merchandise Tower are of glazed blue terra cotta; also the backgrounds
of the book marks which decorate the Printing Building and the discs of
the Power House are of white and blue glazed terra cotta.
It's here: The April 2013 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.
