If Chicago is the citadel of modern architecture, Notre Dame’s School of Architecture must see itself as the government in exile, the rebel stronghold mustering its resources to assault any sign of modernism’s dominance. Since 2003 it’s been handing out the annual Richard H. Driehaus Prize, named for the Chicago investment manager who bankrolls the annual $100,000 award, to architects it considers major contributors to traditional and classical architecture.
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At its worst, the new classicism hews to the architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome with a fundamentalism Jerry Falwell would envy. Earlier this year, architect Ed Keegan took 2005 Driehaus winner Quinlan Terry to the foot of LaSalle Street for a WBEZ in-terview. “I think the Rookery is extremely interesting,” he told Keegan. “It’s got a whole mixture of things . . . these unusual capitals and that great big arch in the middle. But I wouldn’t put it in the same class as the first two classical buildings”–those being the Federal Reserve and the former Continental Bank, whose columned porticoes face each other across LaSalle. “Outstanding, confident, classical buildings,” declares Terry. And also as deadly sterile as Burnham and Root’s Rookery is endlessly inventive.
As much as Chicago was one of the birthplaces of modernism, it could also be said to be the birthplace of the new classicism. The city’s first skyscrapers featured a stripped-down simpli-city distinct from the profusely ornamented style preferred in New York City. But all that changed with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, where under the direction of Daniel Burnham and his new chief designer, Charles Atwood, ancient Rome was reborn as the White City, a sequence of massive exhibition halls structured in steel but with classical facades of sprayed-on plaster. The public–27 million people–ate it up. It was Disneyland’s Main Street designed not as a set for Andy Hardy but for the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. Louis Sullivan thought it was the death of architecture, and as far as his career was concerned, it was.
What redeems the building, however, is its five-story base, inspired by the architecture of the Renaissance. Here the homage to the opera-loving cardinal begins to make sense. It looks like a stage set out of Puccini’s Tosca–the Farnese Palace reimagined by Disney. The precast cladding is a light peach color and the window frames are burgundy; there are more than a hundred flower boxes. The second-story facade, which hides a 215-car garage, has large framed windows with fake shutters–air louvers to ventilate the parking area. Centered over each of the windows on the floor above is a smaller arched window, itself centered in turn beneath a pair of very small rectangular windows just under a projecting cornice.
