Landmark This!
The colors of the original were rich–Root wrote of “the right of color to be recognized as an independent art”–though determining exactly what they’d been required some detective work. A consultant analyzed 60 old paint samples under a microscope and came up with a palette of five basic colors, from a brick red on the main body of the church and roof to a jute brown on the arches, windows, and doors.
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The 80-year-old enfant terrible hadn’t gone soft. He was there to show that Mies, known for minimalist structures free of the applied ornament Louis Sullivan loved, was a bit of a hypocrite–not above choosing symbolism over substance when it came to creating an architecture that expressed the industrial sensibility of his time. Mies declared that the structure of a building should be visible, but Chicago’s building code required that the steel frames of multistoried buildings be encased in concrete to make them fireproof. The exterior of a classic Mies skyscraper such as the IBM Building at Wabash and the river may appear to be structural, but it’s actually black anodized aluminum covering concrete.
Draw Me a Picture
This past summer the designs were exhibited on a sun-blasted terrace behind the Harris Theater with no signs pointing to them, and few people knew they were there. They can now be seen at Midway Airport–though you’ll have to leave town because they’re past the security checkpoint–and in a cleanly designed, generously illustrated book also titled Visionary Chicago Architecture ($31.50 at Prairie Avenue Bookshop, 418 S. Wabash, and $35 at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan).
