“Preservation and Renewal in Post-World War II Chicago”

AboutDaniel Bluestone examines how the critical and historiographical construction of the "Chicago School" narrative shaped Chicago's historic preservation and urban renewal movements from the 1950s through the 1960s. He traces the concept's origins to the Museum of Modern Art's 1933 exhibition Early Modern Architecture, Chicago 1870-1910, which established a canonical genealogy running from Richardson through Sullivan to Wright, and argues that this narrow, aesthetically focused narrative created an unusual postwar coalition between modernist architects and preservationists. Civic boosters invoked the Chicago School during events such as the 1957 Chicago Dynamic Week to legitimize a massive downtown rebuilding campaign, while the same narrative selectively motivated preservation battles: the successful 1957 campaign to save Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, the 1957 founding of the Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks, and the unsuccessful but highly publicized 1960-61 fight to save Adler & Sullivan's Garrick Theater (Schiller Building), which ended with architectural fragments salvaged by Richard Nickel, John Vinci, and David Norris. Bluestone contrasts this selective, style-driven preservationism with the routine, unprotested demolition of buildings falling outside the canon—the Pullman Building, the Columbus Memorial Building, the Woman's Temple, and Henry Ives Cobb's Federal Building—and with massive urban renewal clearance in African-American and working-class neighborhoods such as Hyde Park. He concludes that preservationists must more critically examine which historical narratives they reinforce through their choices of what to save.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1046-4883%28199405%2947%3A4%3C210%3APARIPW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H