Hanging Chads in Harry Weese's Punchcard Prison

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Time decomposes dreams.

It's been over 35 years since architect Harry Weese's triangular, 27th-story Metropolitan Correctional Center was completed, and it's hard to imagine Chicago's south Loop skyline without its distinctive presence.  Journalist Dan Weissmann has just taken another look at Chicago's Jailhouse Skyscraper for Roman Mars' 99% Invisible website, with this audio report of the structure then and now.

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One of the interview subjects is architect Jack Hartray, who was project manager on what was then called the Campbell Correctional Center.  "The mayor didn't want this building in the Loop," recalls Hartray, "so there was a lawsuit.  I think it took them about 12 minutes to get the thing kicked out of court.  It was impossible to find a judge who wasn't in favor of building the building."

Hartray has fond memories of the quality of the design, "Harry sort of viewed this from the standpoint of accommodations on sailboats.  The furniture was all built in, so you could really do pretty nice furniture . . . It's not a bad place to stay.  We were doing a hotel at the time, and this was better than the hotel."

The concrete tower functioned  less as a long term retention facility than as a holding pen for suspects going on trial at the nearby Federal Courthouse designed by Mies van der Rohe.  Since none of the residents were yet convicted, a way was sought to avoid the brutal nature of most jails.  According to Kathleen Murphy Skolnick, co-author with Robert Bruegmann - who's also interviewed in Weissmann's report -of the new book, The Architecture of Harry Weese,

Each 7 x 10 foot room contained a single platform bed with drawers for storage underneath, a desk, shelves, and a chair . . . Carpeting eliminated the need for acoustic treatment. . . The butcher-block furniture chosen for both the individual rooms and the common areas created a residential quality and was easy to clean and hard to destroy.  A bright red, white, and blue color scheme replaced the drab gray and sterile white so frequently found in the conventional correctional facilities.

The building's facades are animated by a series of slits, actually floor-to-ceiling windows, beveled to bring the the maximum light, but just five inches wide to come in below federal guidelines where bars would begin to be required.

 While Weissman was unable to gain entry to the interior of the building for his report, he did interview someone who visits it regularly, prison reformer Phil Carrigan, "Show me the hotel," he says, after hearing Hartray's remembrances.  Carrigan says today's detainees would be "aghast" at such rosy descriptions, given the facility's current condition. "MCC is not a spa", he says. "It's very drab, gunmetal gray."  Those carefully designed furnishings?  "They're gone.  The bunks are steel, two-tiered structures - no wood."  The floor-to-ceiling glass slits?  "The windows are generally frosted.  Doesn't allow for sunlight to come in. The place is old.  It's definitely undergone some changes.  None of them have been for beautification."

Weissman has come up with a great portrait of good intentions curdled by time.  Listen to it here.

Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice: Most Endangered?

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The last time we wrote about Bertrand Goldberg's brilliant Prentice Hospital, a security guard was trying to tell me I couldn't take pictures of it without getting prior permission from Northwestern Hospital, the building's current owner.  Northwestern has been silent about the structure's future, which is ominous, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks MIA.

Now there's an ongoing effort by Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, and other preservationists to save this irreplaceable modern masterpiece, including setting up a Save Prentice page on Facebook.

Today at 12:15 p.m. at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, Preservation Chicago Executive Director Jonathan Fine will be revealing this year's version of the organizations own Chicago 7, the Seven Most Threatened Places of 2011.  I'm betting Prentice should be near the top of the list, especially since Preservation Chicago's website has just posted this new video, including testimony from people like architectural historian Bob Bruegmann, architect Jack Hartray, writer Cheryl Kent, and the architect's son, Geoffrey Goldberg, doing an excellent job of explaining the building and it's centrality to Chicago's architectural legacy.

Revival Meeting at the Church of Weese

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Tuesday night, there was a bit of a revival meeting at the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist.  At the pulpit, the Right Rev. Bob Bruegmann, co-author of the superb new book, The Architecture of Harry Weese, discussing the life and work of the great architect, planner and iconoclast who died at 83 in 1998, designer of  the very auditorium in which the roughly 600 acolytes now happily congregated.

Bruegmann was introduced by Ben Weese, Harry's youngest brother, and a distinguished Chicago architect both in his long collaboration with Harry, and with his own firm.

The Architecture's co-author Kathleen Murphy Skolnick provided an overview of the Church, and the two authors signed copies of their books after the lecture.

Even if you knew the story, there was something bracing in again making the acquaintance of Weese's iconic buildings, his fervent crusades - from saving the Auditorium, to creating Printer's Row, one of the first beachheads in the back-to-the-city movement - and the vivid trajectory of a life epic, antic, tragic, impassioned and inspired, portrayed in a succession of striking images projected on the back wall of the handsome, modernist sanctuary that has no pews, only plush seating that would be the envy of a Broadway theatre.

The benediction came during the Q&A session after the lecture, when a member of the audience suggested that all the architects in attendance who had at one time or another worked for Harry Weese stand up.  It felt like half the audience rose.  And even if the photograph below would indicate the percentage was perhaps slightly less,  it still proved in moving fashion that the famous inscription  memorializing Christopher Wren holds true not only for buildings, but for the lives a person touches: Si monumentum requiris circumspice.

I've previously discussed The Stormy Life and Magical Architecture of Harry Weese here, and Weese's wonderful River Cottages here.  I bought my copy of the Bruegmann/Skolnick book at the Chicago Architecture Foundation's fine bookshop, whose website, inexplicably,  does not have it among the paltry eight titles listed.  If you need to order on-line, I'd recommend you get it from William Stout Architectural Books.  The Architecture of Harry Weese is an invaluable book that anyone who loves architecture will want to add to their library.

David Shah, Bruegmannx2, National Public Housing Museum lectures - more for the October calendar!

 And the hits just keep coming.  Just added to the October calendar of Chicago Architectural Events:

This coming Monday, October 11, trend forecaster/provocateur David Shah will kick off the School of the Art Institute/AIADO's Mitchell lecture series, with a talk on Design in a Time of Change, 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall.

On Wednesday the 6th (make your reservations by noon today), UIC's Robert Bruegmann will talk about The Rise and Fall of Public Housing: An International Perspective, followed by a tour of the site of the National Public Housing Museum, one of a series of five lecture/tours this month that will feature such people as Little Italy's Peter Pero,  great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells Michelle Duster and City Design Center's Robert Feldman.

On Tuesday, the 26th, Bruegmann is back at a Graham Foundation event held in Harry Weese's dramatic Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, talking about the new book he's co-authored with Kathleen Murphy Skolnick, The Architecture of Harry Weese.   This first monograph devoted to Weese's work has just been published.  I'm making my way through it now, and it's a worthy successor to Bruegmann's 1997 The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918.  Along with a recent profile of Weese by Robert Sharoff in Chicago Magazine, it's jump-starting what looks to be a renewed appreciation of one of Chicago's most creative architects.

There are over 60 great events still to come on the October calendar.  Check them all out here.

And speaking of great Chicago architects, while we don't usually list tours - there's just too many of them - I did want mention a one-time only tour that's part of Docomomo North American Tour Day for 2010, Architecture in the Round:  the life and work of Bertrand Goldberg, a bus tour co-sponsored with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, from which it departs at 12:30 p.m. this Saturday, October 9th. The tour takes in four of Goldberg's designs: Marina City, the Hillard Homes, River City, and the endangered Prentice Hospital (just don't try to take pictures of it.) $38 per person; $33 seniors/students; $33 CAF members, 3.0 AIA Continuing Education Credits. Registration and information on-line.

The stormy life and magical architecture of Harry Weese

The July issue of Chicago Magazine includes a splendid article by Robert Sharoff, On the Life and Work of Chicago Architect Harry Weese,  chronicling the spectacular career and tragic final years of one of the city's most essential designers.  Weese's personality comes off as part Kahn, part Wright, part Le Corbu, with a bit of Richard Corey thrown in for good message.  It's a great read.  (And the July issue is well worth picking up, not just for the Sharoff, but for a survey of the city's best pizza, and Graham Meyer's list of the Chicago's 40 top contributions to the English language, which include pipe dream, yuppie, cafeteria and doo-wop.  Apparently, we have Saul Bellow to thank for ass wipe and yuck it up.  Who knew?)

Since his death twelve years ago, Weese has been in something of an

eclipse, an eclipse that now, thankfully,  appears be lifting.  One of the most exciting things in Sharoff's masterly piece is the discovery that a new monograph, The Architecture of Harry Weese, is to be published this September by W.W. Norton.  What makes the book
even more eagerly anticipated is that it's by UIC's Robert Bruegmann, the same author who's already given us one of the more

indispensable volumes on Chicago architecture, The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche  of Chicago, 1880-1918.

Weese was a giant in Chicago history whose contributions went beyond his buildings, to an impassioned activism that kept Inland Architect alive for years,  and that was instrumental in saving and restoring the irreplaceable Auditorium Theater at a time when Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was recommending demolishing it and building a replacement in the shell.  It was Harry Weese, looking down from an airplane at the abandoned hulk of the 21-story Transportation Building, who was inspired to partner with Larry Booth in 1981 to rehab that structure into 200+ housing units.  With the last decade's huge building boom inventing new life for neighborhoods and industrial directs all around the periphery of the Loop that had grown menancingly derelict, that kind of development now seems a commonplace.  But it was Weese's work in Printers Row that was the mother of them all.

Weese's architecture is also a source of underappreciated wonder. Weese was sui generis.  Looking at the body of his work, you'd be hard pressed to pigeon-hole him into any given school.  There's isn't a lock-jaw style stringing the buildings together.  The only constants were a sense of exploration and invention, and the essential fact that Harry Weese was a damn good architect  His superb buildings  have become anchor points carrying forward the evolution of Chicago's rich architectural fabric,  expressing the spirit of their time with an eloquence and grace that, even today, feels bracing and fresh.

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