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Donald Maurice Kreis
Now that architecture is blessedly post-post-modernism,
and it is possible to look with affection and even respect on the
major public designs of the 1960s, one might well ask: What major
American architectural project of that era, through which millions
of people pass each year, is still as fresh and functional is it
was on the day its creator first presented the design’s initial
drawings?
New Englanders might think of I.M. Pei, or Paul
Rudolph, or maybe even Benjamin Thompson and his now-ubiquitous
festival marketplaces. But for unsung architectural heroes of the
1960s, you can’t beat Harry Weese FAIA.
It was Weese, in 1967, who dreamed up the enduring
and distinctive design concept for the Washington, D.C. metro system,
with its vaulted, column-less spaces of coffered concrete, its richly
textured walls awash in reflected light. In its grandeur, reflecting
an abiding love of the subway-commuting masses, the system has no
equal outside of Moscow, whose metro obviously influenced Weese’s
design choices.
Weese was certainly a New England architect,
in the sense that no one who received a bachelor’s in architecture
from MIT, with a year spent at Yale, could not have been steeped
in the region’s design traditions. But Weese’s name seems
to have faded into a kind of obscurity here, if not everywhere -
because he had the misfortune of hailing from and practicing in
Chicago.
Although no American city outranks Chicago in
importance to the history of the nation’s architecture, the
Windy City was something of a curse to Weese, who died in 1998 at
the age of 83. While many American architects came to Chicago and
found the prairie to be liberating, as a native Weese was painfully
aware of Daniel Burnham’s legacy. It was Burnham, who warned
against making "small plans" because they "have no
magic to stir men’s souls,"and followed his own advice.
Weese ended his career disappointed that he did not earn recognition
as the successor to Burnham’s mantle as great builder of a
mighty American metropolis.
He deserved such recognition - or at least very
nearly so.
That a 27-story building Weese designed in Chicago
has become something of an icon on that city’s skyline is no
great surprise, until one ponders the fact that the project is actually
a prison. The Metropolitan Correctional Center, completed in 1975,
has a bold triangular plan and a distinctive concrete façade
with a syncopated array of (understandably) narrow windows.
The Oak Park Village Hall, completed in Oak
Park, Illinois in 1974, is a similarly invigorating addition to
the public realm. Most of the building is a square, cloister-like
structure with offices arrayed around a courtyard - but one quadrant
has been omitted in favor of a sharply triangular, plan-busting
module that contains the village’s council chamber.
An earlier project, the First Baptist Church
completed in 1965, is one of several projects Weese designed in
the American architectural Mecca known as Columbus, Indiana. It
is a rare example of a church design from that era which does not
seem, 30 or 40 years later, to have forgotten that the beautiful
does indeed connote the spiritual. The two tall, triangular sanctuary
spaces that comprise the major elements of this design have simple,
modern lines, but still look richly satisfying against the sky.
The unifying theme, and the accomplishment that
makes Weese worthy of study today, is the ability to achieve architectural
success in the public realm. At his best, Weese knew how to design
beautifully as well as how to convince committees and bean-counters
to invest in those designs, which look lavish by today’s denuded
notions of what passes for building in the public and nonprofit
sectors.
One must also confess that Weese had a mixed
record, with some major projects that no longer look like great
successes. The Sawyer Library, completed for Williams College in
1975, has a warehouse-like ambiance - and, alas, it is not just
the books that are being warehoused. The library was designed with
a series of warren-like study carrels, arrayed in a kind of sawtooth
pattern, that must have seemed innovative at the time but today
seem uniquely calculated to induce claustrophobia. The building
Weese designed for the Law School at SUNY Buffalo similarly seems
preoccupied with getting the job done as cheaply as possible at
the expense of creating spaces that inspire or at least empower
their occupants.
Architects who sense a resonance with the practitioners
of a generation ago, but who are already well versed in the great
works of familiar names northeastern names like Kahn or Breuer or
Barnes, would do well to head for the nearest art library and check
out the two published monographs of Weese’s work. One is Harry
Weese Houses, by the architect’s wife, Kitty Baldwin Weese.
The other, which is a thorough survey of the winners and losers
among Weese’s commissions, is Issue No. 11 of the journal Process
Architecture, entitled Harry Weese: Humanism and Tradition.
If you do not sense such a resonance, but you
have read this far into a tribute to a dead architect, you deserve
to learn Weese’s secret when it comes to landing a huge public
commission like the Washington Metro. "It was the letter we
wrote," Weese told the oral history project of the Art Institute
of Chicago in 1988, confessing that he actually delegated the task
to a well-spoken associate in his firm. "It was beautifully
written. We showed that we were more enthusiastic than anybody else
for the Metro. No other firms gave it more than perfunctory attention.
So our letter was longer and better and the English was better."
Weese himself was quite articulate, and prescient
about trends in the profession. "We live in the age of the
consumer and he is rich and uncertain," Weese wrote long ago,
before the era of gender-neutral language. "And with his accelerating
estrangement from nature in industrialized society, artificial substitutes
for natural processes, and the foregoing of tradition produces cultism,
superstition enters the vacuum of angst, and decadence naturally
follows. It is being reflected in our architecture."
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