2018

A fine example of Venetian Gothic architecture, the Chicago Athletic Association Building at 12 South Michigan Avenue between East Monroe and East Madison Streets in the Loop neigbourhood of Chicago, Illinois, was built in 1893 and was designed by Henry Ives Cobb. The eleven story building operated as an elite private men’s club until 2007. It now hosues a 241 room hotel.

During the late nineteenth century, architect Louis Henri Sullivan (1856–1924) created a new and honest expression in the design of buildings, inspiring a genre known as Chicago School of Architecture. While many other architects adhered to fanciful historical styles which were very popular at the time, Sullivan created buildings that expressed their structural design, relying only upon simple and organic ornamentation to embellish their facades. The Chicago Stock Exchange, designed by Sullivan with his partner, Dankmar Adler, was widely considered an architectural masterpiece. Constructed in 1893, the thirteen-story building incorporated Sullivan’s signature ornamentation that combined geometric forms with expressions of natural foliage. In the 1960s and 1970s, many beautiful nineteenth century buildings in Chicago were demolished to make way for new development. In an effort to inspire preservation efforts, photographer Richard Nickel (1928–1972) began to document old buildings as they fell into decay or were slated for demolition. As Nickel struggled to find support to save monuments like the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, he asserted: "Great architecture has only two natural enemies: water and stupid men." Sadly, Nickel died in 1972 when a staircase collapsed on him inside the Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Despite a strong public movement opposing the demolition of the architectural masterpiece, the building was razed in 1972. After the demolition, the Art Institute of Chicago acquired the building’s terra cotta arch, along with several other original fragments. Using a gift from the Heller Foundation, the Art Institute installed the iconic arch in a small plaza just northeast of the museum in 1977. Around the same time, the Art Institute opened a reconstructed version of Adler & Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Trading Room as part of the museum’s East Wing Addition.