Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, S.R. Crown Hall
As Chicagoans, we are fortunate to live in one of the great architectural cities in the world. Not only that. It is a city defined, like few others, by one overarching aesthetic and functional principle: modernism. True, there are considerable differences between such masters as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But like the other architects who have made Chicago what it is (from Frank Lloyd Wright to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and from Bertrand Goldberg to Stanley Tigerman), they were wedded to the modernist ideal of finding an architectural language that could at once respond to and lead technological and urban development. The result was not only the subordination of form to function, but the conception of architecture as a social intervention – an optimistic vision that sees the built environment as an agent of progress.
Bertrand Goldberg, Prentice Women's Hospital
We don’t think of them this way. But Chicago’s grand public housing projects – like the now demolished Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green – stemmed from this very impulse. They certainly betrayed their modernist roots aesthetically, with clean lines and efficient design. But more than anything, they were modernist in their social vision. Conceived and built in the 1950s and 1960s, the very heyday of the movement, they were an integrated solution to a whole host of urban problems: rapid population growth, urban sprawl, social inequality. And they had their counterparts all across the Midwest and the country at large.
We know how the experiment ended. Instead of models for modern, urban living, Chicago’s housing projects became notorious incubators for narcotics, gangs, and violence. And by the 21st century, they were gone – bulldozed to make way for mixed-income housing in low-rise buildings. That, at least, is the conventional story. And it has a good amount of truth to it.
Thomas Struth, South Lake Apartments II
But there are counter-narratives as well – representations that seek to redeem aspects of the housing projects’ progressive styling along with the optimism inherent in their original design. At the forefront of this recuperation is an extraordinary group of visual artists.
Thomas Struth, South Dearborn Street
Thomas Struth, the great German photographer and one of the world’s most widely exhibited artists, is easily the most prominent among them. In 1990, in conjunction with his first major U.S. show held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the artist spent several weeks photographing Chicago. Most of the images in the series are of downtown, capturing the city’s modernist ethos in its most iconic form. But he was also drawn to Chicago’s public housing projects, particularly the Robert Taylor Homes in Bronzeville. The result is a number of startlingly beautiful photographs that perfectly capture the housing projects’ precarious nature, balanced, as they were, between modernism’s visual elegance and the inhabitants’ wholly unanticipated alienation. In the wake of the demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes (completed by 2007), I see these photos as both a potent critique and wistful memento. At once populated and seemingly empty, they mark and lament a bygone moment in architecture and urban design.
Thomas Struth, South Lake Apartments III
Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar
Another powerful representation along such lines comes from Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz, currently one of the stars of Documenta and a speaker in our upcoming fall festival. In 2005, he created Dull Roar, a remarkable installation that commemorates the modernist housing project, in this case St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe complex. Much like its Chicago analogues, the St. Louis structure hailed from the 1950s. But its demise happened much earlier, in 1972, amidst racially charged unrest. The widely-televised demolition marked the first major failure of a public housing project, a signal moment across the United States. In his piece, Rakowitz recreates the housing project in plastic tarp, inviting the public to come up-close on a viewing platform. From there, the spectator can witness the implosion, ingeniously orchestrated by deflating the building. So far, so historical. But the poetic intervention happens afterward, when Pruitt-Igoe is re-inflated to repeat the cycle. The building’s demise, in other words, is reversed on a cyclical basis, a gesture I read as a paean, no matter how ambivalent, to modernism’s ongoing promises.
Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex
Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar
Chicago photographer Jason Lazarus sounds a similarly poetic note of resilience in his extraordinary piece Cabrini-Green housing project (before razing). Created in 2008 in the midst of the housing projects’ multi-year demolition, Lazarus gained entrance into one of the already-condemned buildings. There, he found and documented the following graffiti, written in two hands:
I was here. I was raised here and played here as a child and as a[n] adult. Now I’m leaving here after 30 years with a lot of love and memories. God bless a child with her new home and now I’m leaving my love here and taking it also to the new home. God bless you.
It’s a startling piece, both for its striking formal simplicity and the potency of its moving message. Even more importantly, it reminds us that Chicago’s housing projects were not just the product of a centralized vision of urban renewal, but the lived experience of thousands of people. And their stories, all too easily lost when buildings are torn down, are not just about drugs and violence but the whole panoply of life.
Jason Lazarus, Cabrini-Green Housing Project (before Razing)
Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green
The stories of local residents were also at the center of Jan Tichy’s marvelous Cabrini-Green installation. Realized in 2011 and widely hailed, it coincided with the demolition of the housing project’s last building and took the form of a light installation (the preferred medium of the Chicago-based artist). Working with children from the area, Tichy placed light sources in individual apartments and used them, via poetic transliteration, to tell the residents’ stories. The play of lights was set in motion and continued unabated, albeit on an ever-diminishing scale as the building vanished over the course of several weeks. Thousands witnessed this extraordinary spectacle, which could be seen live, on-line, and at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In its original form, the piece is now gone, of course. But it lives on, in film and photo, and, perhaps most importantly, in the stories Tichy collected.
Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green
Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini-Green
Art has taken us closer and closer to the experience of living in Chicago’s public housing projects. But it’s a writer, Audrey Petty, who has taken the definitive next step. A Chicago-based author of creative non-fiction, Petty has been undertaking an ambitious oral history of the city’s public housing communities. Working in the great tradition of Studs Terkel and Alex Kotlowitz (whose There Are No Children Here remains one of the towering accounts of life in Chicago), she learned firsthand what life in the projects was actually like. Her oral history – titled High Rise Stories and covering the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green along with the Henry Horner Homes and Stateway Gardens – reveals a rich tapestry that translates into a collective story of community, displacement, removal, and relocation. The book will be published at the end of the year in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series, created by yet another great Chicago writer: Dave Eggers.
Audrey Petty
Audrey is a cherished colleague of mine at the University of Illinois, where she is on the faculty in Creative Writing. And I was absolutely thrilled when she agreed to give us a preview of High Rise Stories at the fall festival. Having been taken with the artistic representations of Chicago’s public housing projects for so long, I can’t wait to hear the perspectives Audrey’s oral history approach can reveal. Will it be more wistful memories of a once buoyant but ultimately failed modernism, a celebration of collective resilience in the face of urban plight, or something else entirely? Join me as I find out!
203: Sun, Oct. 21 2:00 - 3:00 PM
Tags: Chicago architecture, Cabrini Green, Pruitt Igoe, Jan Tichy, Jason Lazarus, Michael Rakowitz, Thomas Struth, Matti Bunzl, Chicago Humanities Festival, Audrey Petty, urban housing, housing projects, Robert Taylor Homes,
