The Chicago Seven was a first-generation postmodern group of

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

s in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. The original Seven were

Stanley Tigerman Stanley Tigerman (September 20, 1930 – June 3, 2019) was an American architect, theorist and designer. Biography Early years Tigerman was born into a Jewish family, the only child of Emma (Stern), a typist for the federal government, and Sa ...

, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, Ben Weese,

James Ingo Freed James Ingo Freed (June 23, 1930 – December 15, 2005) was an American architect born in Essen, Germany during the Weimar Republic. After coming to the United States at age nine with his sister Betty, followed later by their parents, he studi ...

Tom Beeby Thomas H. Beeby (born 1941) is an American architect who was a member of the "Chicago Seven" architects and has been Chairman Emeritus of Hammond, Beeby, Rupert, Ainge Architects (HBRA) for over thirty-nine years. He is a representative of New U ...

and James L. Nagle.

Motivation

Rebelling against the oppressive institutionalized predominance of the

doctrine Doctrine (from la, doctrina, meaning "teaching, instruction") is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the essence of teachings in a given branch of knowledge or in a belief syste ...

modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

, as represented by the followers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Chicago Seven architects were looking for new forms, a semantic content and historical references in their buildings. Nagle commented on the state of affairs that prompted the intervention of the Chicago Seven: "It wasn't Mies that got boring. It was the copiers that got boring,... You got off an airplane in the 1970s, and you didn't know where you were." The Seven brought their ideas to a broader audience through their teaching, exhibitions and

symposia ''Symposia'' is a genus of South American araneomorph spiders in the family Cybaeidae, and was first described by Eugène Simon in 1898. Species it contains six species in Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic o ...

Origins, development and further members

The nucleus of the group formed in protest against the travelling exhibition ''One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago'' about to be shown in 1976 at the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporar ...

. The organizers put such an exclusive emphasis on the role played by Mies, his predecessors and followers, that it distorted the historical reality. This aroused the criticism of Tigerman, Cohen, Booth and Weese who simultaneously mounted a counter-show in the

Time-Life Building 1271 Avenue of the Americas is a 48-story skyscraper on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas), between 50th and 51st Streets, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Designed by architect Wallace Harrison of Harrison, Ab ...

which attracted nationwide attention. Quickly dubbed the ''Chicago Four'', with the addition of Freed, Beeby and Nagle, they soon expanded into the ''Chicago Seven''. They embraced this name as it paid homage to the anti-Vietnam war protesters known as the

Chicago Seven The Chicago Seven, originally the Chicago Eight and also known as the Conspiracy Eight or Conspiracy Seven, were seven defendants—Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Lee Weiner—charged by ...

who stood trial in the city from September 1969 until February 1970. The name stuck even after they were joined by

Helmut Jahn Helmut Jahn (January 4, 1940 – May 8, 2021) was a German-American architect, known for projects such as the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany; the Messeturm in Frankfurt, Germany; the Thompson Center in Chicago; One Liber ...

for the 1978 project "the exquisite corpse" which produced variations on the Chicago townhouse to "demonstrate the harmonious variety of a cityscape allowed to develop through minimally controlled 'accident'." These townhouses were characterised by their abandoning the modernist rules, the modification of the structural grid, the introduction of barrel vaults and historical references. As Nagle put it, "a lot of it really had to do with history... The appreciation of history made us all much better architects." Beeby's townhouse was strongly influenced by Palladio and the facade even sported a

Serliana A Venetian window (also known as a Serlian window) is a large tripartite window which is a key element in Palladian architecture. Although Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554) did not invent it, the window features largely in the work of the Italian ar ...

. The group was further enlarged by the inclusion of Gerald Horn, Kenneth Schroeder and Cynthia Weese.Blair Kamin
"Adding up the other Chicago Seven"
Chicago Tribune. 2 October 2005. The Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 9 February 2011. However, the members were a heterogeneous bunch and, according to Beeby, "didn't agree on anything". Yet, "despite the reliance on form, sometimes ironic and sometimes nostalgic, this was the first broadly conceptualized alternative to Chicago's modernist architectural canon."Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi. ''Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Aftermath

In 2005, the Chicago Architectural Club organized a reunion of the Chicago Seven at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, ''Celebrating 25 Years of the Chicago Seven'', to discuss the contemporary state of Chicago architecture. Tigerman did not attend.

Motivation

Origins, development and further members

Aftermath

References

Further reading