Should the Republic Stand - Somewhere Else?

Remember when they first announced Millennium Park, when it was going to be topping over the unsightly Metra tracks with a gracious new greenspace?  And how then Cindy Pritzker got involved, John Bryan came in to raise the bucks, and Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and Frank Gehry were brought in to make Millennium Park the most spectacular urban park of the new century?

Could we revive just a little bit of that spirit for the Statue of the Republic, a diminished replica of Daniel Chester French's sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition?  Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey reports it's in for a much-needed re-gilding, but why stop there?

Illustration courtesy World's Fair Chicago 1893

Originally, The Republic, 65-feet-tall, dominated the vista from the 1893 Fair's domed Administration Building across the Great Basic to an eastern terminus with a casino, harbor and pier extending 2,500 feet into Lake Michigan.  It was meant to symbolize national unity.  Remember that?

Like almost the entire rest of the Fair, the colossus was never built to last, constructed of plaster staff sprayed over a metal skeleton.  After the Fair's closing, The Republic stood watch over an increasingly bleak landscape as a series of fires destroyed its massive buildings.  The grand statue was allowed to decay, becoming stained, its gilding stolen and losing an arm, until in 1896 the South Park board secretly ordered one of their engineers to burn it down at break of day.

Illustration courtesy World's Fair Chicago 1893

Over two decades later, in 1915, the corporation that ran the Fair still had leftover funds in the bank and, closing out the books, $48,000 of that was donated to the B.F. Ferguson Fund, created to promote public sculpture in the city.  It was the fund's second commission, after Lorado Taft's The Fountain of the Great Lakes, which still stands in the Art Institute's south garden.

Funded by that bequest, a bronze replica of The Republic - at 24 feet, downsized to a third of the original's height - was cast from a surviving plaster maquette.  The pedestal was designed by architect Henry Bacon.  It was dedicated May 11, 1918, the 25th anniversary of the opening of the 1893 Fair.  Unlike the original, it was fully gilded, although time and wear since the last restoration in 1992 has made it look like it's developed a serious skin condition.

It's where it is because it was placed at the site of the 1893 Fair's Administration Building, but all vestiges of the significance of that location have long since been effaced.  Today, The Republic is marooned between a golf course and a marina, in an isolated part of Jackson Park that's essentially a traffic circle, cars rushing past on Hayes Drive, and visible only in a small, immediate vicinity.  With the Obama Presidential Center opening this summer, that's no longer good enough.

An argument can be made that it's pretty cool just to unexpectedly stumble upon The Republic on a walk through the park, but in both size and artistry, it's meant to be a marker, not an oversight.  It should be moved.

Where?  Where it's no longer half-hidden, but allowed to terminate the vista from the south of the east lagoon, along Wooded Island and the Osaka Garden, to the soon-to-be-re-opened south entrance of the Museum of Science and Industry, which, although substantially rebuilt, still has much of its original grandeur from 1893.  Such a relocation would emulate the way the original Republic anchored one end of the 1893 Fair's Grand Basin.  It could be placed on land, or on a small island constructed for the purpose in the lagoon itself.

Ideally, The Republic would be re-cast to its original height, but Chicago has apparently grown too small for such ambition.  We can't even fix the nearby, historic Clarence Darrow bridge, which has been allowed to sit closed and rotting since 2012, while empty promises of something soon being done go unfulfilled year after year.

Clarence Darrow Bridge, Burnham & Root, 1880

According to Lee Bey, the re-gilding has a price tag of a cool million.  Anything more ambitious may sound unattainable, until you consider Science and Industry secured a $10 million grant from the Driehaus Foundation to fund the re-opening of the south entrance facing Columbia Basin.  And would it be rude to mention the Obama Presidential Center is coming in around $850 million?

A repaired and re-opened Darrow Bridge and a recast, re-gilded, relocated Republic would complete the current renewal of Jackson Park.  Surely, somewhere, we still have enough civic pride left for that?

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Holiday Excursion: Architecture Seen and Inhabited at Museum of Science and Industry and its anniversary show, 80 at 80, ripe for Dali-ance

A couple of weeks ago we are out at the Museum of Science Industry, whose great dome rises in the Hyde Park skyline alongside the towers of the University of Chicago.  It's the last great structure surviving from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, designed by Charles Atwood for Daniel Burnham in the classical revival style , complete with Erechtheion caryatids . . .

. . . that Louis Sullivan bitterly predicted would set back the course of American architecture half a century.  The summer after the exposition's closing, a great fire swept through the site and destroyed most of the buildings, but unlike those structures, whose timeless elegance came not from stone but sprayed concrete, Atwood's palace was built of sterner stuff, including a brick substructure to protect the priceless art treasures that it had displayed.

The building became the temporary home for the Field Museum of Natural History, but after the Field moved to its own home in 1920,  Atwood's structure was left to rot, until Sears Executive Julius Rosenwald spearheaded the effort to turn it into the Museum of Science of Industry.

On June 19th, the MSI celebrated the 80th anniversary of its opening with a birthday party and opening of a new exhibit, 80 at 80, that reaches into the storerooms to give a timeline of mothballed items, many once quite popular, another moment in the sun.  The newest item of the 80, a Google Glass, was modeled by MSI President David Mosena before being put the display.

The party included the Jesse White Tumblers, a stroboscopic cake, and a big finale that included a rapid-fire sequence of science experiments . . .

. . . of which an unexpected highlight was an errant spark burning a nearby 18-foot-high plasticine giraffe to the ground.*

Model maker extraordinaire Adam Reed Tucker was in attendance . . .

. . .  with his LEGO version of the MSI . . .

Among the architecture-related items in 80 at 80 are a model for the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition . . .

. . . Edwin Howland  Blashfield's painting of the Palace of Fine arts (a gift from Daniel Burnham, Jr. . . .

. . . Latham Tyler Jensen's striking rendering for a 1959 Outboard Marine exhibit . . .

 . . . and, best of all,  a Salvador Dali lithograph of the museum that demonstrates how much the art of architecture rendering would be improved if there were only more large nudes . . .

Still in mothballs, unfortunately, is the museum's original elegant art deco entrance . . .

. . . and its great bronze doors with fourteen reliefs illustrating elements of science.

Fifteen years ago, visitors began to be redirected to the current subterranean shopping mall barn where they now line up in queues to to contemplate ticket options only slightly less complex than those for buying a car, and, with top prices of $35.00 for adults and $25.00 for kids, feeling nearly as expensive.

What endures at the MSI, even in our increasingly digitized age, is the sheer visceral rush of encountering tons of different cool stuff, often animated in increasingly sophisticated and instructive ways, filling to the brim the spacious, acoustically buzzy halls opening off the rounded atrium beneath the great dome.

And after all this, it was comforting to still find, just as I remembered from my childhood, the 3-D printers in the basement . . .

Legal Disclaimer:  portions of this article indicated by an ‘*’ may have been enhanced for dramatic effect.

Today at 4:00 at the Newberry: In Search of Wiliam Pretyman

image courtesy Glessner House Museum

William Pretyman was one of the key interior designers in Chicago at the end of the 19th century.  He was a great friend of John Wellborn Root, which was a factor in Pretyman being appointed "Director of Color" for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.  When it became clear to Pretyman that color - Root had planned the architecture of the Fair to be highly polychromatic - was not to have a big place in what was to become  the "White City", he resigned his post, in 1892, to be replaced by Frank D. Millet.  Today from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., in the Towner Fellows' Lounge at Newberry Library, architect John Waters will lead a colloquium, In Search of William Pretyman, also touching on the recently restored stencil by the artist at Glessner House.  Free and open to the public.

On the great stair of the Art Institute, fear and hope stream beneath your feet in color and light.

Words, words, words, words
I have no words
To describe the vanity of life,
The insane inanity of life . . .
           Martin's Laughing Song, from Leonard Bernstein's Candide

 click image for larger view

Postscript, March 8, 2017:  Over six years ago, when this exhibition took place, who could have imagined the kind of nightmare world  we today find ourselves in, with the kind of fanaticism, xenophobia and authoritarianism that had been kept in the shadows for so many decades now seemingly in full control of the United States government.   Perhaps a new Parliament of the World's Religions should be reconstituted in Chicago, for never has the message of Swami Vivekananda been more needed to be heard.

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[October 3, 2010] Through January 2 of next year, the sedate grand staircase of Chicago's Art Institute has been transformed.  The black backgrounds of its risers have burst worth with strips of lettering in day-glo colors.  The bright LEDs that subvert the abstract classicism have been compared by Robert Venturi  to temple hieroglyphics, "where the sparkle of pixels can parallel the sparkle of tesserae and LED's can become the mosaics of today [creating] an architecture that embraces human dimensions over those of abstract expression--that celebrates the beginning of an age of virtually universal literacy and embraces meaning over expression."

The installation at the Art Institute, Public Notice 3, is the work of the Mumbai-born artist Jitish Kallat, and it draws on a historical synchronicity.

In 1893, the Art Institute building, then home for the World Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition, hosted a 17-day Parliament of the World's Religions.

To east of the grand staircase, two large, 3,000-seat auditoriums, the Hall of Columbus and the Hall of Washington, had been erected where galleries now stand. On the Parliament's opening day, the platform of Columbus Hall was filled with dignitaries from "almost every national and every religion . . . The big oak doors of the Art Institute were besieged by visitors as early as 9 o'clock eager to secure seats in the auditorium or gallery . . .  when the doors were thrown open there was a wild scramble to gain access to the body of the hall."

Several times throughout the day's session, a young Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda, declined invitations from the podium to speak.  "My heart was fluttering and my tongue nearly dried up; I was so nervous, and could not venture to speak in the morning.  All were prepared and came with ready-made speeches.  I was a fool and had none . . . I who never spoke in public in my life."

Late in the afternoon, at the chairman's insistence, the Swami Vivekananda rose.  A rapt silence descended on the hall.  "Sisters and Brothers of America," he began, and the room erupted.  It would be several minutes before the applause and cheering subsided and the Swami could deliver his speech, which included these words:

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.  . . .  I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen . . .

On the exact same day, September 11, one hundred and eight years later, the hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers.  Over the intervening century, the Swami's fervent hopes have been confounded by a unyielding parade of what Voltaire called "the heroic butchery."  Christians murdering Jews, Muslims Hindu's, Hindu's Muslims, in variation and explication across geographies, religions, and sects, all in the name of the one true God. 

So back at the Art Institute, the colorful light show winding cheerfully through that stately, self-satisfied stair is actually the full text of Swami Vivekananda's brief address.  And the significance of the colors?  Jitish Kallat explains:

Now his speech is illuminated, conceptually and actually, in the threat coding system of the United States Department of Homeland Security. I find it interesting how the advisory system co-opts five colours from a visual artist’s toolbox into the rhetoric of terror, by framing them as devices to meter and broadcast threat (much like its predecessors, the British BIKINI alert state and the French vigipirate). Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo.