Starting Friday and continuing through today, October 28, 2009, the first building of 27 at Michael Reese Hospital slated for demolition was lost.  

It comes as little surprise that this first demolition target was one of the eight works at the campus by Walter Gropius - The Friend Convalescent Home. 

Rather than accepting responsibility for their untenable proposal to destroy world culture, Chicago’s politicians have continued to ignore the public, make petty and laughable excuses, and carry out their miserable decision to rid Bronzeville of its history as rapidly as possible.  Already being compared to the fabled loss of Chicago works by Louis Sullivan, Burnham and Root, and others, the memory of this disgusting demolition of Walter Gropius’s work will not be outlived.

 

East Elevation of the Friend Convalescent Home (demolished) Befitting its role as a tranquil setting for convalescent patients, Gropius conceived the Friend Pavilion as a simple and restful, but elegant, environment. The east elevation shows the unmistakable “Gropius-style” fenestration and sheltered recess of the lower level.

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

 

Elegy for a Friend Departed

News of this unforgivable assault on world culture is already spreading around the globe, and it is not being taken lightly.  Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer-prize winning architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, today proclaimed the destruction “savage… an act sure to live in infamy.” 

“Chicago is plundering its history, much as the city did when it allowed the destruction of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler buildings in the 1960s and 1970s,” Kamin writes (link at the bottom of this article).

 

Demolition of the Friend Convalescent Home, October 2009 Crews destroy the perfectly solid and imminently reusable concrete frame of the Friend Convalescent Home at Michael Reese Hospital.

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

 

The almost ceremonial destruction of a Walter Gropius building as the first casualty at Michael Reese Hospital is pure symbolism.  It is a completely unnecessary, calculated act.  This is a signal to Chicagoans, pure and simple: Chicago does not care one iota about its Gropius legacy.  Nor does Chicago care about its world image, which is being bruised by this cavalier carnage.

Nor, it would seem, does Chicago care about the financial welfare of its populace.  20% Federal Redevelopment Tax Credits are currently pending, thanks to the tireless work of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition members in nominating the site to the National Register of Historic Places.  The destruction of the Friend Convalescent Home is a clear attack on this proposal, for without the Walter Gropius buildings at Michael Reese Hospital, there is no strength in our nomination (see discussion below). 

Design Development of the Friend Convalescent Home (demolished) This elevation drawing from The Architects Collaborative has never before been published.  A part of the typically extensive collaborative process between Walter Gropius and Norman Fletcher (of TAC) and Loebl, Schlossman, and Bennett, the drawing sheet from June of 1956 shows the design at an intermediate phase of development.

(The Architects Collaborative / Michael Reese Hospital Archives.)

 

 

	A Historic Photograph of the Friend Convalescent Home, c. 1957.  Showing double-height entry volume, classic Gropius-style entry canopy and railing.
	(Historic Photograph:  Hedrich Blessing / Michael Reese Hospital Archives)

It also is no surprise that demolition is starting in the very part of the campus that Chicago’s own Landmarks Division, just last summer, shockingly stated on record as likely warranting listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

With taxpayers exposed and accountable for the staggering amount of $91 Million, paid simply for site acquisition and land clearance, and excluding the $100 Million in TIF money expected to be required for reconfiguring city streets and utilities, one would think that Chicago would perk up at the prospect of hedging its decidedly losing bets.  With the former Olympic Village development at the site expected to have cost upwards of $1.2 Billion, the 20% tax credit possibility is simply too powerful to ignore.  Unfortunately however, Mayor Daley’s horse is too high.  Or he is too preoccupied pilfering the city’s hard-won and precious reserves to plug holes in Chicago’s annual budget.

Make no mistake:  There are no solid plans for the Michael Reese Hospital site.  Chicago is creating “Superblock 37.”  Or, perhaps “Neighborhood 37.”  

Call it what you want, the 37-acre Michael Reese site is over 13 times the size of Block 37 in the Chicago Loop.  Two decades later and hundreds of million dollars literally down the drain, Chicago’s “expert” City Planners, Department of Community Development, and real estate developers still cannot produce a viable development on that downtown site.  Why are they being allowed to reproduce the mistakes of the past on a megalomaniacal scale?

 

The entry to the Friend Pavilion in summer, 2009. The building remained virtually unchanged from its original design. The hand rails were altered in 1971 when the adjacent Siegel-Regenstein Pavilion opened, and canopy lighting had been altered.
(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition)

By the Numbers

Always eager to trumpet its superlatives, Chicago today gains another:  Mayor Daley has secured for Chicago the title of becoming the first municipality in the world to have willfully destroyed a permanent work of Walter Gropius. 

Over the past two months, the Gropius in Chicago Coalition has been conducting unusually thorough research into the complete portfolio of Walter Gropius around the world, and the current status of his built projects.  The results, although not shocking, are revelatory:  Globally, only a handful of Gropius-designed projects of a permanent nature have ever been destroyed.  Far more frequently, Gropius’s work is a cherished part of its custodial community. 

Based on the most scholarly accounts of Walter Gropius’s work and our own thorough investigations, there are merely 105 Gropius-designed projects in the world of a permanent nature.  These projects range from tombstones, to single-family houses, to skyscrapers and major housing developments of several hundred freestanding buildings.

The eight individual buildings at Michael Reese Hospital have been included as separate projects in our tabulation, for good reason.  They were awarded to Gropius at different times, involved different programs and clients, featured different local architects of record, and were conceived as related but independent designs.  They are held together by a common philosophy or, in the words of Gropius, a “consistency of approach,” but each is entirely unique.

Master plans without actual Gropius-designed buildings, temporary exhibition buildings, and minor alterations of existing buildings are not included in our statistics. 

Among the results of our investigation, per the above limitations:

• Only 5 Gropius projects of a permanent nature in the world had been completely lost before today’s loss of the Friend Convalescent Home.  This includes two projects in Germany lost during WWII, and one renovation project in the United States.
• There are only 39 built Gropius projects in the United States, counting each of the eight buildings at Michael Reese Hospital as a separate project.  Demolishing all of Michael Reese Hospital’s Gropius work would eliminate 20.5% of all Gropius projects in the United States.
• Now that the Friend Convalescent Home has been demolished, there are only 9 remaining buildings of Walter Gropius in the entire Midwest.  Seven of these are at Michael Reese Hospital. 
• Michael Reese Hospital is unequivocally one of Gropius’s most engaging and unique projects anywhere in the world.  The 15-years he spent contributing to Michael Reese are unequalled anywhere.  And based on scale, range of vision, and totality of execution, there are few places anywhere that are as complete as a total Gropius-conceived and -executed environment.
• The Friend Convalescent Home is the first major Gropius work demolished in decades, anywhere in the world.
  
   

Demolition of the Friend Convalescent Home, October 2009 On Tuesday, October 28, 2009, all that remained of the grand entry sequence was a defaced, inscribed limestone memorial to the Friend Family, one lally column, and crudely spray-painted markings.

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

 

Gropius buildings are national monuments worldwide:  From major cities in Germany, to small towns in England, to rural Poland.  Rightfully so, these communities and enlightened countries cherish the work that one of the world’s greatest architects has afforded them.  Not so in Chicago, always so desperate to defend its professed cultural sophistication but rarely eager to protect it. 

A comparison between Germany, where Gropius is rightfully held as an artistic hero, and Chicago is enlightening:

• In Germany, it takes acts of war to destroy a Walter Gropius building (only three Gropius projects there have been demolished; most are national landmarks).  In Chicago, we wage this war upon ourselves.
• In Germany, Gropius buildings lost during World War II are actually being rebuilt today as they once were.  In Chicago, anyone suggesting such an act would be tarred and feathered, the town laughingstock.
• In Germany, over 50,000 citizens of Berlin live joyously in “Gropiusstadt,” or Gropius City, a major Berlin district Gropius planned and, in large part, designed.  They shop at the “Gropius Passagen.”  They hold Gropius fests.  Some live in the “Gropiushaus.”  In Chicago, meanwhile, our city government deprives our citizenry of the ability to even ponder such ideas.

Today, Walter Gropius’s famous school of art, architecture, and design, the Bauhaus, is celebrating its 90th anniversary, being feted and revered worldwide.  Chicago, considered the fourth home of the Bauhaus after Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, was supposed to partake in these celebrations.  Instead, we can mourn the utter lack of vision and democracy in our municipality.

Thank you, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, for having the sound vision of celebrating the Bauhaus “Chicago style” with the destruction of one of the few Gropius projects in America.

 

Nibbling Away at History Steel reinforcing bars twist under the torsion of a concrete girder collapsing; heavy equipment works its way through the concrete frame of the Friend Convalescent Home.  The Friend building was the only Gropius work in Illinois with a predominantly exposed concrete structure, a trademark of his later career.

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

 

Remembering a Friend

	The Ringleader  A Heneghan Wrecking employee orchestrates the crude ballet that is robbing Chicagoans of their city landmarks.
	(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition

The Friend Convalescent Home was designed from 1954-1956, and erected in 1957.  Gropius and Norman Fletcher of TAC designed the building in collaboration with Loebl, Schlossman, and Bennett of Chicago.  The building, despite being of a small scale, was a critical part of the overall Gropius master plan for the south Reese campus, framing the western edge of Rothschild Park and helping to form this unusually beautiful “courtyard” area.

Various conceptual versions of the future Reese convalescent home were located in roughly this location since the earliest master plans of 1946.  As early as 1953, Gropius had conceived of the building as a simple rectangular shape in plan.   The building was desired to be a subtle and elegant part of the overall Reese composition, not grabbing excessive attention and thereby distracting from the overall impact of the campus.  Gropius preferred to leave the most prominent and central buildings as the most elaborate, a notion he compared to a medieval city with a dominant, central cathedral.  In designing the Friend Convalescent Home, Gropius continually spoke of feeling “the urge to simplify,” and he worked hard to produce a functional, elegant, and deceptively sophisticated building.

Gropius relied on the heavy trees of Rothschild Park (Sasaki + Novak, 1956; demolished) to shade and shelter the building.  He rejected the projecting solar shades that he had employed elsewhere on the campus, instead arguing that the two-story building with primarily east-facing windows did not require special shading devices. 

South Stair of the Friend Convalescent Home (demolished) A signature element of the Convalescent Home was its doubly cantilevered concrete stair, a beautiful and expressive construction. The cantilevered stair relates conceptually to an enclosed cantilevered stair that still stands on the Laundry Building.

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

 

Like most of the Gropius buildings at Reese and elsewhere in the world, the elevations of the Friend Convalescent Home varied based on function.  The east elevation was comprised of a ribbon of patient rooms on the second floor, overlooking the tranquil park, with community rooms and offices below.  The patient rooms were accessed from the raised, upper-level entry on the west elevation, protected by its elegantly curving brick garden wall and classic Gropius entry “marquee.” 

The Friend Pavilion in winter, 2009.
(Photograph: © David Schalliol / Gropius in Chicago Coalition)

The two-story mechanical section of the building can be closely compared to Gropius’s Wohnhaus Stichweh in Hannover, Germany.  The house is now occupied by the The Federation of German Architects, Lower Saxony.  It is a protected national monument of Germany.  (Click to compare images of the
Stichweh house.)

The Friend Pavilion is the first major Gropius work to be demolished in decades.  Our comprehensive research into the status of all Gropius buildings worldwide has concluded that the building is in fact one only a handful such Gropius designs ever to meet the wrecking ball (discussed above).  

Chicago is sadly living up to its poor reputation as a great destroyer of world culture.

 

 

 

 

	North elevation of the Friend Convalescent Home.  Exquisitely proportioned and beautifully executed, the rarely seen north elevation of the Friend Convalescent Home was as beguiling as a fine hotel.
	(Photograph:  © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition)

A Worldwide Outrage

News of Chicago’s cavalier destruction has already spread around the world, and it will continue to do so.  Chicago has made a tragic mistake concerning its worldwide image in destroying the work of an internationally important architect.

A sampling of media coverage in the hours since we first announced the demolition:

The Architects’ Journal in the United Kingdom has run a piece entitled “Outrage: Gropius Buildings Destroyed in Chicago.” 
(Web site.)

e-architect, a publication based in the UK and one of the world’s most heavily trafficked web sites on architecture (with over 26,000 unique daily visitors and 560,000 daily hits), has featured a news item on the demolition.  They correctly state that there has been “a chorus of disapproval from around the world to this destruction.”  (Web site.)

Interior Designmagazine, based in New York City, in a front-page news item from their web site trumpets, “Chicago Bulldozes Gropius Buildings Despite Losing Olympics.”  (Web site.)

Locally, Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribunehas written an incredibly powerful piece.  “What Chicago is doing is crazy,” Mr. Kamin exclaims.  (Web site.)

  

Walter Gropius and the City of Chicago Need Your Help

Please do what you can to spread the word and speak out in favor of a true solution at Michael Reese Hospital, instead of the $91 Million vacant lot being created on our behalf by the City of Chicago.  Let us come together as a world community to ensure that the Friend Convalescent Home is the final Gropius building torn down in our city.

We urge you to write letters to the City Officials listed on our support page.  We have a number of earlier letters featured elsewhere on our web site.

Also, please contact us to add your name and logo to either our list of supporters, or to the next version of our powerful letter to Mayor Daley that is being crafted.

Thank you.

inquiries@savemrh.com

 

Partial view of the Friend Convalescent Home, viewed from the Southeast (demolished)

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)