It’s a dangerous thing to attempt to categorize Stanley Tigerman, but it’s probably safe to say that Chicago’s resident architectural curmudgeon is not a preservationist.
“My buildings—I’ll be happy if one or two show up in the history books,” he said. “But save them? I don’t think so.”
Tigerman is in a wheelchair and on oxygen, and says he “feels as embattled now as ever,” but nothing kept him from speaking without notes for an hour and half, explaining—among other things—the most glaring contradiction in his famously nonconforming career: his reverence for Mies. He was a founder of the architectural Chicago Seven, a group that came together in 1976 to oppose the hegemony of Mies’s modernism, which had ossified into the ubiquitous International Style. They mounted an upstart exhibit (in opposition to a contemporaneous one at the Museum of Contemporary Art celebrating modernism), and Tigerman created a now-iconic image of Mies’s S. R. Crown Hall building on the IIT campus sinking into Lake Michigan. He titled it The Titanic.
Two days earlier, in the same room, Preservation Chicago executive director Ward Miller announced that the James R. Thompson Center, a building by Helmut Jahn, who joined the Chicago Seven in time to be part of their 1978 exhibit, has, once again, made his group’s annual list of its own Chicago Seven: the city’s most-threatened historic buildings. Governor J.B. Pritzker, following the lead of his predecessor, plans to sell the unique, glassy structure to a developer.
