In early 2024 I have stayed a relatively longer time in Chicago since many months and years I have spent in the United states in the past: close to five years that I had been in New York in the second half of 1980’s and several months in late 90’s in California. In between there were several shorter visits to New York, Vermont and to Chicago. In all these years, my impression of the country and its people came and went in cycles of recollection and amnesia. Every time I come back I recognize that certain things and places do not change much, including details and routines that regulate everyday life. This is rather comforting for someone coming from Turkey where the pace (and in a sense, violence) of change (in the cities, streets, architecture, in countryside, and certainly in attitudes) is immense. My country is the site of continuous destruction and re-construction on a land with many thousands of years of history. The debris that this leaves behind is not only of anything that has historical value, but in a sense it is also of the remains of human lives and of the entire biosphere. I am not suggesting that everything stays the same in this part of the world in urban America, but that change comes gradually in the physical realm that people can accomodate with some memories intact.
One thing that changed gradually is the face (or the interface) of the corporate USA in the cities. What fascinated me as a young man coming fresh out of architectural school was the Manhattan skyline, first faintly visible in the distance when coming in from JFK airport, later imposed in all its might from Brooklyn. After almost forty years, I still remember the awe that I felt in this first encounter. As a student of photography in New York, I was attracted to its architecture, and I made most of the photographs and graduate work in downtown Manhattan. In fact, in a significant part, the history of the art of photography is closely intertwined with the history of urban architecture in America, roughly up until 1970s. And not so much with Chicago (except for Harry Callahan and possibly others) but with New York. Those photographers were my heroes. Meanwhile, for a few years, I remember spending time in Midtown Manhattan and Central Park over the weekends, possibly lured by the crowds of tourists and locals, and free access to MoMA, by then lacking its own glass tower. It took a while to understand that the variants of the international style skyscrapers, rather than being the interface through which you interact with some content, are opaque facades unless you are spending your working hours inside one. They form the décor for enthusiastic tourists and their selfies and for the urban shopping experience. Trump was already present. For now, these buldings represent other things rather than the power of the biggest corporations: offices, luxury residences and ‘retail space’, their names switching from Sears to Willis. The business of banking and finance is fluid enough to fit in any space, then and now. On the other hand, the ebb and flow of corporate presence in the cities were taking place even then as manufacturing moved overseas, culminating in the ‘campuses’ around Palo Alto and Cupertino and thereabouts which are infinitely more opaque in their inner workings. Today, in the time of distant working and precarious jobs, the true architectural representation of late capitalism are the interiors of Amazon fulfillment centers out there somewhere, and the large google sign on the lawn in Silicon Valley headquarters, a drive-thru selfie point and a backdrop for TV news on tech companies.
As in evolutionary biology, the (first) Chicago School of Architecture represents the link in between Paris, ‘The Capital of Nineteenth Century’ and Mies van der Rohe of Illinois Institute of Technology, as form followed function. More than a case of adaptation, this presented a kind of mutation, later to shape American cities like nowhere else in the world. From the architecture education in Ankara, what got stuck to my mind were black and white photographs (lecture slides reproduced from books) of Chicago buildings, very neatly photographed by professionals using view cameras, large format, perspective correction and all. As a chapter in architecture history it must have lasted several weeks articulated by very knowledgeable professors. And the names also stuck: Le Baron Jenney, Burnham and Root, Adler and Sullivan, and young Frank Lloyd Wright, together with buildings, like Carson Pirie Scott, Reliance, Marshall Field and Co., Marquette, Robie House and others. Other bits of this brief academic survey that remained with me involves legendary innovations in building technology that later enabled the skyscrapers, which co-existed with the daring use of older techniques: that the tallest building in masonry (Monadnock) had walls thicker than 1.5 meters on the ground floor, tapering off towards the top floors. For us in the early 1980’s, the latest chapter in history of architecture in lecture form ended with examples as I selectively remember now: Seagram Building in New York City, late Corbusier and Louis Kahn, Sears Tower, Robert Venturi’s house for his mother, and the last, AT&T building in Manhattan which represented a transition into something new that fortunately lasted only a decade or so. It took a relatively short time for the pastiche employed by Post Modernism in architecture to fade into oblivion, leaving few (and mostly regrettable) traces in American cities, including in Chicago as I realize now. The marriage of the high rise glass facade and the pseudo-historical form in 1980s and 90s was a disaster. This does not mean that the examples from the last twenty or so years of steel, concrete and glass skyscrapers are all better. The computer generated (and enabled) design, convoluted forms, deviations on the plumb line and individually produced facade and structural elements do not always yield better results. And rather than in the American cities, the worst examples of this escape from the boredom of the glass box are to be found in the Gulf states and in fact in Istanbul. When the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire meets the floating global capital to be parked in real estate, another disaster strikes. Meanwhile, Trump’s name also glorifies Istanbul’s skyline, this time not with one but two leaning towers, the siamese twins.
I had briefly worked as an architect-draftsman in New York and since 1990 had very limited contact with the profession, except occasional reviews of student work and lecturing on the very basics of art history. As an enthusiast, I try to follow what is new in debates on architectural practice. This opens a broader view that surpass matters of form, aesthetics and the star architect, and brings issues that are increasingly more recognized (in limited circles) which surface in examples of affordable housing, in the examples with the use of local materials and technology in the developing world, and in the examples that aim at a minimum carbon footprint both in construction and in use. Occasionally, these examples are circulated in architectural magazines and mainstream media, which appear a little like a lip service on major problems including inequality and the climate catastrophe. And today, they are also largely outside of the economy and the speculative value of land in the cities. Thus, one can think of the practice of architecture in the city to be largely knitted into the requirements of big money and wealthy clients, and the architects to be always suspect to selling out and comfortably residing together with the moneyed class when possible. Indeed, this negative view and broad generalization does injustice to many practicing architects and it possibly applies to every other profession that requires a ‘professional degree’ from an institute of higher education. But for me, one of the reasons that lures a young person into architectural school is the promise of a creative job with the possibilities of becoming a creative semi-free spirit, just short of being an artist. It took a while to understand that the architectural education is also specifically good in educating one’s ‘taste’, bringing in topics from the periphery to boost it. Business can go along with this. That is why the architect drop-outs, for example in Turkey, make good galerists, restaurateurs with taste, impresarios of cutting edge night clubs, and run fashion design stores. Some become artists and musicians.
So, as architecture is always context bound, I am trying to find my way in the South Loop in Chicago admiring the legendary buildings that I saw in slides. For now, I am hoping to be more informed in the historical context that made them possible. Should I think that more than one hundred years is enough to negate this chapter in the history of capitalism in America as part of the context? Maybe. The buildings are there on their own for a long time like individual characters, co-existing with later additions up to this time. Seemingly, new materials, steel skeletons and other the structural innovations in building design form one of the strongest component of the context. But for me the most revealing are the transformations that can be observed on the facades, from Gothic influences to other historical references in ornamentation and towards less and less ornamentation and finally to a whole new interpretation of proportions, windows and tectonics in architecture. Started by architects with École des Beaux-Arts education in nineteenth century, Chicago today presents the most concentrated lesson in the history of urban architecture of roughly 150 years, ready to reveal the evolution of structures and forms from one building to the next. I am still inspired.
January 2024
