5 days Ago By Edward Keegan
Architecture is an art that requires three-dimensional experience. But since we can’t all travel all the time to see work, much of its production and communication comes to us in two dimensions. In recent decades, museums and galleries have upped their game to bring us great historical background on the architecture we find in real life.
Between now and early next year, there are three exhibitions in Chicago museums that tell some interesting stories about things we may think we know. “Photographing Frank Lloyd Wright” explores a fascinating subject: how the famed architect used photography throughout his career to capture and communicate his architectural ideas to the public. Beginning with his own experiments with the then-new technology in the 1890s, Wright identified and hired some of the most noted architectural photographers of the times to document his buildings.
Separate displays show how Henry Fuermann and Sons, Bill Hedrich of Chicago’s Hedrich-Blessing, Torkel Korling, Ezra Stoller, Julius Shulman, Pedro Guerrero and others captured Wright’s work at different moments in his career with the different perspectives that each photographer brought to the task. While the topic is compelling, the Driehaus Museum’s home in the 1883 Nickerson Mansion proves an odd venue for the exhibit. It’s ironic that the building’s ornate Victorian motifs and dark parlors are the kind of architecture that Wright repudiated throughout his career.
But in almost every room, the desire to present lighting appropriate to the Victorian era has triumphed over the need for museum-quality lighting to illuminate the exhibit. This puts well-researched material meant to illuminate the presentation of Wright’s work literally in the dark. It’s a problem that diminishes the show’s impact considerably and argues for a radical rethinking of how the Driehaus Museum uses its spaces.
Edgar Miller was a Chicago-based designer whose best-known works combine all the design disciplines in wonderfully eccentric and enchanting works. Many Chicagoans know of his contributions to the Carl Street Studios on Burton Place between LaSalle and Wells streets, a small Chicago art colony that persists to this day. The DePaul Art Museum has mounted an ambitious look at this oft-overlooked and underappreciated figure in “Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917-1967.
” A master of the decorative arts, Miller produced illustrations, wallpaper designs, advertisements, stained glass windows, sculpture, woodcut prints and dinnerware. A number of remarkable collaborations are documented including those with Sol Kogen, Andrew Rebori, Jesús Torres and Hester Miller Murray, his sister. Miller eschewed the modernist fetish toward minimalism and embraced a more traditional approach to narrative, often reaching to whimsy in his depictions of all things animal, vegetable and mineral.
Miller’s work spans genres, high and low, commercial and fine art. Earlier generations would have known him for his total design or The Normandy House restaurant near the Water Tower. Now long gone, his menus, placemats and dishes are all on display to give us a sense of what it was like in its heyday.
An overtly political image on display is from a 1934 mural Miller created for The Tavern Club. Titled “The Rape of Peace” and styled after classical depictions of “The Rape of Europa,” it’s a forthright allegory of the rise of fascism in the 1930s that seems more relevant than ever today. The exhibit makes a strong case for Miller’s place in the city’s artistic and architectural histories.
The final exhibit features the work of a local kid from the West Side, Germane Barnes, who is a Chicago native worth watching. He won the prestigious Rome Prize in 2021, and his one-person show now at the Art Institute of Chicago proves how fruitful his time at the American Academy in Rome was. Barnes goes back to go forward.
Titled “Germane Barnes: Columnar Disorder,” the exhibit’s focus is on three new “orders” for architecture. The column has always been an essential element of architecture, and its codification begins with the earliest surviving book on architecture, Vitruvius’ “Ten Books on Architecture” from 2,000 years ago. Three basic variations have been recognized in western cultures since antiquity — the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian — but until relatively recently, designers have devoted much time to exploring enormous variations within the type.
Dining room at the Lloyd Lewis and Kathryn Dougherty residence at 153 Little Saint Mary’s Road in Libertyville on July 7, 1941. The home and furniture were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This image was photographed for Architectural Forum by Ken Hedrich.
(Ken Hedrich/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum) Barnes’ new orders are identity, labor and migration. Each draws on Black experience to establish new forms that can resonate with a broader interpretation of history. Each column is presented as drawings and two physical models of varying size and material.
The capacity of columns to express diverse forms and narratives has been well established throughout history but has been somewhat dormant in times that embrace minimalism and abstraction. Barnes’ columns reclaim that narrative potential and develop it for expressions of distinctively Black identities that have been generally ignored throughout history. It’s a particularly hopeful message at a time when we need it.
Barnes is currently working on an installation that will be unveiled in August for Exhibit Columbus in Columbus, Indiana. While he left Chicago for an academic post at the University of Miami, his connections to the city remain strong. Let’s hope the success of this exhibit will help lure Barnes back to his hometown to continue his provocative and evocative work here.
“ Photographing Frank Lloyd Wright ” is at the Driehaus Museum, 50 E. Erie St., through Jan.
5. “Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917-1967” is at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton Ave.
, through Feb. 23. “Germane Barnes: Columnar Disorder” is at the Art institute of Chicago, 111 S.
Michigan Ave., through Jan. 27.
Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
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