In April, the University of Chicago hosted the Facilities Conference of the Ivy Plus Society, bringing together campus architects, administrators and facilities coordinators from more than a dozen prestigious universities. “Architecture matters,” explained Steven Wiesenthal, senior associate vice president for facilities and university architect for UChicago. “Architecture is a commitment to a spot on Earth, using up physical resources and human labor,” and architects have an ethical obligation to take that commitment seriously.
Wiesenthal kicked off the conference by moderating a conversation between Jeanne Gang, founder and principal of Studio Gang Architects, which has designed the new Campus North Residence Hall, and Stanley Tigerman of Tigerman McCurry Architects, who renovated McGiffert Hall, the new home of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore and the Plein Air Café.
The discussion was, in large part, about the city of Chicago, and why its inhabitants are so serious about design and architecture. Gang recalled cab drivers who have engaged her passionately about new buildings and the preservation of old ones, and she extolled Chicago as “a very forgiving place to be young.” As she explained, “the cost of living is very low, but you get a high cultural quotient.”
Gang attributes that vibrancy in part to Chicago being “a city that came into its age during modernism,” a city of whose grid-like structure provides an egalitarian, fundamentally democratic division of space. “Chicago thinks of itself as a city of neighborhoods,” she says, “but it’s the grid that allows those neighborhoods to grow and shrink” as the city matures.
Architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham famously helmed the White City at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Almost as famously, Burnham said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized.”
Tigerman’s beef with Burnham is that his “make no little plans" shtick was just so hierarchical. City planning as a discipline is about top-down control, in defiance of the Jeffersonian impulses inherent in Chicago’s grid layout. “The fact is, he [Burnham] was a fabulous salesman, and managed to make everybody do what he wanted,” Tigerman said.
There is of course an argument to be made for making big plans. As an example, Gang recounted her own (so far unaccepted) proposal to re-reverse the flow of the Chicago River.
But more to the point, the top-down control of a Burnham figure and the organic bottom-up growth of a neighborhood can co-exist. More than that, negotiating the two is the central project of architecture: make no little plans, but do consider the ripples of little effects that your plans might have.
“I think architecture is ultimately an ethical pursuit,” Tigerman says. “I'm interested in quality, I'm interested in ethics, and I'm utterly disinterested in business.”
—Prof. Kunle Odunsi
