“Chicago Letter”

AboutA dispatch on Chicago's architecture and museum scene in 1987, reporting on the city's expanding roster of exhibitions and on the flourishing market for architectural salvage. Its centerpiece is the Art Institute of Chicago's new permanent wall-and-floor installation of over fifty architectural fragments in its main stairwell, including a terra-cotta spandrel panel by Adler and Sullivan salvaged from the demolished St. Nicholas Hotel. The column also previews the Musée d'Orsay's forthcoming "Chicago Architecture: 1872–1922, Birth of a Metropolis," curated by John Zukowsky and designed by Stanley Tigerman, and surveys the Struve Gallery's dealings in salvaged decorative-arts material, including windows from a Peter B. Wight-designed house (originally built in Minneapolis, dismantled in 1971) being sold by New York's Metropolitan Museum. Sullivan is named alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, and John Root as one of the architects who put Chicago on the map, and the 1972 demolition of his Chicago Stock Exchange Building is cited as the recurring touchstone in the city's ongoing debate over whether the fragment trade helps or hastens the loss of historic buildings.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0888-7314%28198723%296%3C90%3ACL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8