When a Museum Devours its Own: The Mortal Threat to Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchange Trading Room

Eric Allix Rogers photo, courtesy Preservation Chicago

Here's the thing.  Great art museums are both amazing treasures and amoral empires.  Just ask countries like Benin, or Jewish families whose ancestor's art was looted by the Nazis.

To paraphrase George Carlin, erecting massive calling-card buildings lets museums find more space to display their ever-expanding stash of stuff.  Perhaps more importantly, they're a great way to rope in mega-donors, who gain far more lasting notoriety from having their names on a new wing than they ever could from even the most grandiloquent mausoleum.

Sometimes, however, unchecked ambition can tempt these esthetic empires into releasing their inner Mr. Hyde.  This week, Preservation Chicago announced Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchange Trading Room as one of their Seven Most Endangered places for 2026.  Only hours later, The Art Institute of Chicago confirmed to Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey that they were, indeed, contemplating ridding itself of the Trading Room to make way for their wet dream of another mega-wing.

Turns out Preservation Chicago learned of this possibility a year ago, and decided not to go public with the news on the chance the museum might, by way of extended contemplation, come to its senses and let a putrid idea die a natural death.  Instead, spurred by a $75 million gift last year to jump-start a new building program, it's apparently blossomed into an idée fixe.

Put simply, this is nuts.  Suicidally, reputation-killing nuts.

First, some background: Adler & Sullivan's 1894 Stock Exchange was one of the greatest structures of the First Chicago School.  Despite that, despite being fully rented, and being the subject of an intense preservation battle, it was cleared for demolition, destroyed in 1972, and replaced by 30 N. LaSalle, a glass tower whose only distinction was that, after opening, some of its windows started popping out and crashing to the ground.  Most recently, it was used to grow vegetables.

As the bulldozers begin to circle, renowned Chicago photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel became obsessed with the keeping the memory of the building's beauty alive by salvaging as much of its striking ornament as possible.  The Trading Room was a particular revelation.

"I think it is sort of like a holy room," Nickel is quoted as saving in Richard Cahan's moving biography, They All Fall Down. "The more you are in here the more you are in awe of it."

As recounted by Cahan, when the Trading Room's drop ceiling was removed, the original design was revealed for the first time since a Depression-era modernization . . .

... with the gold-leafed column capitals, leaded art glass, and carbon filiament lamps showing, the room looked like it had when it was first built.

"Why do we just save the pieces?  Why don't we save the whole room?" Nickel asked.

His young co-worker - and, on this project, his boss - John Vinci thought the idea was insane, but soon came around.  "I was sick and tired of saving bits and pieces."

image courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

The task was Herculean.  A double-height room, 100 by 75 feet, richly ornamented.  Intricate, beautiful wall stenciling.  Gold-leaf capitals.  Hundreds of art glass skylights.  The often damaged originals were carefully removed; the entire room meticulously notated.

For Richard Nickel, the Stock Exchange building brought him to the point of despair and exhaustion.  Then it killed him.  Early in 1972, a portion of the Trading Room collapsed and crushed him, ending his life even as it secured his legend.

The restoration and reinstallation at the Art Institute was an equally rigorous task.  As team leader John Vinci told Betty J. Blum for an oral history ...

we had to recreate everything below the drop ceiling including the baseboard and wainscot.

Recreating the stencils was especially arduous, "52 distinct hues in muted tones of gold, green and yellow."

John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

In another oral history with Blum, architect Walter Netsch, who designed the building that would house the Trading Room, recalled thinking, "Wouldn't it make a great trustees' room ... I received a very recriminatory comment from Mary Block saying, 'Walter do you realize there are so many colors in that room, what can I choose to wear?'" Eventually, said Netsch, "the Art Institute was happy because they have this money-making spot to rent and show off."

image courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

An early champion of the project, Art Institute curator David Hanks, called the original Trading Room "a work of art as important as any work at the art museum."  In 1977 the restored room was unveiled to great acclaim.  Then New Yotk Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger judged it "one of the finest interiors created before the turn of the century,"

John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

Back in 1894, the shimmering beauty of the Trading Room was probably visible for only a few months before unruly use and an endless procession of insensitive retrofits trashed it.  Restored and recreated, its splendor has endured, largely pristine, for just short of fifty years. The Art Institute raises the prospect of demolishing and reconstructing the Trading Room - AGAIN!!! - at some player-to-be-named-later somewhere else. Puh-leeze. The original project cost $1.5 million, back when that was real money.  Who is this Daddy Warbucks waiting in the wings to repeat the process at today's prices?

If the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is to rescue their recently compromised status as an entity promiscuously designating mediocre buildings like 30 North LaSalle just so connected developers can fleece taxpayers for massive tax breaks, they need to landmark the Trading Room, the Stock Exchange arch, and, possibly, McKinlock Court.  They need to be the antidote detoxing the Edward Hyde-like impulses two-facing the outwardly respectable alter ego of the civic jewel known as the Art Institute of Chicago. 

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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.