Masterpieces of Chicago Architecture

By John Zukowsky and Martha Thorne Rizzoli and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004, 240 pp., $65. Chicagoans seem transfixed by their city’s role in American architecture. The reason is simple: from the late 19th century to the 1960s, native or adopted Chicago architects such as Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe produced some of America’s (and the world’s) notable buildings. But the Windy City has not ranked supreme for a long while, and this new collection of “masterpieces” inadvertently demonstrates how provincial Chicagoans can look when pretending that works by Helmut Jahn, John Burgee (with Philip Johnson), and Douglas Garofalo are on a par with those of history’s greats. John Zukowsky, the curator of architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, and Martha Thorne, associate curator, have assembled a lavish, large-format book containing 200 illustrations culled from the Institute’s capacious collection of 150,000 architectural drawings, models, photos, and building fragments. Here are the Rookery, a Burnham and Root office building organized around a magnificent light-filled court; the Trading Room of the Chicago Stock Exchange, displaying Sullivan’s incomparable talent for pattern and ornamentation; Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s bird’s-eye view of the 1909 Plan of Chicago; entries in the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower Competition; and many other stunning creations. Most of the old buildings look marvelous. Some buildings from the last 30 years are also impressive, such as Jahn’s United Airlines Terminal One at O’Hare International Airport, from 1987, and Ralph Johnson’s International Terminal at O’Hare, from 1993. Air transport hubs seem to be nearly the only building type that has stimulated consistently world-class design from Chicago architects in recent years. Although Jahn’s United Terminal is a joy for travelers — who would have thought that curved steel beams with circles cut out of them could generate such refreshing patterns in an airline concourse? — downtown buildings by Jahn range mainly from glitzy to silly. I had to check to make sure the illustration of Jahn’s Chicago and Northwestern Terminal Building, from 1987, wasn’t a caricature by that wicked New Yorker skewer of styling excesses, Bruce McCall. That Zukowsky and Thorne are willing to call Chicago and Northwestern “a glistening new landmark” only shows how boosterism trumps critical thinking in the Art Institute’s salute to the Second City. Although the book gives readers a sense of how the architectural winds have shifted in recent decades, many of the buildings shown from the past 30 years are in no sense masterpieces. The scholarship is also sloppy. A 1955 restaurant in suburban Des Plaines is not the “first McDonald’s,” as the authors claim. Nor were the architecture, parabolic arches, and signage of McDonald’s “first developed in Chicago’s suburbs.” All of those, and the chain itself, originated in southern California, as many books and magazine articles have made clear in the years since Ray Kroc. So skim Masterpieces mostly to get a sense of what some of the nation’s best designers were doing between the 1880s and the 1930s and only intermittently after that. Few cities have such an illustrious inheritance.