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.

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.