ORAL HISTORY OF A.

JAMES SPEYER
Interviewed by Pauline Saliga

Complied under the auspices of the

Chicago Architects Oral History Project
Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings
Department of Architecture
The Art Institute of Chicago
Copyright © 1990
Revised Edition Copyright © 2001
The Art Institute of Chicago
This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in
the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham
Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for
publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii
 CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 128

Appendix: Resume 131

Index of Names and Buildings 132

iii
 OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Choice of Architecture as a Profession 1

Architectural Education at Carnegie Institute of Technology 3
Influence of Travel When Young 8
Early Education 9
Architectural Education at Chelsea Polytechnique 11
Influence of Le Corbusier 12
Designer for Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company 13
Speyer’s Own Paintings 20
How Mies van der Rohe Came to the Illinois Institute of Technology 21
Interview with Mies for Graduate School 23
Impressions of Armour Institute of Technology as a Beaux-Arts School 24
Armour Institute at The Art Institute of Chicago 26
Comparison of Teaching Methods, Hilberseimer, and Peterhans 36
The Design of Houses with Open Courts 47
Maser’s Thesis at the Illinois Institute of Technology 52
Mies’s Open Plan Houses 54
Reasons for Not Working in Mies’s Office 60
The Message of the Curriculum at Illinois Institute of Technology 61, 90
Opinion of Mies 64
Furniture in Relation to Architecture 65
Impact of Entrance to Army on Schooling 72
Duties for the Army 72
Illinois Institute of Technology after World War II 75, 81, 85
Institute of Design 77
Influences on Speyer’s Architecture 84
Influential Students of Mies’s 87
Mies’s Retirement from Illinois Institute of Technology 92
Mies’s Trip to Greece 92
Speyer Teaching in Greece 95

iv
Speyer’s Architectural Practice in Chicago, 1946-1961
First Office 103
Stanley Harris, Jr. House 105
Solomon B. Smith House 106
Ben Rose House 107
Herbert Greenwald Apartment 107
Joel Sammet House 107
Jerome Apt House 107
House for the Architect’s Mother 108
Suzette Morton Davidson Apartment 112
Influence of Mies’s Residential Work on Speyer 114
Mies’s Loss of the the Commission for the IIT Campus 114
Speyer as Curator of Twentieth Century Art at The Art Institute of Chicago 117
Mies Exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago 121
Mies Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City 124
Impressions of Mies 126

v
 PREFACE

On June 11, 12, 13, 18, and 19, 1986, I met with A. James Speyer in his office at The Art
Institute of Chicago where we recorded his oral history. His recollections of Mies van der
Rohe are an invaluable record of Mies’s achievements at the School of Architecture at
Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology). In addition, Mr. Speyer’s
interview provided a unique perspective of his own many academic achievements that
made him as one of Mies’s most distinguished proteges. Although Mr. Speyer and I covered
all of the topics we intended to cover in the interview, he did request that we meet once
more to record his impressions of Mies’s interest in the fine arts and Mies’s well-
documented collection of Paul Klee works. Unfortunately, before we could set another
taping date, Mr. Speyer died unexpectedly on November 9, 1986.

A. James Speyer, who studied Beaux-Arts architecture at Carnegie Institute and a number of
institutes in Europe, felt he finally received the architectural education that he was searching
for when he studied Modern architectural design and construction techniques with Mies at
Armour Institute in Chicago. As Mies’s first graduate student, Speyer was in a unique
position to have received a great deal of personalized scholastic attention from Mies, which
had a life-long impact on Speyer. He continued Mies’s academic legacy through his teaching
at IIT and the Polytechneon in Athens, Greece, and through the many residential design
commissions that he received while practicing in Chicago. Later Speyer distinguished
himself as Curator of 20th Century Art at The Art Institute of Chicago, where he became an
internationally respected force in the art world. His many museum installations revealed his
expertise as both architect and connoisseur, and we in Chicago were the fortunate
beneficiaries of his unique blend of talents.

Mr. Speyer’s 4 1/2-hour oral history was recorded on four 90-minute cassette tapes, which
have been transcribed by Kai Enenbach and Angela Licup and minimally edited by myself
to maintain spirit and flow of his recollections. The transcription is available for research in
the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago as well as the Canadian
Centre for Architecture.

A. James Speyer’s oral history was sponsored by the Department of Architecture at The Art
Institute of Chicago in cooperation with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

vi
Additional funding was provided by Mrs. Suzette Morton Davidson, Mr. Speyer’s long-time
friend. We are also grateful to Jim Speyer, himself, for devoting so much time to recording
his own memoirs and his recollections of his mentor, Mies van der Rohe. Speyer’s honest
and open recollections of his early years, his family, and his invaluable experiences and
friendship with a legend of twentieth-century architecture, reveal a great deal about him as
a man who was internationally respected in his professions of architecture and museum
administration, but who personally remained an enigma to all but a few close friends. I
thank him for his willingness to share his unique and personal perspectives, so we could all
become better acquainted with the engaging personality and generous spirit of Jim Speyer.

Pauline Saliga
Associate Curator of Architecture
The Art Institute of Chicago
1990

We are grateful to the Illinois Humanities Council for a grant awarded to the Department of
Architecture in 2000 to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on The Art
Institute of Chicago's website. Annemarie van Roessel deserves our thanks for her masterful
handling of this phase of the process.

Betty J. Blum
March 2001

vii
 A. JAMES SPEYER

Saliga: Today is Wednesday, June 11, 1986, and I’m speaking with A. James Speyer

in his office at The Art Institute of Chicago. Jim, I wonder if you could tell me

a little bit about why you chose architecture as your first career.

Speyer: I chose architecture because from early childhood I wanted to be a painter. It

was the usual thing—my father felt that I should have a profession and that I

couldn’t be sure of making a living as a painter. My mother, who was a

painter and sculptor, wanted to encourage me, and did. She always

encouraged me to be in the arts. She wondered if architecture might be a kind

of middle ground a profession and the arts. I think that’s really why I did it. I

had always been interested in buildings, even as a child, and I’d always

loved to look at them. I had traveled abroad a fair amount, even as a boy

before college. So, I had a preparation for architecture, and it seemed like a

good solution.

Saliga: You said that you traveled a lot. Do you remember which was the first

building that really made an impression on you?

Speyer: I think so but I’d have to really think about it to be honest about it. I could

conjure something, but I would like to be factual about it, and I’m not sure

1
 that I can be factual. You know, it’s like having seen too many reproductions

of a work of art. You’re not sure whether you know the work well because

you’ve seen it that many times or because you’ve seen the reproductions. I’ll

think about that and you can ask me another time and maybe as I think about

it, it will come clear.

Saliga: Since your mother was involved in the art world in Pittsburgh, were you

involved in the art world as a community? Did you belong to arts

organizations or arts clubs?

Speyer: Where I was born, in Pittsburgh, my mother was a member of what was

called the “Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” which was a

group of professional artists who exhibited annually at the museum, the

same kind of thing we have in the Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. As a

matter of fact, my mother took me to museums in my pram. I know, she told

me. She used to take me when I was not yet able to walk. When I got a little

older she would take me to museums in New York. My family always took

my brother and me abroad with them. They would take us to the museums

abroad. My brother hated to go and I loved to go.

Saliga: Museums and architecture, it all seems to blend together at one point.

Speyer: My father always encouraged my mother in her art pursuits. This included

the fact that my mother was a very well informed amateur in decorative arts,

2
 painting, and sculpture as well as being a creative artist. And so my parents

collected paintings and old furniture.

Saliga: Did that influence you later in your collecting?

Speyer: I think it influenced me enormously. When I was as young as, say, sixteen my

father thought it was very good for me to be exposed to the art world in a

kind of semi-professional way and he would send me to auctions with a

certain amount of money and a list of the things he wanted me to bid on for

him. Before the Parke-Bernet or Christie’s it was the American Auction

Gallery and the Andersen Auction Gallery.

Saliga: And that too prepared you for eventual career in the museum.

Speyer: Right.

Saliga: So basically you came from a family that was appreciative of the arts and

architecture and so forth.

Speyer: My father was a business man, he was an investment banker, but he was very

enthusiastic about the arts as a kind of quiet, not at all ostentatious, patron.

He was not at all in favor of the arts for me as a profession. He wanted me to

be a businessman.

Saliga: So was he happy then when you decided to go to Carnegie [Institute]?

3
Speyer: He was more happy than if I had been going to study painting, but he was

less happy than if I had gone to study business. He was a diehard and he was

convinced that I would end up going into business, that I would see the light.

Fortunately, I never did.

Saliga: Why did you choose to go to Carnegie then?

Speyer: I didn’t really choose. I had a choice. When I graduated from preparatory

high school I was offered, by my father, the choice of staying in the city,

where my parents lived and going to Carnegie Institute of Technology, which

at that time had quite a good Beaux-Arts architectural school, or of going

away to school. But, if I went to Carnegie and stayed at home, he would let

me go to Europe during the summers. If I went away to school, I would have

to stay home in the summers.

Saliga: That’s pretty complicated.

Speyer: My parents always went away in the winter. So, I figured that I could stay at

home in the winter and be pretty much alone and get away in the summer.

So, that is why I chose it, and also Carnegie was quite a good school. Actually

I got along very nicely in Carnegie as far as I was concerned. I didn’t get very

good grades, but I got the best grades in what was called freehand drawing

and painting, and I spent much more time on that. I did very poorly in

4
 mathematics and physics and so forth. But I managed to get through.

Saliga: That’s the downfall of many architects.

Speyer: That’s right. I was very much on the art side of architecture, of the design

side. I had some excellent teachers.

Saliga: Who do you recall specifically?

Speyer: I couldn’t tell you the name of one of them. I have blanked out Carnegie

because I really have sort of blanked out my boyhood in Pittsburgh because I

never liked Pittsburgh very much. I want nothing to do with alumnus status

at Carnegie. I feel that I really wasted my time to a considerable extent.

Saliga: Did you feel that the curriculum was a good curriculum?

Speyer: I was not very interested in the Beaux-Arts curriculum. I did pretty well in

the big renderings, but I hated the formalistic focus and the lack of any kind

of intelligent analysis of architecture. It was all formalistic; you know the

Beaux-Arts is by definition. I feel that except for the painting and drawing,

and I spent a great deal of time painting and drawing, that I was wasting my

time. I hated the mathematics. I had to take almost every mathematics course

over at least once if not twice, I mean twice if not three times. It was quite

arduous. I liked some of my teachers.

5
Saliga: When they were teaching you to actually do the design work though, to

actually design a building, was that based from the plan of the building? Did

you start with the plan of the building?

Speyer: You know the Beaux-Arts system. The Beaux-Arts systems is, of course, a

kind of mock monumentality and it certainly is a Neo-Baroque or Neoclassic

direction for the most part although we did simplify things, after all this was

in the l930s. It was following the mainstream of Art Deco and simplified

classical forms. It was, after all, the time of Mussolini and Hitler. I think the

Beaux-Arts system, since it was certainly nonpolitical, frequently would

dispense with the classic orders after the first year or two. In the free design

of the third, fourth or fifth years [students] would do the so-called

“simplified modern,” like the Palmolive Building here, and the Carbon and

Carbide Building. I was just trying to relate the kind of forms that I was

exposed to in answer to your question.

Saliga: But that wasn’t something that you particularly responded to?

Speyer: I was good at that. I was agile. I could make pretty good compositions. My

only distinction in college was as a designer. I didn’t like the formal

renderings. I liked sketch renderings. I didn’t like those wash drawings. I was

never very good at stretching those huge papers. Sometimes the papers on

which we rendered would be six feet long by four feet wide and you had to

6
 stretch them on the table. I stretched them badly. I just was not a good

technician. I could draw, but I didn’t like any of the other things.

Saliga: Did you practice architecture while you were in school? Did you work with

an architect?

Speyer: No, never. Any time that I had free I would paint. I had a studio at home and

I painted.

Saliga: While you were studying at Carnegie in 1932 MoMA [The Museum of

Modern Art] held the International Style exhibition. Were you aware of that

at all?

Speyer: Yes, but not as much as I should have been until later.

Saliga: How did you learn about the exhibition through fellow students?

Speyer: Through friends, fellow students. I had a couple of enlightened teachers. I’m

sorry I can’t tell you their names. They were never outstanding architects, but

they certainly had an influence on me because they taught me a lot and they

were very indulgent.

Saliga: Did you see the International Style exhibition?

Speyer: No, I never saw it. Philip Johnson’s and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s exhi-

7
 bition, no. That was concomitant to the kind of schooling that I had. I didn’t

know about it until a couple of years later. I mean I didn’t understand what it

meant. I was sheltered from the best exposure by the discipline of the school.

Saliga: You said that you traveled quite a bit. Was travel built into the curriculum as

well?

Speyer: No, but it was certainly a great help. You asked me earlier what were the first

buildings of which I was aware. I really am very poor about remembering

things or being sure that I remembered them when I was little. I think the

first time I went to Europe I was eight or nine years old. I had been to New

York and I’d been to cities in America before that. I think it would be almost

guessing if I said what I remembered as a little boy.

Saliga: What would you guess?

Speyer: The normal dull thing, I remember the skyscrapers in New York, that

certainly. The thing that I think I remember most clearly were the palaces, the

Baroque palaces like Versailles or the palaces in London, whether it’s

Buckingham or the great urban squares. I certainly remember palaces, I was

always very interested in the opulence of palaces and the cathedrals. I think

the Eiffel Tower impressed me. I’m sure of that. That remains one of the

things that I consider most exciting in the cityscape.

8
Saliga: Simply because of its structure?

Speyer: Its beauty, yes.

Saliga: Getting back to your early schooling, did you feel that you were adequately

prepared for a career in architecture after going to Carnegie?

Speyer: I did not, no. I felt that I had a very warped education from the beginning.

My father’s father died a year after he was born, or the year he was born. My

father’s mother, my grandmother, was not a very decisive woman. She sent

my father to boarding school from the time he was something like six or

seven. He grew up with a passionate hatred of boarding schools and being

schooled away from home. As a result he over reacted and he never sent me

to school. I was the oldest child. He didn’t send me to school, or my brother,

nor my sister, as they became old enough to learn, until we were really a

good deal older than when one normally starts in grade school. We were

tutored at home. This had undoubted advantages, not the least of which was

the fact that the teaching process was started earlier than it could have been

started in a conventional school. It also emphasized things that my parents

thought were important. The disadvantages were, one, that the teachers were

never good enough and two, there was no association with kids our own age

so we had a lot to make up when we finally did go to school.

9
Saliga: When did you finally go to a conventional school?

Speyer: I don’t think I went to school until maybe twelve or something. I almost

didn’t go to grade school at all; I went to high school. The reason I mentioned

my father so much is because you asked about education. My father dictated

the education. My mother was very intelligent about it, but there wasn’t

anything she could do. My father was determined on that score. He was not

tyrannical, it wasn’t that. He was just determined. I learned a lot of peculiar

things from my parents and from certain private tutors that I wouldn’t have

learned in school.

Saliga: Like what, languages?

Speyer: I learned languages in traveling. I learned to speak French fluently when I

was ten years old because we lived in France for a year or more.

Saliga: Was that related to your father’s work?

Speyer: No. My father was very interested in certain literature and my mother was

very interested in art so they did a lot of teaching. They taught us a lot, but

not formally. The tutors we had were not high enough caliber or they weren’t

well rounded enough, or something. In any case, it was a very peculiar and

warped education but ultimately it all settled down and worked out very

well. But it took a long time.

10
Saliga: After you left Carnegie you studied in London and in Paris?

Speyer: Yes. I went to London and I studied at the Chelsea Polytechnic.

Saliga: I’m not familiar with that school.

Speyer: I don’t even know if it still exists. I studied architecture and painting.

Saliga: Was that in order to round out what you had learned at Carnegie?

Speyer: Yes, and I liked living abroad. I learned a lot of other peripheral things too. I

spent a lot of time in museums, and I spent a lot of time painting. It was very

interesting.

Saliga: But you also studied architecture there?

Speyer: Yes.

Saliga: Was that also in the Beaux-Arts system?

Speyer: It was and it wasn’t very good. Actually what happened was, that I picked

up a lot of independent information.

Saliga: Like what?

11
Speyer: I mean about architecture, just by going around and looking. I think that you

will find as you talk to me that my education in architecture was not very

profound until I came to study with Mies. That was the whole idea. That’s

why I ultimately came to study with him.

Saliga: When you were in London and Paris were you aware of Le Corbusier?

Speyer: Yes, I was, certainly. I was aware of the International Style but I hadn’t

absorbed it really. I didn’t know quite what it meant. It began to mean

something to me at that time.

Saliga: You began seeing more International Style buildings?

Speyer: I began seeing more, understanding more what it meant. Having been

exposed to nothing like that professionally, oh nothing is an exaggeration. I

was certainly exposed to all kinds of pseudo-contemporary Art Deco

architects, even in school. It was not until I went to Europe alone in the years

after I left Carnegie that I began to understand the International Style.

Saliga: At that point were you reading Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture?

Speyer: Yes. And I started reading lots of things. When I came back to America I

decided that I had better study somewhere and really learn something. There

was a period in between when I wasn’t sure what to do. I had never worked

12
 in an architectural office. I worked in a very peculiar architectural office, and

that was in an office in the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.

Saliga: This was after you came back from Europe?

Speyer: Yes. Don’t ask me the year because I never remember the years, but you may

have them.

Saliga: It had to have been around 1937?

Speyer: That’s right. I was enjoying Pittsburgh at that time. I enjoyed it when I came

back because I was independent of my schooling, and parents and so forth, to

a considerable degree. I was offered a job as the head designer in a big office

in the Pittsburgh Plate Class Company, which was developing designs for

the use of their products. Naturally glass was their product, and the kind of

glass they had, in addition to plate glass and glass blocks was an opaque

glass in colors. I don’t know whether their trade name was “Vitrolite” or

“Corara”. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen those colors, that kind of

glass. They were used for theater lobbies, bathrooms, storefronts. It was a

very beautiful product. It was not a big office but it was a kind of adjunct, it

was a kind of elite adjunct, to the big operations of the Pittsburgh Plate Class

Company. There was a man in charge of it who made me the chief designer,

and he let me pretty much do what I wanted. I made experimental designs

using those products.

13
Saliga: What kind of designs?

Speyer: All kinds. I mean interiors, exteriors, obviously not whole buildings, even

furniture out of glass. I did that for about a year. It paid very well and I

didn’t have to ask my family for money and I could go to New York a lot. By

that time I was not only very aware of everything going on in the

International Style, but I knew a great many of the people involved.

Saliga: Like who?

Speyer: I knew Philip Johnson, I knew John McAndrew who followed Philip Johnson

as Curator of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. I knew Edgar

Kaufmann, Jr. who was the Curator of Industrial Design, a section that I

don’t think is autonomous anymore. It’s under architecture. Then I got to

know Alfred Barr and Rene d’Harnoncourt. They really were great influences

on me, wonderful influences. I learned a great deal from them about

architecture, painting and the contemporary idiom in the arts. It was thus

that I began to realize more and more poignantly how little I knew, although

I had been aware of it for some time. I got to know a lot of people; I went to

all the exhibitions and I was very strongly influenced by the Museum of

Modern Art in all of its manifestations. This didn’t start, I would say, until

about 1935 [or 1937]. The International exhibition was when?

14
Saliga: 1932.

Speyer: I said it was a couple years later, didn’t I? I also was very strongly influenced

at that time, when I was living in Pittsburgh, by an architect from Vienna

who was with the Wiener Werkstätte and who, although quite a bit older

than I, became a very close friend. His name was Laszlo Gabor. Laszlo Gabor

was working in the Kaufmann Department Store. The Edgar Kaufmann

family came from a line of department store owners. I had this very close

friend, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who was the grandson of the founder of the

Kaufmann department stores. His father modernized and really made very

elaborate and handsome the interiors of the Kaufmann Department Store.

Just as it was very stylish in New York for Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth

Avenue and Wanamaker’s stores...

Saliga: Do you mean modernized in the sense of Art Deco?

Speyer: I was going to tell you that they modernized them at that time but what they

did was to modernize them in the sense of Art Deco. The Kaufmann

Department Store spent a great deal of money doing this very elaborate

installation. In the process they brought over this man from the Wiener

Werkstätte. The man from the Wiener Werkstätte was far ahead of Art Deco.

He started doing more advanced things in certain areas of the department

store. I learned a great deal from him simply by being a friend of his and

seeing what he did and having him explain it to me. Also, through my close

15
 friendship near Fallingwater, I followed the whole progress of development

of Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Saliga: That is one thing that I wanted to ask you about, since I believe you were in

Europe at that point when the building was begun?

Speyer: No, I wasn’t. I was in Pittsburgh. It is fifty years old this year. It was begun in

1936. They’re having big celebrations, so I know it’s a fact.

Saliga: What did you think about Fallingwater? What kind of impact did it have on

you?

Speyer: By that time I was absolutely a rigid International School man. I thought it

was terribly romantic. But it was so romantic that it was irresistible. My

friend Laszlo Gabor who, as I said, was also a very close friend of the

Kaufmann family, and I were shocked by the romantic aspect. But on the

other hand, nobody could help but be impressed by it. I was impressed by it

and I have grown to love it dearly. By that time I was absolutely

indoctrinated—indoctrinated is the wrong word—I was simply acceptive,

indoctrinated by myself. I believed in the International [Style]. That was what

I wanted to do.

Saliga: The International Style, when it was in Europe, had political overtones. It was

an architecture for a new world. When it came to America it lost a lot of the

16
 political overtones. Is that what you mean when you say you believed in it or

you believed in its forms?

Speyer: I believed in it as the right expression in architecture, not politically. I make

no pretense of being ideologically involved in a political way, but I was

ideologically involved in an aesthetic way.

Saliga: When you were learning about the International Style in Europe, did you get

a sense of that, that there was a whole political ideology attached?

Speyer: Yes, sure, only to the extent that it was for a better life, that it was a better

kind of architecture for a better and truer kind of life. I was interested in the

humanitarian aspect of contemporary architecture, but I was mainly

interested in it aesthetically. I was interested in it as an architectural ideology.

Saliga: Often times critics of the International Style will criticize that very fact. They

think it’s not humanitarian.

Speyer: Which I think it was at that time. I can see the argument since, but I think it

was [humanitarian] and I think it was abused, but I don’t think that it was

basically wrong. I don’t believe for one minute that it was wrong.

Saliga: What made it more humanitarian then?

17
Speyer: I think it was done more carefully and more logically. As it was mass-

produced, it became inhumane and inappropriate. I think that the use of

glass, for example, was exaggerated. It was exaggerated and contradicted its

purpose. I think the cheapness of construction belied the quality of innate

simplicity. I mean if a simplification allowed for some economic saving, it

should not necessarily have been interpreted in a flimsy fashion.

Saliga: Getting back to your friend Mr. Cabot, did he design in the International

Style as well?

Speyer: Yes. He was almost more of the so-called “Viennese modern” school after the

Secession, and his furniture designs were almost Scandinavian. He did some

very beautiful furniture designs. He did some very good interiors. He did a

couple of charming, but not significant, houses.

Saliga: In Pennsylvania?

Speyer: In Pennsylvania, but not significant. His main work was, indeed, in the

Kaufmann department store where he was the chief architect. He was a

brilliant man and he had worked with, I forget which well-known German

and Viennese architects. He was, as I said, a very important influence on me

because he acquainted me with and expanded on the subject of the [modern]

18
 movement in Europe thoroughly digested. I mean [he illuminated] things as

fundamental as the Bauhaus, the Secession, and even the superficialities of

Art Deco. He helped relate a great many things to their real structure.

Saliga: Do you know if any of his designs for the Kaufmann department store still

exist?

Speyer: It’s a good question. I don’t know. I doubt it. I know that I have a couple of

chairs that are not distinguished, they’re just nice chairs, much better than

average chairs. Everything he did was much better than average.

Saliga: Those were designed for the [Kaufmann] department store as well?

Speyer: I think they were designed for himself. I had them copied or he had them

copied for me. He was very talented, but not a great architect. As I said, at

this time I was being stimulated very much by all the people around the

Museum of Modern Art, most of whom were older than I. But then I met

younger people who were around the Museum of Modern Art. It had a great

influence on my development.

Saliga: It was almost like post-graduate training for you?

Speyer: Yes. Then, as I say, while I was in Pittsburgh I began to realize that I had to

study really seriously. I knew enough about architecture and knew enough

19
 about my interest in it. By this time, incidentally, I realized that my painting

was a pleasure, but not a great success. Maybe I knew by that time I was too

interested in museum painting, and I didn’t think I was good enough, or

whatever.

Saliga: Did you try to exhibit your paintings?

Speyer: I did exhibit, but not importantly. I never had a gallery, but I certainly

exhibited them in group exhibitions. I don’t think I was a very good painter. I

was skillful, but I don’t think it was significant. On the other hand, by this

time I really was very, very interested in architecture. I applied to Harvard to

study with Gropius. Gropius accepted me in graduate school and I was going

there, the timing might have been that this was in June or something, or

maybe it was in the winter (I’m guessing) 1937. I was with Mies I think 1939

and 1940. Is that correct? Or was it 1938 and 1939? I think it’s 1939 and 1940.

[n.b. Mies began teaching at IIT in the fall of 1938, and Speyer’s Master’s

thesis from IIT is dated September, 1939, per Schulze, p. 219 and Speyer’s

thesis on microfilm at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.]

Saliga: But you applied to Harvard?

Speyer: I applied to Harvard. I was accepted. I went to see Gropius, although I had

met him previously.

20
Saliga: Did you meet him through the Museum of Modern Art?

Speyer: Through people I knew at the Museum of Modern Art. I had visited

Cambridge, Boston and I went to see him. He said I could come study with

him. I should think it must have been about the middle of the year and I was

going the following September. And in about August or July my friend Mr.

Gabor, who comes up again, knew that I was very interested in Mies van der

Robe and his work. He said that he had heard through the European

architectural grapevine that Mies van der Rohe was coming to America to

work in Chicago, but that it could not be announced because if it were

announced the Nazis wouldn’t let him leave Germany. If you remember, he

had come to America for the Resor House in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He had

spent the better part of the summer [in America], with James Johnson

Sweeney and Philip Johnson in New York, and with the Resors, I think in the

East as well as at their ranch in the West. You know about that don’t you?

You know about the Resor House?

Saliga: Why don’t you tell me.

Speyer: All right, I’ll tell you. One of the people who he saw when he went through

Chicago to go to the Resor House was John Holabird. I think John Holabird,

Sr. was his name. Mr. Holabird was the head of the Holabird and Root

architectural firm in Chicago at that time. Mr. Holabird was also the

Chairman of the Board, I believe, or he was an important trustee, of the

21
 Armour Institute of Technology, which had an architectural school [n.b. John

A. Holabird headed the search committee for the director of the architecture

school of the Armour Institute of Technology. Schulze, p. 205]. Mr. Holabird

asked Mies van der Rohe if he would consider being the head of the

architectural school of the Armour Institute of Technology. Mies accepted.

All of this I know from Mies later. I was told by my friend Gabor that Mies

was expected to arrive incognito in Chicago and that the only way to find out

was to go out there. I would have much preferred to study with Mies van der

Robe than with Gropius.

Saliga: Why?

Speyer: Because I thought he was much better and a much more interesting architect,

a much greater architect. I was going to Harvard with certain reservations

because I never had thought of Gropius as a great architect. I’ve always

thought of Gropius as a great activist in architecture and a kind of arbiter of

taste, and not a great architect. I don’t think he ever was. He almost never did

anything on his own. He always was working with a partner. He was a

brilliant and articulate and serious man, but he was not a great architect, in

my opinion. I always thought that Mies was. I don’t want to be pretentious,

but I want to emphasize I was not aware of the International Exhibition at the

Museum of Modern Art in 1932 when I was abroad. Nor did I go to Europe

with a prior conviction about the International School, but by this time I

certainly knew it very well. It was my life and conviction. Anything that I

22
 was designing was being designed in that idiom and I wanted to expand my

information and education in that connection. I was going to Gropius simply

faute de mieux because there wasn’t any other school that I thought was as

good in America or anywhere else. I would have gone to Europe if I thought

there was a better school, but by this time there was no Bauhaus.

Saliga: Were you considering the Bauhaus?

Speyer: I thought of it, but there was no Bauhaus. You know the Bauhaus was closed

by then. I was always quite unpolitical so that I wasn’t paying too much

attention to politics. But I certainly was at the same time aware of Fascism. I

didn’t want to get involved in a fascistic country. I wanted to avoid it like the

plague. So when I heard that Mies was in Chicago my friend Gabor, as I say,

was in what I’m calling the “architectural underground.” This was a time

when so many Europeans in the arts were coming to America and one heard

about their colleagues through them and their friends and their peers in the

field. This is how Gabor heard about it. I went on a train, came to Chicago

where I’d never been before, did a little research through the Holabird and

Root office, found out that Mies van der Rohe might be at the Stevens Hotel,

which is now the Hilton Hotel. I called him and he was, indeed, there. He

had arrived a couple of days before. I didn’t speak one word of German and

he didn’t speak one word of English. I made a date somehow over the

telephone. I met him in the 18th-century-shrouded salon of the Stevens Hotel.

We got along very well. He accepted me and I cancelled out of Harvard and

came to Chicago. That’s how I came to Chicago.

23
Saliga: How did you communicate with him if you didn’t speak German?

Speyer: Don’t ask. I have no idea. I think I grunted and showed him drawings. I took

a bunch of drawings with me.

Saliga: Drawings from your job in Pittsburgh?

Speyer: My own drawings. I had done quite a few designs by then, architectural

designs, that were not very good but they were a lot better than I ever did in

school.

Saliga: They were a lot different.

Speyer: Yes. I showed him those and I showed him my paintings. Somehow I

conveyed to him that I didn’t think I knew as much about the principles of

architecture as I should. He accepted me and, thus, I became his first

graduate student in Chicago.

Saliga: Do you have any sense about why the Armour Institute changed so

dramatically, why they decided to change their system from the Beaux-Arts

system to Modernism?

Speyer: I can only tell you a few things. For one thing, I think that the Armour

Institute was almost like a poor man’s architectural school. It almost existed,

24
 it seemed to me coming from the outside, as a training ground for draftsmen,

for well-to-do young architects who went to the eastern schools, came back

here and became partners of important firms. All the fashionable and well-to-

do firms or their members, the architects, hired these people from Armour

for their draftsmen.

Saliga: Who do you mean?

Speyer: Just one after another. Almost nobody graduated from Armour who was

distinguished, I think. You name it, I think that all the Chicago firms hired

draftsmen from the Armour Institute. I was appalled. There was a big gap

between the level of cultivation of the students at Armour compared to a

school like the one I’d gone to, Carnegie Institute.

Saliga: So even though you didn’t think your education from Carnegie was

complete, you thought the education one would get from Armour was less

complete?

Speyer: Terrible, Armour was very poor. Oh no, when I was at Carnegie I had a

minor in the history of art. I learned a great deal about that. I had a minor in

painting and I learned a great deal about that. The history of art was very

good, and I studied widely in that area. There is no comparison. It was a

much more lively school. I always heard John Holabird was enlightened and

I’ve heard it from different people, but I never heard it more clearly than

25
 from Mies, himself. He thought very highly of John Holabird. I think

[Holabird] realized what a poor school it was. Let me interrupt myself to say

that I went to Armour when it was still in the Art Institute [of Chicago]. At

the same time there was a campus on the South Side where there were those

old 19 th-century or early 20th-century buildings. There are two or three on the

campus now. The architectural school was in the Art Institute, which was

great. I was able to take some painting courses here while I was studying

with Mies, for example. The classrooms were not great.

Saliga: They were in the area above the skylights?

Speyer: Some were in the area above the skylights and some were in the basement.

They were not great, but it was a thrill to be able to come into the Art

Institute every day. At that time it was not jammed like today and you could

really look at things.

Saliga: At that point the cast collections were still on view in the 1930s.

Speyer: Yes, they certainly were. The building was a much more beautiful building.

Buckingham Hall was a wonderful space.

Saliga: The Blackstone Hall?

Speyer: Blackstone Hall, not Buckingham. I don’t know whether you remember the

pictures. That was literally a three- or four-story space, I forget how high. It

26
 had catwalks going over the big recessed gallery in the middle, which had

casts below. It had these great sculptures of Verrocchio and Donatello, the

equestrian statues, on each side. In any case, it was a thrill to be working in

the Art Institute. But to finish my answer to your question, I just think that

Armour Institute was not dignified by, shall we say, the gentry in Chicago. It

was kind of a poor man’s school, if not poor economically, it was poor in a

cultured way. I’m not expressing it well, maybe. Do you know what I’m

trying to say? It was simply a neglected school, I think, at the time I came. I

think John Holabird, and evidently others had it in their minds to improve

this, and they certainly did. What I started to say was that I went to school at

Armour when it was at the Art Institute. I then left the school. Mies invited

me to teach at the school, and I left for the summer. That was the summer

that the war broke, and I was drafted into the Army. I did not come back, in

fact, for five years. I was in the Army for five years. During that period

Armour Institute moved and Henry Heald started this whole magnificent

concept of the new campus.

Saliga: So he was Mies’s major patron really?

Speyer: First in America.

Saliga: Other than the Resors.

Speyer: Oh, yeah, right. Oh, no, if you want to do that, Mies’s first patrons were

27
 James Johnson Sweeney, for whom he did an apartment in New York, several

years before and Philip Johnson, for whom he did an apartment in New

York. Then he came to America, did the Resor house, then he came back to

America, stayed, and began the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Saliga: Today is Thursday, June 12, 1986 and I’m continuing my interview with A.

James Speyer in his office at the Art Institute. What more do you want to say

about Armour?

Speyer: When I talked yesterday about the Armour Institute of Technology that I

encountered when I came to Chicago from Pittsburgh, I said that I had the

impression that Armour Institute, for the most part, seemed to be a place

which raised draftsmen for the offices of principal architects who had gone

east to college and who came back to Chicago and did most of the work. This

impression was reinforced during my first couple of years in Chicago.

Saliga: You likened it to an employment agency.

Speyer: Not an agency like an employment agency. It really developed employees; it

developed draftsmen. This was almost like a limited technical school. On the

other hand, when I came back to Chicago from the Army around 1945, and

the school had moved to Illinois Institute of Technology, Mies had been the

director for a number of years. There was a whole new faculty. I think there

was also a whole new approach, a whole new spirit. I think this is, of a whole

28
 new approach, a whole new spirit. I think this is, of course, no longer true. I

think that Mies’s advent emancipated the architectural school and that from

the time Mies was there, certain graduates from the architectural school

transcended being draftsmen and became principals and had their own

firms, among the best firms in the city.

Saliga: When you say emancipation, you mean that the school turned out people

who really could function primarily as designers?

Speyer: It improved. Yes, I don’t know why the situation that I described first

obtained. Maybe it was simply a matter of money. Maybe it was simply the

fact that the students who were more fortunate were able to afford to go Out

of Chicago to architectural school, maybe to Cranbrook, Princeton, Yale, MIT

or wherever. It seemed a rather sad situation. I felt badly about it.

Saliga: That leads me directly to one of the first things I wanted to ask you today. As

you saw it, what was the difference between the new curriculum at IIT and

the Beaux-Arts curriculum? The differences must have been vast.

Speyer: It was literally the difference between night and day. I never paid much

attention, or if I did, I don’t remember what the curriculum was for

undergraduate students. Certainly undergraduate studies at IIT had been

Beaux-Arts, and certainly from the time small number of faculty members

29
 who remained after Mies came. Obviously, he couldn’t just come in and

sweep everybody out. I don’t think that was his goal, although I think his

goal was to choose from the older faculty, the existing faculty, those who

might prove to be the most effective and most sympathetic to his ideas. When

I came in I never was conscious of the previous curriculum or their

achievements, and I never paid any attention to it. Of course, I can tell you

very succinctly the difference between the new curriculum, Mies’s

curriculum, and the Beaux-Arts curriculum. I almost think that that

description should be very brief because it’s so well known. However, if you

want me to expand on it, I’m happy to do so.

Saliga: Can you describe it briefly?

Speyer: I should say that, first of all, when I came I was doing graduate studies. I,

therefore, was not going through the curriculum. Because I had never been

through a curriculum such as Mies and his associates envisioned, they had

me do a kind of crash course in what was substantially the Bauhaus

curriculum or program for study. Namely, you first learn how to use your

tools, the pencil, pen, paintbrush, or the crayon and then you learn how to

draw, whether freehand or mechanically. You then learn what kind of paint

gives you what kind of effect, so in a very real sense, you are learning the

limitations and possibilities of materials. Then you study construction. You

study simple construction, and you go from simple construction to more

complicated construction. The essential of Mies’s curriculum was always

30
from simple to more complicated. He always felt that one should not be

given something where they were over their head and where the student

would be frightened or dismayed and, therefore, uncomfortable and not able

to find a solution. In finding a solution to a simple problem, he prepared

himself to then face a more complicated problem and find a solution to that.

Whereas, if he were given a problem for which he was not prepared at all, he

would fail and this would discourage him and put him back rather than put

him ahead. Really, just briefly, the essential module of construction with

which the student was presented was a brick. A brick is, as you know, a

certain size. Now I’m ashamed to say I almost forget. I think it’s 2 3/4 x 1 1/2

x 7 3/4, but I’m not sure. It’s very close to that. With the mortar joint, a brick

and a mortar joint become a unit. The student was taught how to put

together these little units. Starting with a simple problem and always going

to a more complicated problem, he learned how to build with a brick, and

with more than one brick. Perhaps the next problem would be to build with

the module of a board, a wooden board, or a wooden timber. The same

principle applied, although you were much freer in using boards and wood

because you can cut wood to a certain length and you can’t manipulate a

brick. You would then go to reinforced concrete or steel. There are many

possibilities in between. In any case, I was given this kind of crash course just

31
 so I would have an understanding of how the elements of the curriculum

were related. But my main interest and my main preoccupation was with

planning. It is true that I had already studied steel construction, although

heaven knows I had never studied brick construction and it was a great

advantage and a great accomplishment to learn it. I could do it since I was

studying alone, since I was more mature than I would have been were I a

freshman in this course. I was able to do it more quickly and also I was able

to work very hard. I worked with Mies every day and I could work late at

night. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to work all the time. I also studied

sculpture with [Alexander] Archipenko at the Institute of Design, during this

period, and I studied painting with various people at the Art Institute.

Finally, I was enjoying the Mies training so much and was so involved with it

that I dropped the other things. I guess the history of my life is that I

successively dropped various side interests in favor of architecture, which is

something you asked me yesterday. I should say that Mies came to this

country with—if he were a general—two major adjacencies. One was

[Walter] Peterhans and one was [Ludwig] Hilberseimer. Hilberseimer, of

course, was in charge of planning, urbanism, city planning, and the study of

function. Peterhans was an aesthetician and he was in charge of what was

called visual training. Visual training is a very eloquent title for a subject

which is exactly that. The visual training was in painting, drawing and

photography.

Saliga: You said that the crash course that you went through was like a

32
 Bauhaus course of study. Did it also include anything about the Bauhaus

philosophy of designing the entire project from the inside out? For instance,

in addition to designing the building, designing the furnishings?

Speyer: I haven’t told you the project that I worked on. That might answer your

question.

Saliga: We’re getting to that. Just to go back for a minute, you said that there were

professors at IIT who could subscribe to Mies’s philosophy or could try to

teach in that vein. Do you remember who any of them were?

Speyer: I don’t remember their names. I know them when I hear them, but I don’t

remember their names. There were a couple of very nice men who remained.

The rest quit. I don’t have any idea because I was so new and so strange to

the situation myself that it is not as though I had been at the school when a

new director came. I came with the new director and I was simply oblivious

to what had passed before and I was not really very interested. I mean it’s

clear that any Beaux-Arts people would not have been comfortable with

Mies. I don’t even know what work they did. I cannot remember ever

looking at a project. I’m sure I did, but I don’t remember them. There were

several students in the senior class with whom I became very friendly. The

most important, which is a friendship that has lasted all my life, is George

Danforth. There were quite a few other young men in the school with whom I

was friendly at the time. I very much enjoyed being at the school, and I

33
 particularly enjoyed being alone. Although I worked in a corner of the senior

drafting room, I was really alone and I didn’t report to anybody but to Mies.

Ultimately, I also worked with Hilberseimer, to some extent, and with

Peterhans. You asked me if there was a unified approach to a variety of

subjects, like furniture, costume, decoration, as in the Jugendstil or the

Bauhaus. I don’t think that came up specifically, but it was something of

which I was very aware. I had eclectic interests. I was very interested in

traditional styles of furniture, or traditional styles of decorative objects. I

remember that in one early study that I did with Mies, instead of a

freestanding wall I used a 17th-century Belgian tapestry hanging in the space.

Mies was very surprised when he came and saw that.

Saliga: What did he think of it?

Speyer: He liked it very much. He encouraged me to use it. My whole experience

with Mies was that he was not at all doctrinaire in a narrow way. He was

absolutely principled and these principles were straight and concentrated. I

have never felt his imagination was limited. I will never forget the tapestry

because it was one of the early things that I did with him. He was very

pleased, I think. He was pleased that somebody thought of a tapestry being

used that way and not hanging on a wall, and I think he was pleased because

he liked the tapestry. We did more with furniture arrangement in buildings,

34
 in plans. I mean functionally and aesthetically, in every way. Furniture was

not an end, although I think it was always understood that the furniture

would be well designed.

Saliga: Would it have been designed by you? Not necessarily?

Speyer: I designed some furniture, very simple, like stone benches or stone tables. I

once made the mistake of trying to design a chair. It was not very good.

Saliga: Was that part of the curriculum, or are you talking about your independent

practice?

Speyer: No, it was never part of the curriculum to design furniture. In fact, among the

shortcomings of the IIT curriculum, in my opinion, was the fact that it was

too truncated a situation, too limited a time span. I think that it should have

been a graduate course. The students really should have gone to an

undergraduate school and had an unhampered suite of several years

working on nothing but architecture. As it was, the curriculum was

constantly being chiseled away from architecture by academics, which made

it difficult to give time for a broad enough exposure in other courses. I can

talk about that later. That actually was after the war and I came back to IIT as

a teacher. I think I should talk about the school in that context.

35
Saliga: You talked about the area that Mies covered and Hilberseimer and Peterhans,

that’s all pretty clear. What isn’t so clear to a lot of people is the way that the

different people taught. I understand that either Hilberseimer or Peterhans

taught with a Socratic method. Who do you think was the most effective

teacher?

Speyer: I don’t think there’s any comparison between Mies and the others. I think

Mies was just a great teacher for me. He did not talk very much.

Saliga: He couldn’t speak English at that point?

Speyer: He learned English fairly quickly. I had no trouble communicating. I can say

that because I believe it firmly. This is in spite of the fact that we really could

not have long conversations. Ultimately, when I came back from the Army he

was speaking as well as he ever spoke. He never was a glorious linguist, but

he was able to communicate quite well.

Saliga: What was it about his teaching that worked so well for you?

Speyer: In the first place it was trial and error. It was never doctrinaire.

Saliga: As the Beaux-Arts system would have been?

Speyer: As the Beaux-Arts system, I think, certainly was. Mies never said, “It has to

36
 be this way. He would say, “Yes, you could do it this way, but maybe there’s

another way. Why don’t you try this.” One tried one solution, and then made

a variation, and then another. Each of these would go through the mutations

of criticism and you simply found yourself climbing a ladder. I think that

Hilberseimer was very dry. He was very doctrinaire. He was dealing with a

subject that required that kind of authoritative handling. You could say that a

closet had to be a certain minimum depth to accommodate hanging clothes,

or a drawer was no good if it was shallower than a certain dimension unless

it was just for papers, and that a bed, if it were for a single person, should be

a certain minimum width—all these minimums and maximums were

elective. That kind of thing is very regulated. Also, Hilberseimer was a

master of regulation. I think he had an appreciation of fine arts, of aesthetics,

but he almost didn’t allow himself to exercise this in his own work. His own

work was conspicuously dry in my opinion.

Saliga: The city planning, you mean?

Speyer: I think the city planning is brilliant, the ideas were brilliant, the principles

were very fine, but the end result was, at its best, an illustration of the

principles. It left it open to the architect to expand that from a technically or

functionally correct solution to an architectural solution. I think this is true

when I see Hilberseimer’s own work.

Saliga: I was going to say that maybe if you gave me an example, it would be clearer.

37
Speyer: The student was asked, let’s say arbitrarily, to design an apartment building,

and put the beds, closets, desks and the dining room tables and plan the

kitchen and the bathrooms. There was an absolutely regulated minimum for

any one of these elements. You cannot have a dining room table that is

narrower than a certain dimension or you can’t put a plate on it. If it’s a table

for four people it has to be either, let’s say a square table or round table, a

long table that is so long and so wide minimum. Then you can make it as big

as you wish. If you were designing a minimum apartment, there’s a

minimum to the kitchen. You can have a U-shaped kitchen or you can have a

long, narrow kitchen, or you can have a square kitchen. Maybe with a square

kitchen you need a table in the middle to work on. Hilberseimer understood

perfectly all these principles of function. It was his job to have the student

learn what was the minimum requirement. That was not an architectural

solution; that was a functional solution. If the student learned how to plan a

minimal kitchen, then, perhaps if he had a good eye, he could make a

beautiful kitchen.

Saliga: That’s where Mies came in?

Speyer: That’s where the architect comes in. I think Mies made very beautiful

kitchens, as a matter of fact. A kitchen’s a bad example, but let’s talk about

dining room tables. Hilberseimer wouldn’t care whether the dining room

table was Macassar ebony…

38
Saliga: You were saying Hilberseimer wouldn’t care if the table was ebony or scrub

oak.

Speyer: He wouldn’t care if the table was Macassar ebony or whether it was Formica.

But, he knew that if it were a circular table, it could not be less than a certain

diameter and function. Then an architect, whether it was myself or whether it

was Mies van der Rohe, or Corbusier, any architect who wanted to raise

function to the level of art might make a dining room table that, instead of

being a two by four foot rectangle, might be two feet by ten. Still with the

same idea of function.

Saliga: How did Peterhans fit in all of this? You said he taught visual training?

Speyer: He taught aesthetics in the most essential way. His problems were designed

to train the eye and to develop a sense of proportion and to develop a skill in

execution, and to develop an understanding of color.

Saliga: Basically it seems that Hilberseimer and Peterhans provided you with the

basics that you then could take to a project with Mies and turn into a work of

architecture.

Speyer: Of course, but I think that I got much more from Mies than from the

39
 others. I got a lot from the others, but the important thing is what I got from

Mies.

Saliga: Was Mies an inspirational teacher? Was he inspirational as a person?

Speyer: He was for me.

Saliga: What do you most remember about him? What would be one of the most

remarkable characteristics you would remember?

Speyer: His patience, his concentration, the purity of his conviction, and the

unflinching devotion to his high principles.

Saliga: Do you think that he was able to continue communicating that on through

different generations of architects? You were his first graduate student.

Speyer: I had a marvelous dose of Mies.

Saliga: Because you were the only one.

Speyer: Yes, and I think he liked working with me. He gave me an awful lot of time.

He wasn’t with me every day by any means, maybe he was with me every

day, I don’t remember. He certainly wasn’t with me every hour or every

minute. He was very busy and I was very busy. He usually came to see me

pretty much every day or three or four days a week. This gave me enough

40
 time to do the work in between. He would stay with me for several hours.

Saliga: Critiquing your drawings?

Speyer: Yes, and models. We worked in three dimensions for the most part.

Drawings were usually a support for or an extension of the model. I learned

with him to visualize everything in three dimensions.

Saliga: That’s one thing that I wanted to ask you from yesterday, you said that when

you went to Carnegie one of the things that you enjoyed most was drawing. I

know that Mies taught primarily through models. I was wondering how that

worked for you—to design through models instead of through drawings,

since you preferred drawing originally.

Speyer: I did both. But I learned to visualize much better in three dimensions. And, as

I said, the drawings were a support for the model. I actually made drawings

to expand my understanding of the model. You know enough about Mies’s

own drawings and his sketches to know what this means in his case. I was

not trying to copy him in my technical direction, or my study direction. I

found that the model was infinitely more revealing than just drawing. Many

times I had to make drawings to know what I wanted to do in the model.

Saliga: To understand details?

41
Speyer: To expand my information about my invention of the details, to see how it

would work. The models were always abstract. The models were never

slavishly real. The models were precise, and if they weren’t precise Mies

would have a fit. If they weren’t precise, I couldn’t tell anything.

Saliga: You mean precisely proportioned?

Speyer: Yes, I mean they had to be exact dimensions. They had to be carefully made

so that one was not distracted by flaws in the work. That’s what I mean. But,

they were quite abstract. One didn’t draw all the bricks, if they were brick, or

the stone. Everything was abstract to a degree. If we were using stainless

steel columns we would use knitting needles, which were chromium and

delicate and a good proportion. If we were using stone, or marble, or wood

floors, we would use paper on the floor that would simulate the color and

maybe the texture of the material.

Saliga: Your models had color? I had the impression that they were white, like

Strathmore board or something like that.

Speyer: Yes, they had color. No, often one might make a white model just to quickly

put something together to see what it would look like. I sometimes worked

with as many as three models of the same thing at one time. It reveals more

of the problem than simply having one.

42
Saliga: It’s the process of trial and error again?

Speyer: Yes, I still do that here in an installation. I will make two or three models of

an installation in the museum and see which one looks better. I almost

always can make two. I can compare them and see which one looks better. I

would use white models, usually, only in the very preliminary stages. Once I

had an idea that the space was working in a white model, which I would

only make for myself, not for criticism, then I would use color. We used a

great deal of color. When I said that I had used a tapestry for example, I had

found a post card of a tapestry and I cut it out to the size of the wall. The

interiors were always simulated. If Mies wanted me to have a painting wall

or a picture wall, we would cut a frame out of a mat, and move it over a

Brace or a Picas reproduction and find a good section, cut it out, mount it,

and use it in the model.

Saliga: So your models were actually collaged?

Speyer: Very frequently, yes.

Saliga: How did the two-dimensional collages work into this then?

Speyer: They were simply a record of the three-dimensional model project.

Saliga: So they weren’t part of the design process?

43
Speyer: They were not a part of the design process. They were the end result because

you can’t keep the model. They became another step in the whole study

because the collages were approached from several points of view. One was

you were in effect making a “rendering,” to use the conventional

architectural term, of the model which you had completed to your

satisfaction. What you wanted to achieve, then was a two-dimensional

rendering that would catch the spirit of the model or building, and would

give a feeling for the space perhaps to an even greater extent than the model,

itself.

Saliga: Why would the models not have been kept?

Speyer: You can’t physically keep models. There’s no room for them.

Saliga: It’s just too difficult?

Speyer: And then they fall apart. This point about the two-dimensional collages is

very important. The collages are taken from models in all cases. I don’t know

whether you realize that.

Saliga: That’s something that I didn’t realize. I think a lot of people don’t realize how

they functioned.

44
Speyer: Let’s go back and think of it with other terms. The model is a building. We

must divorce ourselves from the idea that the model functions separately.

The model is simply a three-dimensional realization of a building on which

an architect is working. Given the fact that the model is not easily

transported, kept or stored, and not easily available for future viewing, the

two-dimensional work is meant to capture the entire spirit or essence of the

building that you had planned in model form and had drawn with measured

drawings. This is finest art of presentation for a project.

Saliga: They’re very beautiful.

Speyer: And they’re abstract. They’re abstract to a great degree, as I said the models

were. The drawings are not abstract, the drawings are very specific. The

collages, then, also offered possibility for Peterhans in his visual training to

enter into criticism. Mies would criticize and be very involved in these two-

dimensional works. He would spend hours on the exact form of a cut-out

piece of paper, the exact density of the paper or the shade of color. These

things took hours and they were very, very intricate.

Saliga: When Mies was critiquing a collage for hours, and you were with him, did

you find that you were following his process of conceptualization? Did you

know what decisions he was making in his mind?

45
Speyer: Yes, if I didn’t I would find out.

Saliga: But he didn’t always talk about it, did he?

Speyer: He could make it clear. I’m sorry to insist on that because it sounds so foolish.

We really did get along perfectly well. Perfectly is an exaggeration, I mean if

you can’t speak the language, it’s not easy. I remember when I used to go to

visit Mies at his hotel. He was staying at the Blackstone Hotel and we would

have dinner together. I used to spend time with him personally and socially

from the time that I arrived. I would have dinner with him, sometimes as

many as two or three times a week would go to his room after dinner and he

would show me the Paul Klee paintings he was buying at that time. We

would look at them and he would talk to me about them. He got across what

he wanted, but how he did it or how I understood I don’t know. We got

along very well. We understood each other.

Saliga: Do you know the basis of his interest in Paul Klee’s work?

Speyer: Before you ask me that I’d like to finish, so that you understand, about the

collages. I think that’s part of the art.

Saliga: That’s a key point and I can see how Peterhans and Mies would mesh very

nicely.

Speyer: Sometimes Peterhans and Mies both would spend a long time together

46
 with me, on a collage. When I say “me,” I want you to know that what I was

doing with him as a student was also done by the other students who

followed. In fact, there is a picture of me that you showed me the other day of

several students and we’re all looking at models. After a certain length of

time, even that first year, Mies chose a couple of other students who were

particularly good students, and he would have them work on the models too.

We are looking here at three abstract models in that photograph.

Saliga: Were they your models?

Speyer: No. What I wanted to say was ... I’m sorry I didn’t make sense. Let me repeat,

although I was the only graduate student by the end of that year, which

meant that Mies had been there for two semesters, he had chosen a couple of

other senior students and given them the same problems. He took them away

from the work that they were doing when he came. They were interested in

this so there were two or three of us working on related things by the end of

the year. They weren’t graduate students, but he began to indoctrinate them,

too.

Saliga: That was George [Danforth]?

Speyer: George and a couple of other students [in the photograph] whose names I

don’t remember.

47
Saliga: What was the project? Do you remember?

Speyer: It was called a court house, a house with walled gardens. It’s like a city lot

with walls all the way around it. Everything inside the lot is house, although

some of it is garden, but it is not like a conventional suburban house where

the house is stuck in the middle of the lot and all the garden around it is

public. The house is the only private thing, which is isolated in the middle.

This house would have walls all the way around it so that the owner has the

entire property.

Saliga: He essentially has a courtyard in his house.

Speyer: Let’s say there’s a lot 50 x 100. That’s his house. Some of it’s garden outside,

some of it’s house. Whereas, if you have a 50 x 100 lot in a suburb and put a

house, which is 25 x 30 in the middle of it, you have a back yard, a front yard,

and side yards and you’re left with only a 25 x 50 house.

Saliga: There are many people who feel that particular solution is really a brilliant

solution for urban life.

Speyer: I think so too.

Saliga: I think that it’s surprising that court housing, isn’t more widespread.

48
Speyer: It’s something which is very widespread in the Near East and the Casbah in

Moslem countries, North Africa particularly, and in Greece ever since the age

of Pericles, for example, this was used right up through the 19th century.

There was a whole area of old Athens called the Plaka which, as recently as

ten years ago, consisted of this kind of integrated court house. Every house

has a wall around the property arid, in one way or another, there was a court

inside.

Saliga: Do you think Mies used any of those precedents? Did those precedents occur

to him?

Speyer: I’m sure he did. I’m sure he knew them all. I don’t think he copied them any

more than Le Corbusier copied a transatlantic ocean liner in making a facade.

The principle of a porthole appealed to Le Corbusier just as the principle of a

court house, court in the sense of atrium that we use so much today,

appealed to Mies.

Saliga: It seems that atriums as they’re used today are more widespread in public

buildings.

Speyer: They are, sure.

Saliga: I still think it’s very curious that this kind of housing has never really become

popular in the United States.

49
Speyer: I think it’s a great pity. I think the typical suburban style is really not at all

based in comfort, it’s based in ostentation. Everybody is like putting a

centerpiece on a table. A hostess will vie with another hostess to see who can

get the prettiest, fanciest vase of flowers, and a suburban resident with vie

with his neighbor to see who has the fanciest looking or the most impressive

house.

Saliga: Do you think it’s due to characteristics in the American culture that this kind

of housing would have never been more widespread?

Speyer: I think it must be, yes. I think it also has to do with the fact that we always

had so much space. After all, the typical suburban house is a petty bourgeois

adaptation of a palace, exaggerated as this analogy may seem, because a

palace was a freestanding building with its properties around it.

Saliga: Exactly.

Speyer: And, it’s sort of a feudal idea. So that in a suburb, even a little private house

would be parked in the middle of a lot. Rooms inside a conventional house

might be painted different colors. In a small house this often makes for chaos,

whereas if they were painted all one color, white or gray or blue or whatever,

it might seem more unified. This comes from the idea, I think, that in a large

house of palatial scale there was a room with carved wooden paneling,

another room with marble. The rooms were so big that you didn’t relate one

to the other constructively.

50
Saliga: That’s interesting.

Speyer: I think that’s the basic idea.

Saliga: Do you think that Mies maybe was just ahead of his time with the idea of the

court house?

Speyer: I think that he was ahead of his time in every one of these original

architectural ideas.

Saliga: When you think of some of the new developments even in Chicago, on the

Near North side, Near Northwest side, it does seem that the idea of the court

comes into play more often, as almost a kind of defense against the city.

Speyer: It should. That’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is. I agree with you entirely.

I think that the house with party walls makes a lot more sense to me than the

freestanding suburban house. At its best, the house with party walls in the

city would have a garden in back. I don’t believe it exists to a great extent in

Chicago because Chicago has so much space, or had so much space. But in

New York City there are blocks and blocks in Greenwich Village which still

exist where there are anything from three- to five-story houses, a whole block

will be a single facade of these houses. If you go into the house and walk

through, each of these houses has a garden the same width as the house that

goes to the end of the property. In some cases the entire inside behind the

51
 houses is one, like a community garden, but much more frequently there are

walls that go in between the properties dividing each garden from the

neighboring garden. This whole pattern is repeated on the other street behind

so that you will have a double expanse of back gardens, backyards, without

an alley intersecting. You look out the back of your house and you have a

private court situation. We don’t see that very much in Chicago.

Saliga: You think it’s a matter of space, that we just have so much space?

Speyer: I think the concentration in New York indicated this kind of solution. I think

it’s a very fine solution because the outside of the house makes for a unified

block. One sees this in Paris and London too, Europe, not so much in

America. After all Chicago, at a time when these houses were being made in

the beginning of the 19th-century, didn’t exist. When it did exist, all the well-

to-do people built freestanding houses.

Saliga: Their palaces. I wanted to talk a little bit about your thesis with Mies. It was

about comparing the residential work of Mies and Le Corbusier and Wright.

Speyer: You better not ask me too many questions about my thesis unless I have a

chance to scan it again. I haven’t looked at my thesis for years. If somebody

asked me what I wrote about, I think I would know the general theme and

that’s about it.

52
Saliga: Residential architecture.

Speyer: Residential architecture—contrasting Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright and

Corbusier, which I think is a fascinating subject still. I think it’s interesting for

me to realize that this was a subject that not only interested me as a student,

but continued to interest me with what I did as a practicing architect. It’s also

my own deep personal interest. I love residential architecture, but I like all

architecture, so it’s not all-exclusive. You better not press me too hard on

what I wrote about because I don’t remember. You can ask me and I’ll tell

you if I don’t know.

Saliga: One of the things that you wrote about was the idea of the open plan. In

Wright’s work, like in a lot of his Prairie Style work, he developed an open

plan around the central hearth. Mies seems to have had a different kind of

open plan. Do you see their treatment of residential space as related or

unrelated?

Speyer: Just briefly, the subject of open planning is a major treatise. I still think that

the contrast is an enormously interesting subject, starting with Frank Lloyd

Wright because he was the oldest and the earliest, and because I think Frank

Lloyd Wright had a considerable influence on Mies van der Rohe.

Saliga: You do?

Speyer: Oh yes, I do.

53
Saliga: Would Mies agree to that?

Speyer: Mies agreed to it although I don’t think that Frank Lloyd Wright felt that

Mies gave him sufficient credit. Let me say it again differently. Yes, Mies

certainly did agree to it. He certainly admitted how much he was impressed

by those early European publications on Frank Lloyd Wright.

Saliga: Like the Wasmuth portfolio?

Speyer: Yes. I think that he learned a great deal about planning from Frank Lloyd

Wright, but I don’t think that, in any way, there is a vestige of identical space

in Mies’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve just been

looking at some early houses of Mies van der Rohe, and I’ll tell you what I

think about those in relation to Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright, in my opinion,

never really opened the space to the same extent as Mies van der Rohe. One

of the main things that Frank Lloyd Wright never did was to open the

outsides of his house to whatever the view, no matter how magnificent the

view, no matter how private. Frank Lloyd Wright always contained the

effect, in my opinion. If you looked out of a room through a full-length

window, you could not look beyond a parapet or the balcony beyond

because Frank Lloyd Wright did not want you to be in an environment that

was not controlled. This is, in my opinion, absolutely correct.

54
Saliga: When he did choose a beautiful view he would be controlling the view?

Speyer: Yes, in the Robie house, for example, if you look out you will see a parapet.

You have a window from floor to ceiling, you have a projected roof that

carries your view out of the window, you have projection of the floor that

carries you out, but then you are stopped by a parapet. Mies van der Rohe

will open the view entirely and then, as Wright had a parapet, he might have

an eight- or ten-foot brick wall around a garden, as in these court houses we

were discussing. But, you are able to look at the entire property. If you’re in

the country, there may be no barrier at all. Do I make that clear?

Saliga: Like the Tugendhat house?

Speyer: Yes, exactly. That’s not in the country but in the back of the Tugendhat house

you look into a large series of lawns and trees. Visually, Frank Lloyd Wright

contained the view that his occupant enjoyed. He managed the view; you

were not allowed out of his house visually. If you even go to something as

elaborately new and located in the most exotic private preserve, such as

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, you will find that if you’re sitting in the

living room or the bedroom of a house that has no neighbors for miles—you

are in a preserve of 3,000 acres—you cannot look out at the forest except

above a parapet wall, a solid parapet around the balconies. You are always

looking out at nature partially and being held in.

55
Saliga: You’re saying that Wright’s house has a sense of being introverted?

Speyer: More introverted. They’re controlled. Also the space inside is sometimes very

open and exotic in form, and is penetrated vertically and horizontally. You

don’t have the feeling to the same extent—and I’m not saying that it’s better

or worse, it’s entirely different—of Mies’s very severe open space in which

you have a manipulation of the horizontal planes of the floor and ceiling and

the vertical planes of the walls. The vertical planes can be curved or they can

be straight and what you’re aware of is the skeletal construction of these

pavilions. I’m talking about his later works.

Saliga: How did Mies’s approach to designing a residential space come into play?

How did it influence you in your own residential work? Can you give the

most successful example in your own work?

Speyer: I think that I was influenced because I thought that the spaces that he created

were so beautiful. I simply would say that they were among the most

beautiful houses I had ever seen. At their best they function very well, but

unfortunately he was rarely allowed to carry these buildings to the

development of function which he had actually projected. For example, the

Tugendhat house functions perfectly. I think that the Lange houses function

very well. By the way, I was thinking of the Lange houses that were built

56
 between 1927 and 1930. The Lange houses were built, of course, before the

Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat house, these great examples. They are

really very beautiful blocky buildings, but the space is not at all as original as

Mies’s later work. This is what I was referring to earlier. Whereas when

Frank Lloyd Wright was the same age Mies was then, Frank Lloyd Wright’s

work was much more innovative in space at an earlier point. Mies did not

pick up the lesson of open space.

Saliga: You’re talking about the Prairie houses, or Fallingwater?

Speyer: Yes in the Prairie houses, Fallingwater is much later.

Saliga: On a functional level, one of the things that Mies’s house plans have been

criticized for is that they don’t necessarily function so well for a family,

because they are open. How do you respond to that?

Speyer: I think that depends on the particular building. These houses in Krefeld [the

Lange houses] that I just talked to you about, for example, were perfect

family houses. They had a whole wing for bedrooms, closed rooms,

bedrooms for children, nurses, wings for domestics and so forth. The

Tugendhat house is the same way. I think those are all perfect. I think the

Tugendhat house had a conventional, series of closed rooms for children. I

don’t think Mies would ever have designed an open plan bedroom for little

children. I can’t believe it because the idea of having little children crying or

57
 screaming or something would not be attractive in one of his pristine

interiors. The living areas of the Tugendhat house were on a different floor. I

think the function of those houses was perfect. I believe that the Farnsworth

house would be terrible for children. But Dr. Farnsworth was a barren lady of

considerable age and certainly was not expecting children. In talking about

function, there is no question that the Farnsworth house, which is of

quintessential beauty, suffers because it is not air-conditioned. It would have

been much better, in my opinion, if it were air-conditioned. But it certainly is

not for children, and I think the open plan is not for children.

Saliga: So what you’re saying is that even though Mies did use the open plan, he

really did tailor homes to the needs of his clients.

Speyer: You tell me if there is any case you can think of where the open plan has been

used for children and a family.

Saliga: I can’t think of one.

Speyer: I can’t think of any.

Saliga: Getting back to IIT a little more specifically, in addition to your thesis, Franz

Schulze wrote a lot about the famous late night dinners with Mies, and

students and colleagues. He wrote a lot about Crown Hall and the real sense

of camaraderie, the real sense of purpose. How did you feel in the midst of all

58
 that as a student? Early on, I would imagine that there wouldn’t have been

that close sense.

Speyer: I would say that during the time that I lived in Chicago as a student, I became

very close to Mies personally. As I told you, I used to spend evenings with

him. He was living, as I’ve said, in a hotel at that time. We would have

dinner in a grill or a restaurant. Much later, when I came back from the

Army, he was living on Pearson Street. I used to go over there much more

often. Sometimes I would meet George Danforth there, sometimes I would

meet [Josef] Albers or Dr. Farnsworth, many different people.

Saliga: Was Helmuth Bartsch around then?

Speyer: Yes, certainly, Bartsch was a good friend of his. I would meet older people,

his friends. On the other hand, the camaraderie about which you talk I think

declined as the school became bigger. By the time of Crown Hall, which is

quite late in the development, Mies was spending much less time teaching.

He was doing other projects. I think when you referred to Crown Hall that

really isn’t accurate. The camaraderie was much more during the time that

the school first came out to the new campus, in the new building, which was

called then the Navy Building. I don’t think that there was so much revelry. I

don’t remember so much communal revelry. I remember very fine, in fact

wonderful, evenings at his house with a few students and good friends.

59
Saliga: You’re talking about when you were a student?

Speyer: No. When I was teaching. When I was a student I don’t believe that I ever

had any group activity with Mies of any kind. He was too busy learning

English and getting used to Chicago.

Saliga: You were with him a short time in the beginning?

Speyer: I was with him barely two years. It was just about two years.

Saliga: Schulze also wrote in his book about the summer that Mies and Danforth and

other people went to Wisconsin to work on the IIT plan. Were you involved

in that at all?

Speyer: No I wasn’t. I never worked for Mies, ever, in his office. I always felt that I

had a precious relationship with him, which if I began to work for him,

became an employee, I might lose. I preferred to work elsewhere and

continue to be close to him. Of course I taught for years, but I never worked

for him. I did some work with him. I went to New York with Danforth and

Daniel Brenner. We went to the Museum of Modern Art for the first

exhibition he [Mies] had—I think it was in the early 1950s—and worked on

that. Am I correct?

Saliga: It was 1947. [per Schulze, p. 236]

60
Speyer: I would work sometimes on something special with him, but never, never as

an employee. I wasn’t here when they went to Wisconsin [to work on the

plan of the Armour campus plan]. What year was it?

Saliga: 1939.

Saliga: Why don’t we just finish up with IIT then and tomorrow pick up a little bit

about when you were in the Armed Forces and your teaching at IIT, and your

work here. Looking back on Mies’s teaching and the whole curriculum at IIT,

what do you think was really the message of IIT, the message of the

curriculum?

Speyer: I think the greatest thing was that the curriculum was orderly, working from

simple to complicated, from easy to difficult. It was planned to train a

student to become an architect in the most direct fashion where the student

might come in without any knowledge of architecture and emerge, if not as a

great artist, at least as a thoroughly trained architect. If he were not a great

creative architect, or even a mildly good creative architect, at least he knew

his craft perfectly. He knew how to draw, how to build, how to plan, and he

was assured of a basic professional status. If he was an artist, he could elevate

any one of these professional assets to the level of fine art. I think that it was

without question, from my point of view, the best and most basic curriculum

that I could imagine. That is why first, I believe I profited to the extent I did

and second, that I sponsored [the philosophy in my own] teaching for so

61
 many years. It simply was a profound belief. I think that it is exactly the

opposite of most architectural school curricula in that it is so, I repeat, simple

and direct in evolution, whereas the temptation in so many schools is the

reverse. I made the point earlier that Mies always felt that it was very

damaging for a student to be put into a situation where he could not find a

solution.

Saliga: Where he would not have the information to find a solution?

Speyer: Where he would not have the information, where he would have no way of

finding a solution. This really retarded him rather than advancing him.

Mies’s belief was that everything proceeded in the architectural school as

step after step. You would start to draw black lines on white paper. You

might do nothing but draw a fine line, a medium line, and a heavy line. But,

by the time you had mastered the art or craft of drawing those lines so that

you could make a line any weight you wish, and make a rough line or a

smooth line, you had made great progress. Then you could maybe think

about how to put the lines together and draw a square, or get a compass and

draw a circle, or make a complicated composition of crosshatched lines. Then

you might go into color. I said that before, and I’m repeating it because I

think it’s so essential. And then you go into construction. It’s an evolution. I

think that it is absolutely logical and I don’t believe that I know of any school

where it was that logical before or since. I think the results have proven

remarkable.

62
Saliga: So you are saying that, at the very least, you would learn to be a competent

architect?

Speyer: Yes, at the very least. there were always some who could be more.

Saliga: Your opinion of the curriculum is that it was actually the best in the country?

Speyer: Oh yes, I think it was wonderful.

Saliga: Best in the world?

Speyer: I know of no curriculum that was as good as it was at the time. I’m not

informed sufficiently to be able to say what is the best architectural school

today. I don’t think that IIT is what it used to be.

Saliga: That’s what I was going to ask. How do you think it held up over the years?

Speyer: I think it held up remarkably well. After all, nothing can hold up too long. I

don’t think it’s holding up now. I think there are still some good people but I

don’t think that the direction is good. I don’t think that there is a spirit in the

school and I don’t think that the principles are consistent. First, I don’t think

that they should necessarily use the same principles as previously. I don’t

63
 think that they have advanced or adjusted to the times. I think basically there

simply is not an inspired director of faculty. I think there are individuals who

are good but I think they are no longer part of a team, of a coordinated

group. The great thing about that curriculum was that everybody really was

passionately involved. All the teachers believed in it, all of the teachers gave

of themselves to the master. It was all logical.

Saliga: Do you think after a certain point the teaching just became standardized and

it all became accepted?

Speyer: Yes, I think it gradually became more routine and less inspired. I think today

it is rather lost. As I say, there are individuals who are excellent, who are still

able to do good things, but it’s no longer a coordinated group. As I’m

repeating, I think the direction is not good. I don’t think the director of the

school is good at all and I don’t think that it can be the same thing as when

Mies was there. I’m not sure it should be. I think it should be something else,

but I don’t think it is what it should be.

Saliga: Is there anything else about your schooling at IIT that you wanted to bring

up at this point before we finish for today? Is there anything that I forgot to

ask or any aspect I forgot to bring up?

Speyer: I’m thinking whether there is. I don’t believe so. I think we’ve gone all over

the lot so that I’m not sure. I suppose I should say in closing that I had the

64
 highest regard for Mies as a teacher. I had the greatest respect for the

curriculum. I admired the way it was implemented by a really unified group

of men and women who were teachers. I think that it proved to be a great

success. I guess that’s about all.

Saliga: You were very fortunate to be there at that time.

Speyer: I was very fortunate.

Saliga: It was a once in a lifetime experience.

Speyer: It was marvelous for me. I really believe that if I had not done it, I would not

have known what I know about architecture. I undoubtedly feel that it

changed my life completely. I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there are

other people for whom it’s the same thing. I won’t presume to mention them,

they can tell you themselves.

Saliga: This is Friday, June 13, and I’m continuing my interview with A. James

Speyer in his office at the Art Institute. Yesterday we pretty much covered IIT

but there are a couple of other things that I wanted to get back to just briefly.

You said that you designed a chair when you were at IIT. I have a photo of it

here. Could you tell me a little bit about that, what it was made of, what the

problem was?

65
Speyer: First, I thought about that question which you asked me yesterday, if at IIT

we studied furniture and the whole decorative ensemble of an architectural

project. I don’t know how I answered it. I’ll tell you again what I think, and it

may be different than what I said yesterday. There was an absolute unity to

the furniture and the building. Without wanting you to think that the

students of Mies van der Rohe were indoctrinated to believe only what he

believed, I think I should really make it very clear that as a student one learns

much more if he or she is convinced of the teacher’s principles than if he or

she is criticizing the teacher. In other words, I think that to believe in the

teacher helps the student learn the teacher’s point of view. Perhaps at a later

date, hopefully at a later date, the student will develop his own direction and

emancipate himself from his teachers, incorporate what he’s learned, but at

the same time demonstrate his own originality. Going back, therefore, to the

idea of Mies and the relationship of furniture and the accouterments of a

building, interior accouterments or even the gardens and the environment, I

believed that Mies’s furniture was absolutely consistent with his architecture.

The stainless steel chairs like the Tugendhat chair, the Barcelona chair, the

Barcelona table, the chairs made of leather and steel, the tables made of glass

or marble and steel supports—this furniture was absolutely in harmony with

the architecture. It was minimal structural support. It used the raw materials

exploiting them to their structural limits. I don’t like to include other people,

but I’m sure it was true of other students for many years during the heyday

of IIT, I think we felt that that furniture

66
 was the answer to solving interior arrangements. Not necessarily only Mies’s

furniture, but furniture which we might ourselves design in the same

direction, where the supports were essential, pure and obvious and where

the materials were in contrast with the building materials, let’s say fine

leather in relation to fine marble or cotton in relation to wood, etc. That is

answering the question that you asked me yesterday. Now to get back to the

chair that we designed.

Saliga: Let me just ask you one further thing on that. Would you have, for instance,

designed specific tables and chairs for a specific house? In a Prairie School

house the furniture often was very specifically designed, as in the Martin

House or the Robie house, et cetera. Would you have approached the

interiors the same way?

Speyer: I certainly designed cabinetwork frequently and I designed tables. I designed

all furniture except chairs. I was always led to believe, and in my

investigation I convinced myself that it was true, that designing a chair was a

tough job.

Saliga: I think that’s true.

Speyer: There isn’t a harder job. The proof of it is, I suppose, how few chairs have

been designed, even in the whole twentieth century, and how related the

models of these chairs might be. For example, in the International School

there were what we call cantilever chairs, which are tubular or strap metal

67
 chairs which are cantilevered on their bases. The best ones were designed by

[Marcel] Breuer and by Mies van der Rohe. I guess Corbusier never designed

a cantilever chair, although he designed comfortable chairs, those basket

chairs. He used Thonet chairs and he designed tables. He did design the

chairs. He designed the version of the Foreign Legion chair, which was a very

good chair and he designed that wonderful chaise lounge. That was, I think,

the most innovative piece of furniture he designed, don’t you? Can you think

of something I’m forgetting?

Saliga: No, I think that’s one of his most wonderful pieces.

Speyer: But I think that’s it. Breuer certainly designed the cantilever chairs, the

Wassily chair and so on. In steel there were a number of variations and then

later there were all kinds of adaptations, from porch furniture to very inferior

and complicated pieces with the same principle. At the same time, we

mustn’t forget that there was that whole Scandinavian movement in what we

might call handmade wooden chairs. Then there were the factory made, and

very excellent, chairs by Alvar Aalto, that’s about it. I think of the handmade

chairs as going back to tradition. Chairs that were not handmade, but were

made by important designers or architects, were variations on the cantilever

model and it was Corbusier in the things we just talked about and a few

complicated things that Breuer did, like the Wassily. I don’t think there was a

great deal more, was there? I’m not going to stop to think about it now. Back

to the chair that you asked me about that I designed. I forget under whose

68
 aegis was a competition.

Saliga: Was this a Museum of Modern Art competition?

Speyer: It was a Museum of Modern Art and I guess that was the aegis. I forget how

the competition was phrased, but I wanted to enter it with a friend and

colleague of mine, Daniel Brenner, who was an architect in the city, and also

a professor at IIT, and the very well known designer James Prestini. The three

of us got together. Prestini is mainly known for some fabulous wooden bowls

that he made. Do you know the bowls?

Saliga: No, I don’t.

Speyer: He was one of the outstanding industrial designers of his time with the

bowls. He executed absolutely superb paper-thin wooden bowls. He had a

method of doing it that I have never really known because he would never

tell anybody how he did it. They were paper-thin and sometimes as large as

eighteen inches in diameter and eighteen inches deep.

Saliga: That is remarkable.

Speyer: They were absolutely beautiful. For many years I know that some of my

friends and I used the bowls for salad bowls and we used them for serving at

the table, although in the interim they have become museum pieces and

nobody dares use them.

69
Saliga: Was he a teacher at ID [the Institute of Design]?

Speyer: He was a teacher at ID. He, Daniel Brenner and I entered the competition and

decided to do this plastic chair. It was plastic in the German sense of

sculptural and it was plastic in the scientific sense of a cast resin or a poured

resin. The photograph that you have me looking at this moment which shows

the designer Jody Kingrey sitting on it. Jody Kingrey I might say,

parenthetically, with Mrs. Harry [Baldwin] Weese, Kitty Weese, ran the best

industrial design store in town for furniture and objects, accessories.

Saliga: Called Baldwin Kingrey?

Speyer: Called Baldwin Kingrey, yes. A very outstanding place. The chair is probably

at its best in this photograph because Miss Kingrey covers a good bit of it. It

was an absolutely gross object. We never really managed to make it work. I

know that it was very influenced by certain plastic cast resin chairs that Mies

van der Rohe had been working on but it, I’m afraid, lacked a great deal of

the aplomb.

Saliga: Did you submit it to the competition?

Speyer: I think we did, I don’t remember. If we did, we never gained from it. We

spent an awful lot of time on it. Prestini did the casting because that was his

70
 thing at that time. He subsequently dropped the bowls and did sculpture,

which was too bad because his sculpture was never very good, whereas the

bowls were absolutely outstanding. The chair was terrible.

Saliga: Does the chair still exist?

Speyer: Not to my knowledge. I think I have a very convenient memory and with

something like this chair, of which I was always very ashamed, I have no

recollection. I simply remember that it was red, brilliant red plastic, and that

Brenner and Prestini and I worked hours and hours and days and days on it.

We submitted a very important brochure with photographs and I think this

picture was one of the presentation pictures.

Saliga: There’s a whole series of photos of it that we got from Brenner’s office.

Speyer: Are they all in the work room with that ugly bay?

Saliga: Yes, and on some the background is cut out, the figure has been cut out.

Speyer: You’ll have to show me sometime. I think Miss Kingrey looks very good.

Saliga: She does. She looks very glamorous. Did Baldwin Kingrey ever handle any of

your furniture?

71
Speyer: No, I never produced furniture except for clients. I did things for clients for

whom I did houses. I presume you want to ask me about my practice at some

other time and I will tell you about that.

Saliga: After you worked with Mies for a couple of years in graduate school at IIT,

you were then drafted into the armed forces.

Speyer: Right.

Saliga: How did being drafted in 1941 affect your graduate schooling?

Speyer: For five years I was in the Army. For about half of that time I was in America.

In the second half, the last two-and-half-years or so, I was in the South

Pacific. I don’t think that there was any activity architecturally at all. I did

quite a bit of sketching, I did a lot of reading. It was not a happy time. I was

very much involved in the war.

Saliga: Were you reading architectural books?

Speyer: I was reading anything I wanted. We went with infantry, I had a small

intelligence unit and we were attached to infantry organizations. In the South

Pacific there was a lot of sailing from Hawaii, which was the port of

departure. We’d go to the South Pacific, to New Guinea or the islands, Philip-

72
 pines or Okinawa. We would always go from a staging area. We’d be on

boats sometimes, small boats of one kind or another, for a month or two or

three. It was very good for reading and sketching. When we got to the

battlefront there was no time for any of that. Again, I forget all the unpleasant

aspects, and I guess the only architectural thing that I ever did was that in

Laiti I was able to snag onto a very pretty peasant cottage. I collected a lot of

furniture from the village that was deserted.

Saliga: Where was it?

Speyer: Laiti. It was great fun. Our little unit had a pretty house and I was able to

furnish it, alas, from the other houses that were deserted in the village and

Okinawa. Those were my main architectural expressions.

Saliga: So, for the Army you didn’t do architectural work or engineering?

Speyer: No, I was in charge of a chemical warfare intelligence team. I’d never taken

chemistry at any time in my life and knew nothing about it, so the fact that I

had been indoctrinated in officers’ training school to know something about

chemical warfare was quite a feat. Also, I taught basic Japanese at the time. I

had studied basic Japanese. I knew nothing about chemical warfare, but I was

able to fumble around with a slight knowledge of the Japanese language. I

was able to do better than I might have done otherwise. It was a typical

73
 foolishness of the United States Army. I spoke fluently in European

languages and had lived in Europe quite a bit. Instead of sending me there,

fortunately, they sent me to the South Pacific. There certainly was no cultural

development in the arts during that period.

Saliga: For that period, do you feel that your interest in architecture or your

knowledge of architecture continued to emerge, or was it kind of shelved for

awhile?

Speyer: It continued in moratorium.

Saliga: It continued but there was really nothing you could do about it?

Speyer: There was nothing I could do about it. I saw the Imperial Hotel in Japan.

Saliga: You did? Well, that would be significant.

Speyer: That was significant. It’s since been torn down. As a matter of fact, I then

went to Korea, where I was made an acting historical monuments inspector.

My intelligence team and I, since there was no more concern about chemical

warfare, were made into a monuments team. We had a jeep and a truck and

we went from one museum to another in Korea. It was very interesting. We

stayed in the villages where they had museums. The main thing we had to do

was try to keep the GIs from pillaging the temples for souvenirs. In any case,

74
 that was a cultural activity. That was interesting. That was after the war.

Saliga: Did they have the same problem in Japan?

Speyer: Yes, the Americans are inveterate, absolutely hopeless souvenir hunters. In

fact we were attached to the infantry, as I said, during the war because,

theoretically, we were to keep the infantry troops from taking intelligence

material as souvenirs. I was in charge of chemical warfare intelligence. They

might find, let’s say, a canister of gas which they would abscond with as a

souvenir, or a gas mask, which would, on the other hand, be of some

intelligence value were the right person able to get it. Our little team would

collect the material and send it back to Washington. That was the expressed

idea. I’d forgotten about the Korean assignment. I was there quite a few

months and it was very, very interesting.

Saliga: You must have learned something about the architecture and the culture.

Speyer: I learned quite a lot about the architecture of the Orient and I learned a lot

about the art of Korea at the time. That is all peripheral to the war. I then

came back from the war and settled down in Chicago.

Saliga: Which is on to my next series of questions about when you came back to

75
 teach at IIT. By that time IIT was all located down on the [South Side]

campus?

Speyer: Yes, that had all happened while I was away.

Saliga: What building did you teach in when you came back?

Speyer: It was called the Navy Building. It’s got another name now, the Materials and

Metals Research Building [of 1942-43]. It was built as the Navy ROTC

building. It was an extraordinarily good building. It was the first building at

IIT that was built by Mies van der Rohe unless it was the powerhouse, I don’t

remember which was first.

Saliga: Was that the one that was built during the war?

Speyer: I think it was. That’s why it could be built during the war because it was built

for the government.

Saliga: There are now some technical problems with it because the materials they

had to use at the time were inferior.

Speyer: I hadn’t heard that. In fact, I think it was very well built at the time. My

recollection, although I wasn’t here when it was built, it was built before I

came back, is that it was a very unusual space because it was a rectilinear

building in every way but it was a two-floor building encompassing a huge

76
 two-story-high free space. I won’t try to describe it.

Saliga: It’s impressive, a very impressive space.

Speyer: It was a very interesting building and it worked perfectly for architecture at

that time. It was a small school and very good.

Saliga: The Institute of Design at that point was separate?

Speyer: The Institute of Design was entirely separate, it had nothing to do with IIT. It

was being run by

Saliga: Serge Chermayeff came in ‘47, so it must have been [Laszlo] Moholy-Nagy.

Speyer: It was Moholy because I told you I had gone to the Institute of Design when I

was studying with Mies, and studied sculpture with Archipenko. At that

time the Institute of Design was in the old Marshall Field house on Prairie

Avenue. During the War, it moved to the Historical Society, that nice old

Richardsonian Romanesque building which is now the Limelight, you know.

At that time the Institute of Design and Illinois Tech had no connection

whatsoever.

Saliga: It was only later that ID moved to IIT?

Speyer: Yes, in fact, as you undoubtedly know, Mies van der Rohe and Moholy were

77
 not friendly. I can give you my version of it from Mies, and Mies would

maintain this and is correct. The reason they weren’t friendly was that Mies

closed the Bauhaus of his own volition in 1935. Moholy opened a Bauhaus,

called the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. Moholy maintained that because

he had been director of the Bauhaus in Germany before Mies, he had the

right to use the name. Mies always felt that he was the one who had the right

to use the name. Furthermore, he never really liked Moholy. Mies was a

person who tried to avoid trouble. He disliked unpleasantness, almost to a

fault. He tried to avoid being unpleasant with Moholy, but it was very hard.

Moholy was very unpleasant. He was very difficult. There were two factions

in the city, there were those supporters of Mies and those supporters of

Moholy. Moholy and Mies rarely had any kind of contact except on the most

official level at some reception or something. Mrs. Moholy-Nagy disliked

Mies in a much more obvious fashion. She was very belligerent and she was

also very articulate. She made life a little hard for Mies. But, there was no

connection between the Illinois Tech architectural school and the Bauhaus

until much later.

Saliga: Eventually they both ended up in Crown Hall.

Speyer: What happened was simply that Moholy died while the Institute of Design

was still in the old Historical Society building. He died while he was director.

The Institute of Design was actually in the Historical Society building. In fact,

his funeral was in the auditorium of that building.

78
Saliga: I didn’t realize that.

Speyer: Yes. I believe that Mies went to that funeral, which is the kind of thing that

Mies always did. He was a very broad-minded man.

Saliga: It seems appropriate.

Speyer: Yes, he felt that he wanted to honor the memory of Moholy even though he

had not been a real friend of his in life. I remember going with Hilberseimer

and, I think, with Mies. I’m not positive, but I know that I went to the funeral

with Hilberseimer. What happened was that after that Gropius, who was

kind of the spiritual father of the Bauhaus from the beginning, recommended

that Serge Chermayeff be made the new director.

Saliga: Chermayeff having come from Harvard?

Speyer: Chermayeff was at Harvard. He came from Harvard and became the director.

Chermayeff was a really miserable man, awful man.

Saliga: A lot of people share that opinion.

Speyer: He was terrible. He could not manage the school. It just kept getting more

and more difficult for him to run the school, IIT was looking for a design

school and they offered to takeover the Institute of Design. Chermayeff, in a

most craven fashion, sold it down the river. The whole principle of the

79
 Institute of Design was a kind of studio school without any kind of classical

curriculum and without grades, without the conventional apparatus of a

university and certainly not the apparatus of a technical school. IIT took it

over, turned it into an absolutely typical department of a technical university,

with grades, academics with the works—all of the things that were

conspicuously avoided in the original Bauhaus, and even in Moholy’s

reconstruction of it. Of course, the Institute of Design may not have gone

downhill economically at IIT, but it lost all of its character very quickly. Some

of the teachers went with it, like [Aaron] Siskind, Arthur Siegel, there were a

bunch of people, a few who went with it and stayed with it for a long time.

Saliga: To IIT?

Speyer: Yes. Arthur, of course is not living.

Saliga: Why would Chermayeff have done that? Just because he had such great

financial responsibility?

Speyer: To get rid of it. Yes. He could not manage it. He wanted to get rid of it.

Saliga: Didn’t he manage it while it was at IIT?

Speyer: No, I don’t think he did. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. I think he left it

and I don’t remember who the first director was.

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 I believe he was the first, though I can’t be sure.

Saliga: Getting back to you and your experience teaching at IIT after the War, how

had the school changed? There must have been radical changes from the time

you left until the time you came back. What was it like when you came back?

Speyer: Oh yes. It was much more organized; it was functioning. When I left Mies

had not even been able really to have his influence felt. I was alone in the

graduate class and then there were the fifth year [students]. Below that he

was, at that time, unable to have made much of a dent. In the meanwhile he

was able to implement the curriculum. Hilberseimer and Peterhans in charge

of their respective areas had gotten assistants. The assistants were people like

George Danforth. It was over five years since I had been there, so that would

have been the graduation of a number of classes that would have gone

through the indoctrination by Mies. There was a certain small reservoir of

available people. I joined this group as a teacher. I taught the fourth year. I

always taught design in the fourth year until I went into graduate school.

Saliga: Until you taught graduate school?

Speyer: Yes. I might say that it was wonderful to be working in good space. The

divisions of the different classes were very clear. It was very agreeable.

81
Saliga: Did you have the sense that Mies felt he was making real strides at that

point?

Speyer: Yes, I do. I’m sure he was. I don’t think Mies was ever complacent, so that if

he had a feeling he was making strides, I don’t think that he would have

admitted to being satisfied with those strides. I think Mies was always

looking for something more in the right way, not as a pragmatic ambition but

as an insatiable perfectionist.

Saliga: That’s a funny thing. When you began teaching at IIT Mies was really a

figurehead for a lot of the GI’s coming back to school. I think he was

somebody who they felt was going to help them build a bright new world. It

was a very optimistic time. There was a lot of building that needed to be

done. The way that I understand many people responded to Mies was almost

as if he were an idol pointing the way for them, pointing the direction for

them. It seemed a good direction and they were happy to learn and to go in

that direction. I was wondering what was it like for you because you came

back as a teacher, not as a student.

Speyer: I think I was still a student too. I certainly continued to learn a great deal, not

only from my association with Mies, talking with him and listening to him,

by that time he spoke pretty good English, but also seeing his buildings that

were being developed. Of course seeing the campus design was a revelation,

all of which happened while I was away. During the time I was in the Army

82
 I didn’t have enough time to come back to Chicago. I was learning as a

student too. I don’t think that I approached Mies with any delusion about his

role as Messiah, but I certainly approached him and returned to his sphere of

influence still as a young architect who believed that he was the outstanding

living architect.

Saliga: Do you think that the students who were working at the school at that

point…

Speyer: I think they believed in the high quality of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture

and example. I think that it goes back to something I said either today or

yesterday, which was I think that a student who believes in his teacher is

going to learn more from the teacher than a student who is at loggerheads

with the teacher. I think the student should question the teacher at all times,

but I think that if he is out and out of a contradictory opinion, then it’s a

waste of time to be working with the student.

Saliga: Because it would never sit right with the student?

Speyer: No, it wouldn’t sit right with the student, he’s not going to learn anything,

and so the teacher isn’t going to be able to help him. I think that certainly

there were plenty of students over the years who were not convinced by Mies

van der Rohe and who left. I think those who were listening and those who

were interested profited. And hopefully, those students, at a later date if they

83
 had the spirit and ability to do it, would have been able to do things of their

own, original, increasingly different from the model but maybe with the

same principles embodied. That’s the important thing. I have always felt that

in painting or in any of the arts, including architecture, it doesn’t mean

anything to say so-and-so was influenced by so-and-so. If we look at a

painting and say the artist was influenced by Picasso, we look at a Picasso

and say he was influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, I think that is not to say

anything. It is an historical fact. It’s an observation of some interest in the

development of the artist or the architect. I think it’s much more interesting

that Mies van der Rohe was influenced by [Karl Friedrich] Schinkel. I think

what Mies van der Rohe did himself is much more interesting. I think that

Mies van der Rohe had absorbed the principles of Schinkel, he had absorbed

the principles of Behrens, he had absorbed the principles of the Jugendstil

and [H.P.] Berlage, and medieval art and so forth. I think at the same time

that Mies’s students, I would be probably a good example, would absorb

Mies’s principles and I don’t believe that my architectural expression would

be what it is today if I did not have those principles. I do not feel at all that I

am copying Mies. I feel beholden to Mies in any architectural expression I

may make. I feel grateful for the principles with which I was imbued, but on

the other hand, I do not feel that it is to my detriment that I was influenced,

you see.

Saliga: I know that Mies was the primary influence, but did any of the influences

84
 from your Beaux-Arts education ever come into play?

Speyer: I think all one’s knowledge comes into play. As I told you, I was very

interested at one time in Art Deco. I’m sure that the Art Deco, which at that

time was not even called Art Deco it was simply the style of the period of the

late 1920s and 1930s, had an influence. I think that my knowledge of antique

art, whether really antique from Greece or Rome, or Renaissance, whatever,

18th century, has influenced my expression. I think one absorbs what he

knows and it comes out maybe in another form.

Saliga: One expresses what he absorbs.

Speyer: Yes. I don’t think it’s plagiarism, unless it’s consciously plagiarism. I think

unconsciously one’s expression in terms of art would reflect his knowledge,

his accumulation of information.

Saliga: When you came back to IIT was the curriculum still being worked out? Did

you have input into the curriculum at that point? Did you change it?

Speyer: I certainly had input in individual problems. The curriculum was quite a

strong, clear outline.

Saliga: As Mies had outlined it?

Speyer: As Mies, Hilberseimer and Peterhans had done it.

85
Saliga: Did they use the model of the Bauhaus for planning this?

Speyer: Yes, very much so.

Saliga: So it wasn’t that it was totally new?

Speyer: No, it had variations, but it certainly incorporated fundamentally the

Bauhaus architectural teaching.

Saliga: Yesterday I asked you about the feeling of camaraderie at the school. You

said when you were a student it was very strong and, as the school grew, it

became less so. What was it like when you first got back? Was the school still

small enough that there was a real sense of purpose and real sense of

kinship?

Speyer: I think so, yes. I think that the sense of purpose was stronger than the social

sense. I don’t think that the students at IIT, as far as I’ve ever known it—from

the beginning until the present for that matter—have ever felt much of a

social bond among the architectural students for the simple reason that IIT is

largely, in the architectural school, at least, composed of Chicago students, of

students from the city.

Saliga: That’s true.

Speyer: They go home to their families for the most part, and it’s not as though

86
 they’re all living together in a college town or in any large sense in

dormitories. There are dormitories, there are fraternities, and so forth. I’ve

never had the feeling that it was to the same extent as consolidated a social

group as there might be, let’s say, in a place like Williams or Dartmouth, a

small town.

Saliga: It’s a different experience. You must have worked with an awful lot of

students when you were there.

Speyer: That’s true.

Saliga: Can you name any of the people who you thought were some of your most

promising students? I know you’re bad with names.

Speyer: I’m terrible with names. I’ll think about it and tell you the next time when we

finish up. I doubt that I can tell you. I can certainly tell you some of the

people who were around the school. I can tell you, without any hesitation,

certain people who were outstanding, all of whom came as students and

ultimately many of whom became teachers. Of course I can tell you, I was

thinking of students in a different sense. The faculty, after all, was

continuously re-fed by the best students as faculty would leave. Among the

best students were, not necessarily in order of importance, Daniel Brenner,

who became an architect in Chicago; Reginald Malcolmson, who became an

architect and who also became the Dean of the architectural school at the

University of Michigan. All of these men were teachers ultimately. There was

87
 somebody called Earl Bluestein who was an outstanding city planner; John

Vinci; I can name many, Ronald Krueck. In recent times, Keith Olsen.

Hundreds… I saw many of them at the opening of the Mies van der Rohe:

Architect as Educator exhibition recently. I was quite surprised because I saw

all these people and many of them knew me and said, “Hello, Jim,” and I

said hello. I didn’t recognize them and I thought they must have been my

teachers at one time, and they all turned out to be students. They looked so

old and they were younger than I. I decided it was like Methuselah night.

Saliga: It’s just that you look so young.

Speyer: Oh, no, I wish so. In any case, there were a lot of them there. I haven’t named

any part of them. There was Skip [Charles B.] Genther. Literally dozens over

the fifteen years that I was at school. While I was teaching at the school for

fifteen years, I always found that there were two or three very good students

in the class, which made the class worthwhile.

Saliga: What I think is so interesting about looking at the careers of the people who

have come out of IIT, is that they prove what you said to be true: that Mies

provided a set of principles for people to use in their architecture, but he

didn’t slavishly dictate anything to them. When you look at them, John Vinci

does a lot of restoration work. You wouldn’t expect someone who was

trained in the Miesian method to do that. But then again once you know

88
 about the way Mies taught, it does make a lot of sense. If you look at

somebody like Krueck and Olsen, what’s amazing to me is that they’ve taken

the Miesian idiom and continued to work with that sensibility. But the

architecture they’ve come up with is something that is so revolutionary and

so, I don’t want to make it sound like I’m saying it’s better than Mies, but it’s

so different.

Speyer: It’s different. That’s the kind of thing I was thinking of when I talked earlier.

It incorporates the principles. I don’t believe that John Vinci would be able to

do nearly as well with reconstruction and traditional renovation, if he had

not had the principles of Mies van der Rohe. He will conceive the space and

he will conceive the structure in a much clearer fashion than if he had gone to

many other schools. He can draw it better and he will know how to visualize

it better as a result. I think that the discipline is being used in an absolutely

logical fashion without the same final visual results. The forms are very

different. I think Krueck and Olsen could never have done what they did if

they did not have this background of principles that they obviously

understand better than many other people, and therefore more easily adapt

to their advanced solutions. Again, I don’t mean advanced in that they’re

better than Mies van der Rohe, they’re different. It is logical that for our time

things should be different than they would have been a quarter of a century

ago.

Saliga: They’re carrying the message.

89
Speyer: They couldn’t do it without that kind of principled background, that’s the

whole thing. That’s what I meant yesterday when I said that Mies always felt

that his obligation in education was to equip a young person to be able to

exercise his profession. And to the extent that that individual could exercise

his profession with a flair, he could fly rather than walk.

Saliga: As all of those architects you named certainly did.

Speyer: Yes, that’s it. There are many more: I think Gene Summers, for example, who

did the [McCormick Place] convention center here, who was the chief

designer at [C.F.] Murphy, who went out West and was in partnership with

Phyllis Lambert; and [H.P. Davis] Rockwell, who was in business with

Danforth and Brenner. There are many.

Saliga: Some of the people who studied at IIT and originally designed in the Miesian

style or Miesian sensibility haven’t kept up with the times, really. I

understand that they have difficulty now, getting commissions. It’s curious,

you just wonder where they all fit into this. They, very strongly, believe in

International Style architecture and the Miesian principles, but somehow

can’t take it beyond that.

Speyer: I have nothing to say about that except that that is their problem and they

have to solve it.

Saliga: What were the differences between the time that you originally started

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 teaching and the time you left? How did the school change?

Speyer: I think that the school grew and grew, I don’t mean just in size of student

body, which it did. But I think it grew in effectiveness and coordination. I

think that it reached a plateau and I think when Mies left and Peterhans died

and Hilberseimer retired and maybe even a little before Hilberseimer,

Peterhans and Mies left that it had reached a plateau and then maybe it just

sort of slipped a little continuously.

Saliga: Now you don’t think it’s the same school at all?

Speyer: I don’t think it’s the same school at all because, as I said, I don’t think the

director is in any way adequate or sufficiently inspired to lead it. I think that

the older teachers, who were excellent, have for the most part had to leave for

one reason or another. There’s no longer the united purpose. There is no

longer a consistent direction. I think the absolutely clear single direction

obtained during the heyday of that school was superb. It resulted in the high

quality of achievement.

Saliga: To a large degree that was reliant on Mies, Hilberseimer and Peterhans all

being involved.

Speyer: Sure. Peterhans died early, but his message was really carried through. Many

of the other teachers at one time or another taught his course after having

studied with him very carefully.

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Saliga: Why did Mies retire from IIT? Was there a mandatory retirement age?

Speyer: You have referred to Franz Schulze’s book frequently and I can only ask you

to look there because I forget exactly why he left. My recollection is that he

left because he was too busy in his office. He simply didn’t have time to teach

any longer. I think he always loved teaching. Even after he left as director, he

would come and talk to the students on occasion and he would work with

graduate students now and then, but he simply didn’t have time to do it.

Saliga: Would he give special lectures or anything like that?

Speyer: Mies never lectured. His communication was more on an intimate level of

conversation or just sitting around the table, like a critique. After a certain

number of years, I took a sabbatical from IIT in 1957 and I went to Greece.

Mies and Lora Marx came to visit me [in 1959]. He had never been back to

Europe after he left IIT.

Saliga: Actually that was what I was leading into, to ask you about that.

Speyer: That was a great thrill for him because he had never been directly exposed to

antique architecture except at Paestum. He had been to Paestum before in

Italy but he had never been to mainland Greece.

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Saliga: He was there to accept the RIBA [Royal Institute of British Architects] gold

medal?

Speyer: Yes.

Saliga: It was just coincidental that you were teaching there?

Speyer: It wasn’t coincidental that he came when I was there, no. He came to get the

medal in London and then came to Athens. I arranged all the itinerary for

him and so forth.

Saliga: What were his impressions of classical buildings? People always talk about

the classical basis of his work.

Speyer: He was simply thrilled. He found that, for the most part, they simply

amplified his already vivid enthusiasms. It was a great experience for him.

By that time he must have been in his seventies.

Saliga: Did you tour with him?

Speyer: Yes, we drove around. I had a house in Athens and he and Lora stayed at a

hotel nearby. We traveled to some of the major sites.

Saliga: The Parthenon?

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Speyer: Also outside of Athens, we went to Delphi and Epidaurus—everywhere. We

had a wonderful time.

Saliga: I know. I saw photographs of Mies in Franz Schulze’s book. Those were your

photographs?

Speyer: A couple of them are.

Saliga: His reactions to classical architecture were just what you would have

expected?

Speyer: They were. He was thrilled by it and he analyzed it in his most exhaustive

and concentrated fashion.

Saliga: Does that mean that he would spend hours looking at a temple?

Speyer: Yes. He sat and looked at the Parthenon for a long, long time, not once but

more than once. The effect of the fluting of the columns and the repetition of

the columns and the repetition of the flutes and the entasis of the building,

the whole design of the Doric temple of the Parthenon was one of his great

extravagant pleasures.

Saliga: Franz Schulze wrote quite a bit, too, about his relationship with Lora Marx,

which I don’t really want to get into, but what was it like for Lora Marx, for

instance, when he would spend hours looking at the Parthenon?

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Speyer: I think Lora loved to look at those things herself, as well.

Saliga: In the same way? To carefully study?

Speyer: I think not in the same way. She was not an architect. Lora did other things,

too. Lora at one time was an artist. She was very intelligent and an

enormously refined person. She was very, very fond of Mies van der Rohe,

very indulgent of him and very stimulated by him. It was, I think, a great

pleasure for her to be with him. I’m sure she didn’t look at architecture as he

did, but she looked at it in her own way and was perfectly capable of being

moved by the same kind of thing as he.

Saliga: Maybe she could see the architecture through his eyes?

Speyer: Yes, I think she understood his ideas very well.

Saliga: Today is Wednesday, June 18, 1986, and I hope to finish the interview with A.

James Speyer today. We are speaking in his office at the Art Institute. I

wanted to talk briefly about your teaching in Greece. I understand that you

were invited by the royal government to come to teach in Greece?

Speyer: What happened was that I took a sabbatical. I had been teaching at IIT for

twelve or thirteen years. I was due to have a sabbatical leave and I took one

for six months, or I think it was a whole academic year. I traveled abroad. I

went to Greece finally, after going other places, and I was making a study of

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 architectural history and the history of art. I was rather systematically going

from one place to another with which I was not familiar. I worked south and

went through Naples and informed myself about Neapolitan Baroque and

Neoclassicism. I went to Paestum, Sicily and then I ended up in Greece.

Naturally I went to see the Athens Polytechneon, the polytechnic school of

Athens, which had an architectural school. I met the director, who was an

architect and art and architectural historian in Athens and was among the

outstanding aestheticians of Greece. We got along very well and he asked me

if I would consider giving some lectures at the Polytechneon. I said that I

certainly had not thought of such a thing but that I would consider it. He

said, “Would you expect any remuneration for this?” I said, “Yes, I would.”

This was rather upsetting to him because he had not figured that this would

be the case. I don’t know why he thought that maybe he could get it for

nothing. So he got the government to invite me through the Fulbright

Commission to come and teach for a year. I stayed a year. Then the Fulbright

Commission renewed the invitation the next year. The third year the

government invited me. If I remember correctly, the Fulbright never would

have had more than a two-year stint. I think that was it.

Saliga: So you taught there for three years?

Speyer: I was on my third year when I left. I spoke fluent French and, of course,

English. I was teaching the fifth year, and generally any student who had

reached the fifth year had a good understanding of either English or French.

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To the extent that I could speak English or French to the Greeks, I did. If they

couldn’t speak either language, I would have a translator. I put on a crash

course of learning Greek, and by the third year I was able to speak Greek and

teach in Greek. I’ve forgotten a good bit of that kind of specialized language,

and now I can only speak colloquial Greek. In any case, it was a thrilling

experience. The students were avid to learn. The academic system in Greece

is absolutely archaic. The professors in the Polytechneon, as in the whole

Greek University system at that time—and this was in 1957 to 1960… It was

a case of a professor getting the appointment and then giving the absolute

minimum of attention to his classes or his students. And he was able to get

assistants to work with him and for him. The average professor used his

position to advance himself personally as a distinguished intellectual or

architectural businessman, whichever discipline he was involved in. I would

say that most of the architecture teachers and professors were rarely in the

school. If they were there once a week, it would be quite impressive. Coming

from a very different kind of organization in America, and also being

intrigued by this whole new exposure, I came three or four days a week and

acted the way I did teaching in America. Not only was I able to get more

done with the students than the other professors, the students were also able

to get much more done with me. They were very pleased that they got more

attention. I had a very good relationship with the good students. It was a

completely enlightening experience from every point of view.

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Saliga: Did they change their teaching system after you left?

Speyer: They let me make my own curriculum. Mind you, I was teaching the fifth or

graduate year, so I was not able to institute a school-wide curriculum. What I

did do was to make projects that I thought were much more logical and solid

and much more related to the kind of thing that I had been exposed to as a

student with Mies and that I had taught as a professor under Mies.

Saliga: What kind of curriculum did they have there? Was it a Beaux-Arts system?

Speyer: It was a Beaux-Arts system. It was just the flimsiest kind of formalized

architectural approach. From the very beginning students were asked to

design things for which they had no training. If you remember in previous

interviews, I’ve explained to you that one of the great things I learned from

Mies was that he believed in steps, and that you started at the bottom step

and worked up the steps rather than starting at the top and falling down, or

in the middle and falling down. There was no organization. It was an

anarchical kind of exposure. Each of the teachers was to some degree a

successful, if not outstanding, architect in Greece. Practicing architecture in

Greece was not of any distinction at that time, anyhow. Most of the

professors were from well-to-do families. They had studied abroad. Many of

them were attractive and interesting individuals, well-educated and

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 interesting for their ideas, if not their architecture. But the level of the

architecture was extremely poor. This was a revelation. I don’t mean this,

again, to blow my own horn. It’s not a pretension at all. What I tried to do

was to give them some sort of fundamental approach to architecture and to

show them what principles meant. How you can do that in the last year is a

problem. I don’t hold any great belief for what I accomplished, but on the

other hand, I think I did have an influence on the better students, with rather

rewarding results. I had several students who came back in a graduate

capacity while I was still there and worked with me. They are doing very

good things today and I’m very proud of them.

Saliga: Was this their first exposure to International Style architecture, to Miesian

architecture?

Speyer: I think it was their first exposure to Miesian architecture. I think they had a

superficial knowledge of the International School. They certainly had a

superficial idea of Corbusier’s architecture. I would say, if anything, that the

Greek temperament would respond better to Corbusier than it would to the

purism of Mies. Their understanding of the International Style was as

superficial as their understanding of anything else. One of the most

interesting things was that the intellectual students, the students who were

more cultivated, more intelligent and above all more original in their

thinking than the average, were very opposed to antique classical Greek

architectural styles. We, of course, in our innocence in America think of the

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 Greeks having the classical antique as their great achievement. At the time I

was there, and I think it still is true, the really sophisticated Greek students

and the aestheticians, including the professors of history, art history and

architectural history, were much more interested in the Byzantine heritage of

the Greeks. This was a great revelation to me. At the time I went there I was

not very well informed at all in the Byzantine. It took me a while to realize

the lay of the land, so to speak. I realized that the Byzantine heritage was of

great importance to the Greek intellectuals and certainly on a visual level.

Their approach to the Byzantine was as superficial as their approach to the

International Style. The architectural school was really of a very low order. It

was the flimsiest kind of superficial formalism. They had no idea how to

build; they had no idea of the relationship of structure to formal expression.

It was a completely eclectic architecture. They could put up an International

facade or they could put up a Byzantine, as I say—classical antique was a no-

no. Nobody but a very dumb person would have done that because it was

really not considered very sharp.

Saliga: It was too obvious.

Speyer: Right. So, I learned a great deal, and my appreciation of Byzantine art, which

is considerable today, is based on the tenets that I picked up when I was

teaching in Greece. I did a great deal of traveling, frequently with students.

We would take field trips for a week or two. It was a reciprocal learning

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 process. It was an enormous stimulation and thrill to me.

Saliga: Why then did you leave your teaching post there and come back to Chicago?

Speyer: I think I mentioned that in one of the previous interviews. In the first place,

when I took the sabbatical leave, I never thought of living abroad

permanently. I never thought of being a professional expatriate. I thought I

should come home and find out what I was missing, if anything, and come

back. I adored Greece and I liked everything about it. I had a very happy life

in Athens. I had a delightful little house in the Plaka, very nice friends. I just

liked everything about it. I came home and, as I said, that year I was invited

to be on the payroll of the government because the University of Athens is a

government thing. The Fulbright would not repeat another time. During the

time I was at home on vacation for a month or so, the colonels of Greece had

a coup and kicked out the king of Greece and it became an autocratic

government. Did I not tell you that before once?

Saliga: No, I don’t think you did.

Speyer: Not only would it have been very unpleasant for me to be under their

auspices, but I doubt very much whether they would have wanted me, in

fact. I was certainly not of their persuasion and most of my friends who were

of liberal persuasion were not radicals at all. Most of the liberals who taught

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 at the Polytechneon either resigned or were kept down during the period of

the colonels. The colonels were there for seven years. It was not auspicious

for me to return. I went back in the summers because I had a house there and

I could go back privately, but I never taught after that.

Speyer: I think I told you one of the nicest things that happened to me when I was in

Greece was in 1959 when Mies van der Rohe and his friend, Lora Marx, came

to visit me. That was a great thrill to take them through Greece. It was a great

thrill to live in Greece. At that time Athens was still a romantically attractive

provincial capital. It was quite sophisticated and there were lots of Neoclassic

buildings. It was only at that time that it started to become Americanized or,

in other words, ruined visually and culturally. I mean they simply tore down

all the old buildings of Athens without any urban plan for the reconstruction

of the city. They just built one after another ordinary, at best, and usually

quite ugly, apartment buildings. I hate to be anachronistic, but there’s no

question that the city is ruined. It is polluted beyond belief by automobile

pollution and no effort has been made to improve it. In fact, a rather

interesting and final side note about my teaching is that one of my students

by the name of Anthony Treatius, came to America and got a masters degree

at IIT. He was one of my best students. Then he went back to Greece. He

became Minister of the Interior in a recent government. He is the only

Minister of the Interior to have made any effort to accomplish a renovation

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 of the city. But it was impossible and he is now resigned. He was very

distinguished as Minister of the Interior.

Saliga: When was he minister?

Speyer: He was minister two years ago, maybe four years ago, for two years. He just

resigned last year. I have a number of other previous students in Athens who

are among the best architects. As I said, I’m very proud of them.

Saliga: I thought we could talk a little bit about some of your specific design projects,

in your own practice. You began your practice in 1946 when you came back

from the war, at the same time that you were teaching?

Speyer: Yes.

Saliga: Where was your office located when you first opened your practice?

Speyer: I lived on Superior Street in a nineteenth-century block of buildings. I had a

couple of contiguous apartments on the main floors of two very run down

contiguous townhouses. I think I paid fifty-five dollars in rent for the two.

The ceilings were fifteen feet high. The buildings ran from Superior Street

back to an alley behind. There were carriage houses on the alley. There were

service steps in the back going down to the carriage houses to the alley. I

rented a couple of the carriage houses and kind of loosely remodeled them.

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 Those were my offices for quite a few years. I had two of them. It was very

entertaining to have them because first I loved the idea of having the office

near my house. I could go down there at any time and come up and take a

nap, eat or something and then go back down. I had some very prosperous

clients and it was great fun to have a big limousine pull up in the alley and a

client get out in the mud and go into my carriage house. In any case, it was

not at all pretentious, that I can assure you. That lasted for quite a while.

Those buildings were all torn down. I moved to Elm Street where I had a

large apartment and part of the apartment was my office.

Saliga: Did you have a staff working for you in the beginning?

Speyer: Yes I did. It started out small and it began to get bigger. I had some very

good people and mostly they were people who were students of mine from

IIT and they became teachers during the period that I was working with

them. I had people like a very fine female architect by the name of Dorothy

Turck work for me for years. Arthur Takeuchi, who is a prominent architect

in Chicago today, worked for me for years; Louis Johnson; Jacques

Brownson, who is certainly well known, worked for me. I can’t at the

moment think of too many other people by name. If I sat down and wrote

them out, it would be quite a roster. They would be well known in their own

right later. It was a small office and I don’t think I ever had more than four or

five people working for me.

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Saliga: It stayed small?

Speyer: Always small. I preferred it small.

Saliga: You mentioned a couple of days ago, in one of the other tapes, that what you

loved most was residential work.

Speyer: Did you say loved?

Saliga: What you enjoyed most was doing residential work?

Speyer: I don’t think I had any option. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think anybody every

offered me a big building, a skyscraper, I mean. I would have loved that.

That’s the trouble. I started out doing rather elegant private residences for

well-to-do people. Certainly if I had to do residences, that’s what I’d prefer. I

enjoyed doing them immensely. For instance, I did a house for Stanley

Harris, Jr. He was twenty-five years old at the time, but he gave me the

commission. He had two little children and he and his wife wanted to bring

up their children in an advanced, contemporary architectural environment.

This was very original thinking. Mr. Harris was the son of Stanley Harris, Sr.

who was the chairman of the board of the Harris Trust Company. I did his

Glencoe house and a farmhouse for his father in Wisconsin. They then built a

new bank, but they never even thought of asking me to do the bank. I think

this is the way it happens in architecture. You get labeled as being a specialist

in one thing or another. Somehow people for whom you do a house are more

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 apt to think of you as not up to doing a big building, I think.

Saliga: How did Stanley Harris, Jr. find you? Did he seek you out?

Speyer: He called Mies van der Robe and he asked Mies if he would do a house for

him. Mies said he wouldn’t, but he recommended me. Through the house

that I did for Stanley Harris I was asked by other people locally to do houses.

For example, another case is that I was asked to do a house for the Solomon

Byron Smiths in Lake Forest. We did a very exhaustive study for them—the

working drawings, everything was ready to build a house on the lake. At the

last minute, Mr. Smith was not able to get the property that he had expected

to get to build the house on. They did not build it. They bought an old house

and I remodeled the ground floor of that house. They built a new bank

building, and I’m sure they were devoted to me as an architect for their

house, but nobody ever asked me to build their bank building.

Saliga: That’s interesting.

Speyer: I think it’s always that way. I think it goes on that way constantly.

Saliga: I think architects who get renovation or restoration jobs then get labeled as

doing only that.

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Speyer: Right, and I think it’s too bad. I had some very nice clients and one was in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was my town of birth. There I did a,

probably more important, house than any I had done in Chicago to date. I

then did the Ben Rose house for the fabric designer, Ben Rose, in Highland

Park. At one time I did a penthouse for Herbert Greenwald on the top of his

Diversey Apartments. Mr. Greenwald, alas, was killed in an airplane accident

the year that we did the apartment. It was barely completed. It was never

published. Many of the things that I did were never published because the

owners didn’t want them published.

Saliga: I was going to ask you because the Stanley Harris House was published in a

French magazine. There was very little in English except for the Ben Rose

house.

Speyer: The Harris House and the Dr. [Joel] Sammet House in Highland Park, I

believe both were published in architectural magazines in this country. They

were my first houses. The Ben Rose House received much more publicity.

The Apt House in Pittsburgh received no publicity because Mr. and Mrs. Apt

were anxious not to have any publicity whatsoever. They lived in a very

private area in Pittsburgh.

Saliga: That’s the Jerome Apts?

Speyer: Yes. Actually Mrs. Apt’s father, whose name was Frank, had a house

designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer adjacent to them. This was a

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 very important house, also in this private residential area of Pittsburgh. I had

been instrumental in getting Gropius and Breuer that job. I thought that it

would be interesting to see what Gropius and Breuer would do with a big

job. It was a very important commission indeed. It was also quite suppressed.

I think it finally had some publicity, but very little. The family was most

reluctant to have publicity.

Saliga: It was a matter of your clients not wanting publicity?

Speyer: Yes. My house was next door to this. They both had large properties but they

were next to each other. The last house that I did was for my mother in 1961,

I think. My father died in 1959 and my parents lived in a big old house that

had been my grandparents’ house. My parents had five children. After the

five children all left home, my father died, and my mother decided that she

would move. She always had wanted me to do her a house, so I did her

house. I liked that house very much, but we didn’t want any publicity about

that because mother was an older lady and we thought it was not wise.

Saliga: What was the house like?

Speyer: It was brick and steel and glass. It was quite different than any other that I

did previously. It had a walled garden with a sunken garden. It had a

pavilion at the end of the garden, which was my mother’s studio. I think I

told you my mother was an artist.

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Saliga: She continued to paint?

Speyer: Oh, yes, she continued to sculpt. She continued to do sculpture until she died

at ninety, as a matter of fact. I’m very pleased with that house but,

unfortunately, the only good photographs that were ever taken were taken

by an excellent photographer, but he made a boo-boo in exposure. It is lost

forever.

Saliga: But the house is still standing?

Speyer: The house is still standing. It was sold when my mother died recently. I’ve

never been in it since, nor do I want to. The house inside had a two-story

central area with bedrooms on the second floor with balconies into the two-

story area. The two-story area downstairs was an entrance hail with free

stairs and dining off to a terrace. The living room was in another direction on

the garden. The whole house was enclosed—we were talking about court

houses, you and I, the other day. This was really a court house but it was a

two-story house.

Saliga: It sounds so wonderful.

Speyer: It was an interesting construction because it was built of something called

Lumbercore, which is a structural wood section which is, if I remember

correctly, about four inches square and it is a double tongue and groove. The

structural idea was a steel grid with the Lumbercore spanning between steel

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 beams, exposed as ceiling on the floor below and then hardwood on top of

that as the floor on the upper floor above. The interior of the house was brick.

The exterior walls were structural brick and the interior in some cases was

sheathed in cypress boards, vertical boards. All the wood was left natural

except the hardwood floors were stained on the second floor. The ground

floor was travertine. The people who bought it, I’m told, have painted all the

natural wood a color and have taken up the travertine and put down tile. I

have no idea, so I’m not very interested.

Saliga: That can’t be true.

Speyer: I think it is.

Saliga: This was the last project that you built?

Speyer: Yes, last house.

Saliga: How would you say your work changed from the Stanley Harris house, your

first, to the last?

Speyer: I think I became much freer, much freer. Again, it’s very much what I told

you in previous interviews—that the whole structure of my architectural

knowledge is based on the principles that I learned from Mies van der Rohe. I

have never felt any self-consciousness, or should I say consciousness of

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 imitating Mies. I don’t think I have. I think that I have used the principles to

express my own interpretations, my own ideas. I think I got progressively

freer. For example, in the Apt house, which was built in 1955, I used arches

throughout the house, brick arches that were structural arches. At that time

nobody was using arches, and certainly not Mies van der Rohe. I felt

perfectly comfortable using the arches and, as a matter of fact, when I

showed the pictures to Mies he felt they were perfectly logical. I don’t say

that proudly, I simply say it as an explanation of the fact that I don’t believe

that I was inhibited by the actual solutions that I learned from Mies. I believe

that I was directed by the principles in which I had been inculcated.

Saliga: How did you see your role as an architect with relation to the client? Did the

client look to you to provide the solution to their program problems or did

you rely on a lot of input from the client?

Speyer: I’ve always thought that a client’s requirements and the indicated functions

of a client’s life were not only important to follow but of great assistance in

designing a building. Far from thinking that they inhibited me, I thought

they expanded my ideas. I think nothing is harder than trying to design

where you don’t have any kind of restriction. I’m not sure that it isn’t better

to design without any restrictions, but I think it’s much more difficult. For

example, if one designs something for himself, if I were to design a house for

myself, I find that that is much more difficult than designing for somebody.

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 else. If I’m my own client I’m so pliant that I am not stopping myself from

doing what I would like to do. Therefore, maybe I don’t, in the long run,

know just what to do, whereas if I’m directed by requirements I think it’s

easier to be constructive. My role with almost all the clients that I ever had

was first of all very amicable. I feel that I got to know the clients very well,

not necessary that we became intimate friends, but we certainly became good

working partners. I think this was necessarily. In some cases I did work for

people who really were close friends, such as Mrs. Suzie Davidson. As I’ve

told you, I did some renovations in their villa in Lake Forest. The most

interesting thing I ever did for Mrs. Davidson, who was then Mrs. Zurcher,

was the former Potter Palmer apartment. It is a three-story apartment at 1301

Astor Street. She divested the lowest floor from her apartment and sold it or

gave it to her parents. The main floor was Mrs. Potter Palmer’s salon. We

made it into a dining/living room. That was great fun to do and it was a very

beautiful space. Mrs. Davidson really was a close friend. I talk about her

because you told me that she asked to sponsor this particular interview. It

was very rewarding to work for her.

Saliga: How did you come to terms with renovating that apartment? I assume it was

built in a revival style to begin with?

Speyer: It was a stunning apartment. It was absolutely beautiful. It was built by

David Adler. My goal was to alter the details as little as possible. To the alter

the details would have been to destroy it. To reconstruct it would have been

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 of no advantage whatsoever. You couldn’t do better. The living room, the

salon, must have been close to one hundred feet long, it certainly was

seventy-five feet long. It was quite narrow and it had two fireplaces, not at

each end but two on one long wall with a major entrance in the middle.

Facing the major entrance was a series of equally spaced windows, almost

from floor to ceiling, two stories high. You can imagine from that description

that there wasn’t much anybody would want to do better. What I did was to

change the main entrance from a square arched entrance into a floor-to-

ceiling opening. The hall was black Belgian marble, you can’t do better than

that. There was a spiral staircase to the second floor. All I did was to simplify

a few things. The main thing I did was to rearrange it into two rooms, namely

dining and living, instead of one room. I think it was very successful. We

took four Roman columns that were in the dining room below and we put

them as a suggested division between the dining and the living area. There

were four Byzantine columns in the Potter Palmer dining room. We simply

made a screen out of them, just four freestanding columns with capitals. The

capitals were imitations but they looked good.

Saliga: Which of your projects do you think was your most successful project?

Speyer: I think of the houses my mother’s house, the Apt house and the Rose house.

113
Saliga: As your most successful. Why is that?

Speyer: I just think they were the best. I think the earlier houses are good, I have no

apologies for them at all. I think they’re excellent. But I think that I was

inhibited, less free and less knowledgeable.

Saliga: Do you think that any of Mies’s residential architecture influenced yours?

Like, say, the Farnsworth house?

Speyer: Oh, sure, certainly. No, not the Farnsworth house. The Farnsworth house was

so special that, of course, its principles would have influenced me. You could

be influenced by aspects but not by the house itself. It was so specialized that

it was in an entirely removed category I think. The Tugendhat house, the

Barcelona Pavilion, and the house in the exhibition in 1931 were a great

influence on me.

Saliga: Today is Thursday, June 19, 1986, and I am speaking with A. James Speyer in

his office at The Art Institute of Chicago. What we’re going to talk about is

your work here at the Art Institute. But going back for one question on

Mies—when you were teaching at IIT, either that or when you were in

Greece, Mies retired from teaching.

Speyer: My recollection is that Mies in something like…

Saliga: 1958.

114
Speyer: I think he quit teaching earlier than that. He was slowing down in the

teaching. He was spending more time on work. I forget the date of the

Seagram Building—do you remember it?

Saliga: 1954. But that was what was taking up a lot of his time?

Speyer: Yes.

Saliga: What I was wondering is what do you remember about not only his

retirement, that’s pretty well documented, but at the same time he lost the

commission for the IIT campus.

Speyer: He lost?

Saliga: There was a whole controversy about him not being allowed to complete the

IIT campus. Do you remember the reason why he wasn’t allowed to finish?

Speyer: My recollection is clearly that Dean Henry Heald, who commissioned the

original campus, was a man of great breadth of vision, a dynamic intellectual

person. He had this brilliant idea to do a startling new kind of architectural

campus project and to do it in a place where it wouldn’t appear very logical

to have done it. The reason that I say it’s not logical is that he was building a

new and, of course, relatively costly campus in a slum. It was one of the

worst slums in Chicago. He was tearing down slums and building up new

115
 buildings. There was nothing around them that would in any way relate to

let’s say a middle- or upper-class association.

Saliga: There was no supporting community.

Speyer: No supporting community—beautiful phrase—that is exactly right. Heald

felt that he would like to revive that neighborhood and that by building the

buildings there he would be taking a great step forward. You may know that

Heald could have had property for the university near Northwestern on

North Lake Shore Drive. My recollection is that it was south of Northwestern

and south of the Furniture Mart at 666 North Lake Shore Drive. It may have

been just south of there, but I’m not sure about where it was. He turned that

down because, in the first place, it would have cost a great deal more money,

which he preferred to put into the school, and then, as I said, his ideal and his

principles really were involved with the idea of saving a degenerating

neighborhood. When Heald died, as he did I forget what year, but he died

very prematurely, as you know, then a man by the name of [John] Rettaliata

became president. I never had a feeling that Mr. Rettaliata was a particularly

enlightened individual. My own impression of him was that he was a very

conventional, not very distinguished business person more than any kind of

thinking or visionary type. This is not to be negative about him. I never had

any feelings against him at all. I never knew him very well. I just felt that he

was not really an enlightened individual. I presume, and this is my

recollection, that he became impatient with Mies van der Rohe because of

116
 Mies’s way of working. He had a rather slow way of working because he was

such a perfectionist that he studied every detail much more than most

architects. What he did was to commission Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,

who had a great many of Mies van der Rohe’s students working for them,

and the partners of which firm were also very sympathetic to Mies’s own

expression in architecture. Mies’s method is probably what interfered with

his continuing the campus. Skidmore was in a position, because of their big

office and because of their rapid way of working and very businesslike

approach, to perform the duties in designing new buildings with expedition

rather than the way Mies did it. I think that’s what it was. I don’t think

Rettaliata really understood the difference between a real Mies van der Rohe

building and an adaptation by Skidmore. I think very highly of Skidmore. I

think they’re good architects. At that time they were doing good work in the

Miesian tradition, but it certainly wasn’t the same. Whereas each thing that

Mies completed on the IIT campus was a perfection in its own way, the

buildings that were built later by Skidmore were not on the same high level.

I’ve always felt very sad that the campus was never implemented the way it

was conceived, and it certainly wasn’t.

Saliga: In 1961 you made a rather dramatic career shift in that you left teaching and

became Curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Art Institute. How did that

shift come about?

Speyer: I think we talked about that maybe the first time that you interviewed me,

117
 the first session. Do you remember if that’s the case? We talked about it

briefly once because I think I made quite a point in talking with you about

the fact that I was very influenced by the Museum of Modern Art.

Saliga: You talked about that.

Speyer: I had always had a very high opinion of museums. In fact, even my exposure

to Mies’s indoctrination helped convince me of this idea. Mies van der Rohe

had what he called a hierarchy of values in architecture. At the top of this

hierarchy was the church. He likened it to a pyramid or a triangle, and at the

very top was the church. Below the church was the great cultural institution

of the museum. Below that, I don’t remember if anything was in between,

was the university. Going down in the hierarchy one ended up with

buildings that were purely functional. But the museum was on a very high

level. I also learned from Mies a great respect for museum installations and

presentations. Among some of Mies’s most significant executed projects, in

fact I think some of his most significant works, were exhibitions in museums.

We must not forget that even the Barcelona Pavilion was, in a sense, part of

the museum installation although that was an exposition. I, therefore, always

had a tremendous respect for museums and a great love for them as well.

After I had come back from Greece, when I was teaching graduate

architectural classes at IIT, it was completely out of the blue that I was asked

118
 by John Maxon, the then director of this museum, to come and see him. I

went to see him and he asked me if I would be interested in being curator of

twentieth-century art. I was completely astonished. I said, “Well, indeed I

might be,” but that it was a very drastic thought and change from my present

activity at that time. I told him I would have to think it over. He said, “Well,

why don’t you think it over. Would you let me know tomorrow or the next

day?”

Saliga: That soon?

Speyer: Yes. Mr. Maxon, whenever he had an idea, wanted to see it implemented the

day before he had the idea. I allowed that this might not be possible and that

it would take me a week or two to think about it at least. After about ten days

he called me and asked, “Have you made up your mind?” I said, “No, I

hadn’t.” He said, “Why don’t you come in and let’s talk a little more about

it.” I did go in to see him in a couple of weeks. He pressed me for a decision.

He said, “By any chance would it make any difference to you if I employed

you on an academic schedule? In other words, instead of working twelve

months would you work nine months and have leave of absence without pay

for three months extra?” I said, “It certainly would make a difference, and I’ll

think more about it.” In due course I decided to do it. I think that nothing

could have been more drastic. I had not yet reopened my office after coming

home from Greece because I was back such a short time. I had spent part of

the time finding a place to live and setting up housekeeping again after

119
 being in Greece. Then, as I say, there was a glamour attached to museums

that I found extremely compelling. I took the job. I guess that’s it.

Saliga: How did he know about you? Through your Art News reviews?

Speyer: I don’t know how he knew about me. I do not know. I think he knew about

me through a number of friends. I will not mention whom I think they might

be. There were definitely two or three people, any one of them or all of them,

might have recommended me. Although an amateur, I was known to be very

interested in the history of art and visual arts as well as architecture which I

was professionally interested in.

Saliga: Did you collect art at that time?

Speyer: I did. Not a great deal, but, as I told you, I came from a family that had

always collected art. I was always looking at art and I sometimes collected it.

I was very involved in it. I think I told you that I had also given a couple of

series of art seminars at the Art Institute under Katharine Kuh before that

date, long before. I was known around the museum, I mean among some of

the staff who worked in the museum, and I was known by some of the other

people in town who were interested in art. I just don’t know whom. I never

asked and nobody ever told me.

Saliga: Well, lucky for us, lucky for us.

120
Speyer: Thank you.

Saliga: I wanted to ask you about the Mies show that you organized for the Art

Institute in 1968. Why did you organize a Mies show? Did you just feel it was

time for a Chicago retrospective of his work?

Speyer: I certainly did. I felt that it was absolutely time for it. I felt that the Art

Institute should do it. He was, if I am correct, about to be eighty or was just

eighty.

Saliga: Yes.

Speyer: I felt that nothing could be more propitious. I’m glad you asked me about

that because I think this will be a good way to end our interview. I was the

Curator of Twentieth Century Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Saliga: Architecture was included?

Speyer: Yes, when I was employed. I had done an exhibition of Corbusier with the

Museum of Modern Art many years prior to that. It seemed to me very

logical to do a Mies van der Rohe exhibition. John Maxon was in accord. He

had not given me much opportunity to do architectural exhibitions because,

121
 as you know, architectural exhibitions are not too popular in museums.

Saliga: Yes, in art museums.

Speyer: My idea was not only to show the buildings, projects and the exhibitions that

Mies van der Rohe had accomplished during his lifetime, but to try to convey

a feeling of the space and the architecture, the spirit of it in the exhibition

itself. I think that I accomplished this. I don’t say it pretentiously but I think I

did because Mies, himself, was very pleased with what we did. Mies had

nothing to do with the installation although he had a great deal to do with

the choices. He had everything to do with the choices, he made the choices.

Saliga: Of the buildings represented?

Speyer: Of the work shown. We showed it by means of models, some original

drawings, there were not too many available, some very big blowups of

drawings, of graphic works, and life-size blowups of photographic pictures,

for example, of the Barcelona Pavilion, for example, which would be as large

as high and as wide, or give that impression as a given detail in the Barcelona

Pavilion, itself, or the Tugendhat house, or whatever it would be. What I was

trying to do was to give you the impression that you were in a kind of Mies

space. The movement of these panels was like free walls. The focuses were

arranged in such a way that you moved through the space the way you

might have moved through one of his buildings. Mies didn’t see the installa-

122
 tion until it was finished. He was very pleased with it, he told me. We

showed furniture and we had seating locations in the exhibition, both in the

stairhall of the Morton wing and also within the exhibition. It was really a

kind of easy exhibition. It was not in any way a didactic exhibition. That is, of

course, my great complaint about the exhibition that Arthur Drexler has just

done in New York. I find that that exhibition has all kinds of excellent

aspects. I think it’s very carefully arranged. I think all the drawings are well

framed, the photographs are good, the models and the drawings are well

exposed. I think that what one really feels in that exhibition is a confusion of

data which is like an open book. I don’t think you feel anything of the Mies

space. There is no elegance in the exhibition, except perhaps the details of the

frames around the drawings. Everything is done very carefully and well, but,

there is not any [indication] of the real spirit and magic of Mies’s work and

space.

Saliga: You’re saying that it is essentially no different than looking at a book of

reproductions.

Speyer: I think it is a book, except for some wonderful drawings. I saw many more

drawings of his there than I’ve ever seen in my life, finished drawings, those

colored drawings, black and whites all together. It was superb. We couldn’t

get all those drawings for our show. But, I think our show was a very good

123
 show. I’m most anxious now to see John Zukowsky’s show. [The Unknown

Mies van der Rohe and His Disciples of Modernism]

Saliga: You said that the drawings weren’t available when you did your show in

1968. Were they still in Germany?

Speyer: Some of the drawings were either still in Germany or were still in that

famous box that Lilly Reich sent. I forget when she sent that box.

Saliga: In Mies’s office?

Speyer: In Mies’s office, which I had never seen the contents of.

Saliga: Was he not willing to open it?

Speyer: I don’t remember. The box came—everybody was all excited about the box. I

think maybe the work in the box was going to paper conservation. I forget.

We didn’t get the original drawing of the concrete house, we didn’t have the

original drawing of the brick house, of course, and we didn’t have those

colored drawings of the concrete house. But we had some of the skyscraper

drawings.

Saliga: Were you disappointed then when everything was donated to the [Museum

of] Modern [Art] after his death?

124
Speyer: No, I expected it. I think it was reasonable because, after all, the Museum of

Modern Art gave him his first exhibition in this country. The Museum of

Modern Art recommended him, in a sense, for his job at Armour in that, as

you know, Alfred Barr recommended him to the Stanley Resors to come and

do their house in Wyoming. He came and he saw John Holabird. Alfred

[Barr] certainly gave him a big push with John Holabird, whereas I think that

Chicago, John Holabird and all of the clients who got Mies were very lucky to

have gotten him. I think that, on the other hand, that he was very well

supported by the Museum of Modern Art and that it was right that he should

continue to finish it. As a matter of fact, there really wasn’t a very active

architecture department [in Chicago] and there was in New York. Philip

Johnson and he had worked in varying ways. I never felt that he and Philip

Johnson were close personal friends, although they certainly knew each other

very well. I always felt that they were more professional colleagues. First

Philip Johnson was Mies’s client when Mies did the apartment for him in

New York, and later they were business colleagues when Philip and he did

the Seagram Building. Whereas I think he was a very good personal friend of

James Johnson Sweeney, and certainly Alfred Barr thought the world of him.

In doing the exhibition it never occurred to me, there was no ulterior motive

such as trying to get whatever Mies had left. I think that Philip Johnson had

pretty well absorbed all the material from the office until the famous box

came from Germany. By that time the Museum of Modern Art had been able

to assimilate the really voluminous amount of work that Mies had given

them and dignify it with the proper kind of attention and scholarly

125
 investigation. I think it was right that he leave it.

Saliga: Is there anything that you wanted to get back to in the interview? Is there

anything that I didn’t bring up that you wanted to talk about?

Speyer: If there is, I would have to hear the interview before I could tell you. We have

done it now quite extensively. I think the main thing I would like to

communicate, I think it must be manifest in what I’ve said all through the

interview, is that I have the highest regard for Mies and a great regard for the

quality of his architecture. I have avoided—not for any reason except that it

didn’t seem pertinent—discussing the man. I always felt that he was a good

friend to me, a good personal friend. We had fine times together. I felt in the

position of a tyro in the face of a master. Probably as I got older this altered.

In particular when he visited me in Greece we had a remarkably lovely visit.

As I believe I mentioned before, I had a great regard for Mrs. Lora Marx. That

was one of the outstanding periods. I will end the interview as far as Mies

goes, which I think is the thrust of this interview, isn’t it? That’s the main

thing you’re interested in aren’t you?

Saliga: Mies and his influence on you.

Speyer: My observations about Mies and my connections with Mies. I don’t think

you’re as interested in my personality or my work, I don’t mean that

126
 critically—I think it’s fact, isn’t it? Isn’t that right?

Saliga: Not really. It’s just that Mies is such a key part of your education and your

teaching and so forth. Somehow it always ties back to Mies.

Speyer: I like to remember Mies particularly sitting in the theatre of Epidaurus. There

is a very fine photograph of that. It may be in Franz Schulze’s book [Schulze,

pp. 292 and 293].

Saliga: Yes. Well if that’s how you’d like to remember Mies, I asked you this last

time, for what would you like best to be remembered?

Speyer: I think I would like to be remembered for the quality of my own architecture

and certainly for my accomplishments at the Art Institute. I think that,

although I am often congratulated on architectural installations and

presentations in the museum, which pleases me, of course, I think that I also

have built a fine collection of paintings and sculpture for the permanent

collection during the twenty-five years I’ve been here. I would like to be

thought of in a kind of complete connection that way.

127
 SELECTED REFERENCES

Books and articles by A. James Speyer

The Space Concept in Modern Domestic Architecture, Chicago: Armour Institute of Technology

Master’s Thesis, 1939

“Mies van der Rohe, His First Large U. S. Exhibition Shows How He Helped Create the

Modern Style from Chairs to Skyscrapers.” ArtNews 46 (September 1947): 20-23, 42-43

“Art news from Chicago.” ArtNews 54 (September 1955): 11ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Art Galleries in Chicago, Momentum Group) ArtNews, Vol. 54,

no. 7 (November 1955): 12ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, Renaissance

Society, Francis Chapin at Stevens Gross Galleries) ArtNews, Vol. 54, no. 8 (December

1955): 16

“Art news from Chicago,” (New acquisitions at The Art Institute of Chicago) ArtNews, Vol.

54, no. 9 (January 1956): 19ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (1020 Art Center) ArtNews, Vol. 54, no. 10 (February 1956): 16

“Art news from Chicago,” (Exhibition of Louis Sullivan’s work at The Art Institute of

Chicago, Mies van der Rohe’s work in 1956, Art Rental and Sales Gallery at The Art

Institute of Chicago) ArtNews, Vol. 55, no. 1 (March 1956): 15

“Art news from Chicago,” (Annual Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition at The Art Institute of

Chicago, Exhibition of 47 Midwestern Printmakers at the 1020 Art Center) ArtNews, Vol.

55, no. 2 (April 1956): 18

“Art news from Chicago,” (Chicago’s Involvement in the Venice Biennale, Suzette M.

Zurcher Exhibition at the Chicago Public Library, Exhibition of Typographic Art,

Exhibition to Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Arts Club, Robert Burkert and

128
 Edward Betts Exhibition) ArtNews, Vol. 55, no. 3 May 1956): 18ff.

“Summer events: Chicago,” (Momentum Exhibition, Summer Art at Ravinia, Department of

Photography at The Art Institute of Chicago) ArtNews, Vol. 55, no. 4 (Summer 1956): 23

“Art news from Chicago,” (Spring Festival at The Art Institute of Chicago, Old Town Art

Festival, Ravinia Festival) ArtNews, Vol. 55, no. 5 (September 1956): 18ff.

“Art news from Chicago” (Review of exhibitions at the Arts Club, Main Street Gallery,

Fairweather Hardin Gallery, Alan Frumkin Gallery, Frank Oehlshlaeger Gallery)

ArtNews, Vol. 55, no. 8 (December 1956): 49 ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Review of exhibition of work by Abbot Pattison and Ruth Asaw,

group exhibition at 1020 Art Center, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the 1957 Chicago

Artists No-Jury Exhibition) ArtNews, Vol. 55, no. 9 (January 1957): 52 ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Announcement of 62nd Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition at The

Art Institute of Chicago, work by Martyl, and a group exhibition at Fairweather Hardin

Gallery) ArtNews, Vol. 56, no. 1 (March 1957): 50 ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Review of the 1957 Chicago Artists No-Jury Exhibition at Navy

Pier) ArtNews, Vol. 56, no. 1 (March 1957): 50 ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Review of Evelyn Statsinger exhibition at The Art Institute of

Chicago German Expressionists at The Frumkin Gallery; Marcel Mouly at Main Street

Gallery; Arthur Okamura at Charles Feingarten Gallery; Eleanor Coen, John Colt, and

Robert Marx at Fairweather Hardin Gallery; and Jacquelin Courevitch, Ivan Mischo and

H.C. Westermann at 414 Workshop Gallery) ArtNews, Vol. 54, no. 3 (May 1957): 49 ff.

“Art news from Chicago,” (Review of Exhibition Momentum, Contemporary Mexican

Painting at Main Street Gallery, and various outdoor exhibitions) ArtNews, Vol. 58, no. 4

(Summer 1957): 66 ff.

129
A. James Speyer and Frederick Koeper, Mies van der Rohe. Chicago: The Art Institute of

Chicago, 1968.

Books and articles about A. James Speyer

Achilles, Rolf, Kevin Harrington and Charlotte Mykram, eds. Mies van der Rohe: Architect as

Educator. Chicago: Illinois Institute of Technology, 1986.

“Exposed Steel Frames Modular Illinois Home for Ben Rose, Highland Park.” Architectural

Record Vol. 119 (mid-May 1956): 157-161.

Gueft, O. “Ben Rose House: Geometry in the Wildwood.” Interiors Vol. 114 (June 1955): 70-

77.

“Habitation à Glencoe, Illinois, USA: A. James Speyer, Architect et Alfred Caldwell,

Landscape Architect.” L’ Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Vol. 4 (December 1958): 74-75.

“Habitation près de Chicago.” (Ben Rose residence by A. James Speyer, Architect and

George Edson Danforth, Associate Architect) L’Architecture d’Aujourd‘hui Vol. 5

(November 1955): 70-71.

Schulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe, A Critical Biography. Chicago and London: The University

of Chicago Press, 1985.

Swenson, Alfred and Pao-Chi Chang. Architectural Education at IIT 1938-78. Chicago: Illinois

Institute of Technology, 1980.

Zukowsky, John, ed. Mies Reconsidered: His Career, Legacy and Disciples. Chicago: The Art

Institute of Chicago, 1986.

Zukowsky, John, Pauline Saliga and Rebecca Rubin. Chicago Architects Design: A Century of

Architectural Drawings from The Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago and New York: The Art

Institute of Chicago and Rizzoli International Publications, 1982.

130
 A. James Speyer

Life Dates: December 27, 1913. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

November 9, 1986. Chicago, Illinois.

Education: Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, B.S. 1934

Chelsea Polytechnique, London, Graduate Studies, 1934-37

Sorbonne, Paris, Graduate Studies, 1934-37

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, M.Arch. 1939

Experience: 1941-46 U. S. Army

1946-61 Professor of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology

1946-57 Private Practice, Architect

1957-60 Visiting Fulbright Professor at National University, Athens,

Greece

1961-1986 Curator of Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture, The Art

Institute of Chicago

131
 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Aalto, Alvar 68 Brace, Georges 43

Adler, David 112 Brenner, Daniel 60, 69-71, 87, 90
Albers, Josef 59 Breuer, Marcel 67-68, 107-108
American Furniture Mart, Chicago, Brownson, Jacques 104
Illinois 116 Buckingham Palace, London, England 8
Apt, Jerome 107
Apt, Jerome (house), Pittsburgh, Carbon and Carbide Building, Chicago,
Pennsylvania 107, 111, 113 Illinois 6
Archipenko, Alexander 32, 77 Carnegie Institute of Technology,
Armour Institute of Technology 21-28, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 3-5, 7, 9, 11-
124 12, 25, 41
Art Deco 6, 12, 15, 19, 85 Chelsea Polytechnic, London, England 11
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Chermayeff, Serge 77, 79, 80
26-27, 32, 117, 120-121, 127 Chicago Historical Society, Chicago,
Art Institute of Chicago, Blackstone Hall, Illinois 77-78
Chicago, Illinois 26 Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills,
Art Institute of Chicago, Morton Wing, Michigan 29
Chicago, Illinois 123
Athens Polytechneon, Athens, Greece 96- d’Harnoncourt, René 14
97, 101 Danforth, George 33, 47, 59, 60, 81
Dartmouth College, Hannover, New
Baldwin Kingrey 70-71 Hampshire 87
Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 57, Davidson, Suzette Morton Zurcher 112
114, 118, 122 Donatello 27
Barr, Alfred 14, 124-125 Drexler, Arthur 123
Bartsch, Helmuth 59
Bauhaus, Germany 19, 23, 33-34, 78-80, 86 Eiffel Tower, Paris, France 8
Behrens, Peter 84 Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania 16,
Berlage, H.P 84 55, 57
Blackstone Hotel, Chicago, Illinois 46 Farnsworth, Dr. Edith (house), Plano,
Bluestein, Earl 88 Illinois 58, 114

132
Farnsworth, Dr. Edith 58-59 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan 74
Field, Marshall 77 Institute of Design, Chicago, Illinois 32,
70, 77-80
Gabor, Laszlo 15-16, 18, 21-23
Genther,Charles 88 Johnson, Louis 104
Greenwald, Herbert 107 Johnson, Philip 7, 14, 21, 28, 125
Gropius, Walter 20, 22-23, 79, 107-108
Kaufmann Department Store, Pittsburgh,
Harris, Stanley (house), Hubbard Woods, Pennsylvania 15, 18-19
Illinois 107, 110 Kaufmann Family 15-16
Harris, Stanley Jr. 105-106 Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr. (house), Bear Run,
Harris, Stanley Sr. 105 Pennsylvania, see “Fallingwater”
Harvard University, Cambridge, Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr. 14-15
Massachusetts 20, 22, 24, 79 Kingrey, Jody 70-71
Heald, Henry 27, 115-116 Klee, Paul 46
Hilberseimer, Ludwig 32, 34, 36-39, 79, Krueck, Ronald 88
81, 85, 91 Kuh, Katharine 120
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 7
Hitler, Adolf 6 Lambert, Phyllis 90
Holabird and Root 23 Lange, Hermann (house), Krefeld, West
Holabird, John 21-22, 25-27, 125 Germany 56-57
Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 12, 39, 49, 52-53, 68, 99, 121
Illinois 29, 33, 35, 58, 60-66, 69, 72, 75-
82, 85-90, 92, 95, 102, 114-118 Malcolmson, Reginald 87
Illinois Institute Of Technology, Alumni Martin, Darwin (house) Buffalo, New
Memorial Hall (formerly the Navy York 67
Building), Chicago, Illinois 59, 76 Marx, Lora 92-95, 102, 126
Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Hall, Chicago, Illinois 58-59, 78 Cambridge, Massachusetts 29
Illinois Institute of Technology, Materials Maxon, John 118-121
and Metals Research Building, McAndrew, John 14
Chicago, Illinois 76 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 90
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 12, 20-23, 26-

133
 72, 76-85, 88-95, 98-99, 102, 106, 110- Rettaliata, John 116-117
111, 114, 116-118, 121-127 Robie, Frederick (house), Chicago, Illinois
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 77-80 55, 57
Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (wife of Moholy) 78 Rockwell, H. P. Davis 90
Murphy, Charles Francis 90 Rose, Ben (house), Highland Park, Illinois
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 113
New York 7, 14, 19, 21-22, 60, 69, 118,
121, 124-125 Sammet, Dr. Joel (house), Highland Park,
Mussolini, Benito 6 Illinois 107
Schinkel, Karl 84
Navy Building, see Illinois Institute of Schulze, Franz 20, 58, 60-61, 92, 94, 127
Technology, Alumni Hall Seagram Building, New York City, New
New Bauhaus, Chicago, Illinois 78 York 115, 125
Northwestern University, Evanston, Siegel, Arthur 80
Illinois 116 Siskind, Aaron 80
666 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois
Olsen, Keith 88 116
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill 117
Palmer, Potter 112-113 Smith, Solomon Byron 106
Palmolive Building, Chicago, Illinois 6 Summers, Gene 90
Parthenon, Athens, Greece 93-94 Sweeney, James Johnson 21, 28, 125
Peterhans, Walter 32, 34, 36, 39, 45-46, 81,
85, 91 Takeuchi, Arthur 104
Picasso, Pablo 43, 84 1301 Astor Street, Chicago, Illinois 112
Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 84
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 13 Treatius, Anthony 102
Prestini, James 69-71 Tugendhat, Fritz (house) Brno,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Czechoslovakia 55-58, 114, 122
Jersey 29 Turck, Dorothy 104

Reich, Lily 124 University of Athens, Athens, Greece 101

Resor, Stanley 21, 27, 125 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Resor Stanley (house), Jackson Hole, Michigan 87
Wyoming 21, 28

134
Verrocchio, Andrea del .27 Wright, Frank Lloyd 16, 52-57
Vinci, John 88-89
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Weese, Kitty Baldwin 70 29
Williams College, Williamstown,
Massachusetts 87 Zukowsky, John 123

135