PEOPLES GAS. Light Fixtures and Lions.

I'm not quite sure how Peirce Anderson was able to incorporate state-of-the-art electrical fixtures in a vaguely French Beaux-Arts Office Building that housed the largest public utility company in the country, and still evoke the "Glory of Rome."
.



.

But he did. This while Louis Sullivan designed a local bank in Owatanna. And Frank Lloyd Wright ran off to Europe (in hopes of avoiding scandal) with Mamah Borthwick.

LaSALLE STREET. and Jackson Boulevard

Today, on the public sidewalk, across the street from the Rookery, a security guard asked me why I was so interested in "that" building. The light was playing delicately on the West facade. I was following it with my telephoto.

Not immediately realizing I was being scrutinized I told him I was comparing the proportions of John Root's street level colonnade to the columns and bay windows of Peirce Anderson's Peoples Gas Building on Michigan Avenue for a future blog post. Both are Daniel Burnham buildings and remarkably similar. (After all, HE ASKED.) His eyes rolled as he stepped back, smiling faintly. (That's when I saw the "badge".) He seemed truly satisfied that I was just an idiot and posed no immediate nine-eleven threat. Still, he watched until I left. I had to wonder where he was yesterday, when this guy, almost as tall as I am and twice my weight, walked up to me, put his hands on my shoulders, and then heavily, slowly, exhaled a week's worth of bad vodka into my face. He had just gotten out of jail (for assault), and begged that he needed a "human being" to give him bus fare. Luckily (on both days actually) I have the capability of "puffing up" and looking formidable for short periods of time.

Peirce Anderson knew how to deal with LaSalle Street's hoo-ha's. He just ignored them. When Louis Sullivan went into HIS alcoholic rant about Bankers and Romans and Togas, and what a stupid piece of crap the Illinois Merchant's Banking Room really was, Anderson didn't even bother to reply. I should be so calm.

I'm not.

Today, following the "incident", I wandered around the corner, remembering something about "discretion" and "valour" and began to photograph Peirce Anderson's work at the Insurance Exchange. (ca. 1911 at the corner of Financial and Jackson) As I focused and framed the full horror of Lucien LaGrange's "elegant transformation" of what I have always considered a Burnham masterwork (I've tried to ignore Lucien's renovations for some years now) I broke into a full rage. What kind of shocking arrogance would it take to believe one could "improve" on Peirce Anderson? Damn. The same arrogance, I suppose, that allowed some house designer from Oak Park, (what's- his- name Frank) to believe that frosting the inside of the Rookery with gold painted marble would make us forget all of John Root's nasty ironwork. And remember Frank, Frank, Frank. Amazingly, both of these "award winners" thought they were doing us a favor. And I thought LaSalle and Jackson was the intersection of the symmetrical and the sedate.

Architects are vicious. Architects eat their young.

.

.

THE ROOKERY. WILLIAM DRUMMOND'S 1930 RENOVATION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S 1905 RENOVATION OF JOHN ROOT'S 1885 ORIGINAL.

Note the Deco Vampire Bat eating the Mosquito.

BATCHAWANA. Points North

Two days of brilliant sunshine, that brought to mind Stieglitz, O'Keefe and Sante Fe. And two days of unbroken fog -- grayer than the Thames. Or Whistler or Turner. Pump priming and paint. Electrical wires. Wild flowers. Blackflies. And an old "Batchawana cottage" copy of Longfellow. I'd forgotten Longfellow. Or that "language" could be, simply, so beautiful.

.

I'm not sure when "educated" people learned not to read Longfellow. Although Lawrence Buell had a clear opinion in his introduction to Penguin's 1988 Anthology. ----- "In short, he fared badly within a Critical Framework that is scholarly (a fondness for intricacy), modernist (the equation of alienated pessimism with the authentic) and American Centered. " Well now, doesn't that sound familiar?

.

I first learned of Peirce Anderson some five years ago, when, by accident, I purchased a biography of Benjamin Latrobe that had belonged to him. And only slowly learned of his remarkable architectural contributions to the City of Chicago. Marshall Field and Company. The Field Museum. Union Station. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, The Illinois Merchants Bank. The Insurance Exchange. The strong advocate of the architectural component of the Burnham Plan. And a legacy of the Beaux Arts Architects he brought to Graham Anderson Probst and White. How could he have been erased. Impossibly. Right off the map.

Are we Architects, Artists, Poets, so weak, so unsure that we cannot allow and respect a flourish of stylistic variation within our ranks. That we must all be born-again thus-and-so's. within a Critical Framework. That we must destroy variation to justify ourselves? No Longfellow with the Dickinson. No Tuckerman, no never. Burnham okay with the Plan. But not the Architecture. And certainly, certainly, no Anderson with the Sullivan.

Not in fog . Not in sunshine. -- The vacation is over. Time to head back to LaSalle Street

.

.

CHICAGO PHOTOS available online at CHICAGO IMAGES IN THE LOOP

FIELD MUSEUM. Site. Symmetry. Scale. Size.

Early 20th Century Architecture in Chicago is remarkable for its contrasts. Louis Sullivan completed the People's Bank (1911) in Cedar Rapids.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/repowers/118633239/in/photostream) Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Midway Gardens south of MIdway Plaisance on Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago (1913).(http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3563.html) And construction began on Peirce Anderson's design for the Field Museum (1911). All worked with artists on their commissions: Wright with Alphonso Iannelli, Sullivan with Louis J. Millett and Allen Philbrick, and Anderson with Henry Hering. However similar in team approach, all worked with decidedly different architectural vocabularies. The Field Museum was at the time, "modern" and followed the then broadly accepted Classical Style inspired by the World's Fair that "set architecture back by fifty years."

Interesting to speculate what might we have had if the commissions had been switched.

It is impossible not to compare the Field Museum with the Museum of Science and Industry (Columbian Exposition Palace of Fine Arts). Both are "Classic" and both by urban planning twists of fate are now entered through "the back door." Both were designed by architects who had worked for Daniel Burnham. Both have caryatids (right here on the Lake). But here the comparison stops. The Museum of Science and Industry is of almost Victorian complexity. The Field Museum is planned and sized for the Twentieth Century.

The Field Museum and the Chicago Board of Trade share (and gain importance from) their comparable axial relationships with in the City. The Board of Trade (a Holabird and Root project) is at the terminus of LaSalle Street and holds an (almost) centerline position flanked and enhanced by the symmetries of Anderson's Federal Reserve and the Continental Bank. (This will be the subject of a later post). The Field Museum is the visual terminus of Lake Shore Drive and gains strength from its (imperfect) geometric relationship to Holabird and Roche's Soldier Field. The Field Museum, however, maintains presence by its size and symmetry alone. The image below was taken from the Center of Lake Shore Drive at Balbo. Balancing on one foot. Imagining what might have happened if William Holabird and Ernest Graham had done just a little better with their co-ordination.

.

And having said all that, so to speak, at the end of the day, it is this remarkable view that makes me think about Chicago whenever I am someplace else.

.

CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHS are available for purchase at www.ImagesintheLoop.com