Wright's Roots are Showing: Garrick Theater colors seen for first time in over a century

click images for larger view

It's always difficult to imagine the architecture of the past as it actually appeared to people in its time.  When it comes to the Chicago of the late 19th century, that past, now mostly wiped from the cityscape, passes through the desaturating black-and-white photographic record.   Later photos may be more plentiful, but they usually depict buildings substantially altered from their original design.

We also see architecture of that time through the backward lenses of mid-century modernism, which emphasizes the simplicity of the commercial architecture of what has now been classified as the first Chicago School, seeing it as a precursor to the minimalist modernism of the International Style and the Second Chicago School of Mies van der Rohe and his followers.

But Louis Sullivan won't let you get away with it.  The beautiful simplicity of his Carson Pirie Scott store is anchored by an entrance floor marked by huge shop windows enveloped by the rich, foliate ornament for which Sullivan was famous.  His interiors, especially, were anything but austere, rich with stenciling, often designed with collaborators Louis J. Millet and George Healy, some of which, in a not uncontroversial restoration, was on display at a Crown Hall exhibition at few years back.

Adler and Sullivan's 1891 Schiller/Garrick Theater is a case in point.  Not only was the building itself tragically demolished in 1961, it's original interior design was painted over just seven years after the theater's opening.

As part of the new exhibition Wright's Roots, at the Expo 72 Gallery at 72 East Randolph through September 30th, 2012. curator and Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson endeavored to reveal, for the first time in over a century, the original color scheme of the ornament above the balcony, on the underside of the gallery.

Architectural finishes analyst Robert Furhoff was provided a rescued sample of the ornament, on which he burrowed down all the later paint jobs to document the original color palette.

Erin McNamara executed a sculptural repair of the original, made a mold of the repair and cast new pieces.  Anthony  Kartsonas  of Historic Surfaces LLC, who you see with Samuelson in the video below, then recreated the original paint pattern, using Furnoff's analysis.  And last Friday, Tim Samuelson was kind enough to let us be a witness as, for the first time in nearly 114 years, the original colors were again revealed.

The walls on which Wright's Roots is mounted are painted in the colors of that palette.

Of course, the Victorian palette can take some getting used to - one observer at Friday's unveiling commented it wasn't a palette they would want to paint any part of their home with - but to truly get a feeling of what the experience of an Adler and Sullivan building was like, it's invaluable to be able to imagine being immersed in the colors of the original design.

A substantial part of Wright's Roots traces the early, formative years when young Frank Lloyd Wright worked under the direction of Louis Sullivan, the man for whom he never lost his deep admiration and affection.    Wright's hand can still be seen in many of Adler and Sullivan's buildings of that period, and Samuelson  painstakingly lays out key examples.

The decorative panel you see above came from a Chicago apartment building built for Adolph and William Loeb in 1892.  It was rescued by Samuelson, hanging upside-down from the roof, just before the structure was demolished. The apartments were attributed,  rightly, to Adler and Sullivan, but as Samuelson relates . . .

When shown a photograph of the this long-forgotten project by architectural historian Richard Nickel in 1957, the ninety-year-old Frank grew momentarily quiet and then said, "So . . . you found THAT one, did you?"  After another pause, he said the design was his.

Another piece of ornament that didn't make it into Wright's Roots documents the different route Frank Lloyd Wright would take from that of his mentor Louis Sullivan.

In the above photo from the Chuckman Collection of the Garrick Theater under demolition, notice the large rectangular lozenges forming the outermost part of the arch.  (The flat, white interior surfaces of the rectangles were originally a nine-part stencil.)  Notice the border around each lozenge.  It was designed by young Frank Lloyd Wright, and this is what it looked like . . .

This is about as far from Sullivan's style of ornament as you can get.  Rigidly geometric, it has a vaguely Mayan feel that seems to anticipate Wright's later work.

There are a lot more fascinating stories in Wright's Roots, which we hope to write about in more detail (famous last words) soon.    Needless to say, it's a don't-miss event.  See it, and let your own imagination run free.

Chicago Streetscene: Red Louis

click image for larger view

Sullivan at the Block, Design Evanston Awards, Music's sway over Frank Lloyd Wright, Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference - still MORE great October events

As if 50+ events weren't enough, we've just added another half dozen to the October Calendar of Architectural Events.   Saturday, October 2nd, the Pleasant Home Foundation will offer up A Tour of Oak Parks Arts & Crafts Interiors in Oak Park.  On Wednesday the 6th, the Häfele America Chicago showroom will offer  Digital Solutions: Locker Management (yes, even getting shut up in your own locker by the school bully has now gone digital.)

On Thursday the 7th, musicologist David Patterson will talk about The Five Influences: Music and Mr. Wright's Architecture at Frank Lloyd Wrights Unity Temple in Oak Park.  On Thursday, the 14th, Design Evanston will offering up their 2010 Awards, while from Wednesday the 20th through Saturday 23rd, the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference will convene at Navy Pier with dozens of panels, workshops, seminars and tours.  Access to the exhibition hall is free with registration.

And on Thursday, October 28th, there will be another screening of Mark Richard Smith's new documentary, Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture at the Block Museum in Evanston, part of the Block's film series, The American Architect in Focus, that will continue into November.

The October Calendar is now at 60 great events and counting. Check them all out here.

An epic journey and the architectural book of the year: The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan

click images for larger view

"Can you see anything?"
"Yes . . . wonderful things"
Howard Carter to Lord Carnavon, as he glimpsed for the first time the wonders of Tutankhamen's tomb.

We tried to give architect Louis Sullivan a fitting celebration on the 150th anniversary of his birth, but  kind of made a botch of it. 2006 will be best remembered as the year we burned down three of his handful of surviving buildings.

What 2006 wasn't, 2010 is shaping up to be. First two exhibitions: a very fine one, Looking after Louis Sullivan, with photographs by John Szarkowski, Aaron Siskind and Richard Nickel along with architectural fragments and drawings by Sullivan, at the Art Institute, and a truly extraordinary show, Louis Sullivan's Idea, at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Now, we have a landmark publication, The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan. If you love Sullivan, or Chicago architecture, or just architecture, you will have to have this book.

The Complete Architecture draws on the vast holdings of The Richard Nickel Committee and Archive, which is the conservator of work of the great Chicago photographer. It began, in the early 1950's, as Nickel's student project, to photograph all of Adler & Sullivan's surviving work.  It soon became the obsession of Nickel's life.

Even after the student project concluded, Nickel pressed on, making his work and discoveries the subject of a master's thesis. In 1956, his teacher, Aaron Siskind, signed a contract with Horizon Press for a photographic monograph on Adler & Sullivan's work. Nickel was enlisted, to his surprise (dammti, he was a photographer, Jim, not a writer!) to compose the text.

How was I to write about Sullivan with only a meagerly art history and architecture training and no writing experience? As I think about it now, I feel perfectly justified in not having the text ready.

Nickel continued to write, create new photographs, and salvage ornament. He interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright, Dankmar Adler, and many others.  He enter a long correspondence about the book with publisher Ben Raeburn, but the writer's block continued, right up until Nickel's untimely death in 1972, crushed in the rubble of a great masterpiece, The Chicago Stock Exchange Building, as it was being wantonly demolished to construct a generic office tower of stupefying mediocrity.

There is far more to this story, which I hope, in my usual last words, to "be writing more about soon."  For now, I want to introduce you to this remarkable book, a labor of love nurtured, if you consult the acknowledgements pages, by a "who's who" of Chicago architecture, above all guiding light, architect John Vinci, a close Nickel friend who oversaw the reconstruction of the Stock Exchange's great trading room at the Art Institute, Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson, who continued Nickel's research, and Ward Miller  who, as Executive Director of the Richard Nickel Committee, has spent the last five years bringing this book to reality.

The Complete Architecture includes a catalogue raisonné of every project Adler and Sullivan worked on, both in partnership and apart - built, unbuilt, renovations and refutations of projects in which their participation was rumored.  John Vinci has contributed six especially valuable essays on the work, its influences, its history and techniques

Ultimately, however, as Nickel knew from the start, this is not a book about reading, but about seeing.  In it's nearly 500 pages, there are over 800 images.  Some have been seen before.  Most have not, and many are a revelation.  The book was produced by Meridian Printing, known for the high quality of their art books, including the photographs of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.  Ward Miller talks of spending many long, 8:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. days at the company's plant in East Greenwich, Connecticut, supervising the reproduction of all 815 images, to come as close as possible to the quality of silver gelatin prints.

In this book, all the well known masterpieces - the Stock Exchange, the Wainwright, the Auditorium the Schiller - are represented, often with striking new views: the mosaic flooring of the Schiller, an ad for its opening.  The true glory of The Complete Works, however, may be rescuing less prominent works from the footnotes: the Dooley Block in Salt Lake City, the John Borden house, the Mayer Warehouse, the Gage (Revell) building . . .

. . . in detail and in color.  That's another revelation, the color plates in the book.  Black and white photographs are, inevitably, an abstraction of the subject.  Buildings we've grown accustomed to only seeing in black and white gain an additional dimension in color.  Black and white entombs; color is  the breath of life.  You feel like you can reach in and touch time, experience it, not as a recalled memory, but as a visceral immersion in the moment.  The photograph of the interior of the destroyed K.A.M. Temple/Pilgrim Baptist Church, shown at the top of this post, is in itself worth the price of the book. (I should note, also, that all of the images you see here are my own crude scans and fall far short of the quality of the reproductions in the actual book.)

The detail is often stunning.  You not only see the John D. Allen & Sons department store in Clinton, Iowa through the usual exterior views, you see the selling floor and - in color - experience the true impact of the polychromatic ornament.  We see the National Farmer's Bank not just in the usual view that seems like as a neutron bomb has hit the area and taken out all the people, but with a full house of bankers and their customers breathing life and energy into the great interior.

Through multiple views, you can feel the draw of Sullivan's beloved Ocean Springs cottages, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.  A view of the interior is so completely and specifically detailed, you feel as if if you stared long enough, you'd see the great architect popping back into the room.

Let me be clear:  The Complete Architecture is a work that will quickly become an essential resource for every architectural scholar, an amazing compendium of data.  But as I thumbed through the pages, again and again, the impact transcended the mere documentary, into the realm of shear emotion. Here is a profoundly moving  portrait of a life - two lives - through trial, triumph and tragic decline.  Here is the whole picture of a man: the masterpieces, the experiments, the eccentricities, the huge, soaring forms, the intricate, obsessive detail.  For Louis Sullivan, this book, better than any biography,  is an epic journey of the progress of a soul, battling to assert itself in the tumultuous, indifferent stream of life, struggling to capture in a bottle, in the mask of architecture, the very essence of what it is to be alive.

The Complete Work of Adler & Sullivan is scheduled to be published later this month.  Amazingly, the price of the book is only $95.00.  The print run is limited, so I would order your copy now, which you can do directly by calling the Richard Nickel Committee at 773-528-1300.