The Chicago Seven was a first-generation

postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

group of architects in Chicago. The original Seven were Stanley Tigerman,

Larry Booth The Chicago Seven was a first-generation postmodern group of architects in Chicago. The original Seven were Stanley Tigerman, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, Ben Weese, James Ingo Freed, Tom Beeby and James L. Nagle. Motivation Rebelling against the ...

Stuart Cohen The Chicago Seven was a first-generation postmodern group of architects in Chicago. The original Seven were Stanley Tigerman, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, Ben Weese, James Ingo Freed, Tom Beeby and James L. Nagle. Motivation Rebelling against th ...

Ben Weese Benjamin Horace (Ben) Weese (born 1929) in Evanston, Illinois is an American architect hailing from Chicago, and a member of the architects group, the Chicago Seven. Weese is the younger brother of Chicago architect Harry Weese. He received BArc ...

, James Ingo Freed, Tom Beeby and James L. Nagle.

Motivation

Rebelling against the oppressive institutionalized predominance of the doctrine of modernism, as represented by the followers of

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd ...

, the Chicago Seven architects were looking for new forms, a

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

content and historical references in their buildings.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,

exhibition An exhibition, in the most general sense, is an organized presentation and display of a selection of items. In practice, exhibitions usually occur within a cultural or educational setting such as a museum, art gallery, park, library, exhibition ...

s and symposia.

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 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 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 Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War (before) or anti-Vietnam War movement (present) began with demonstrations in 1965 against the escalating role of the United States in the Vietnam War and grew into a broad social move ...

protesters known as the Chicago Seven who stood trial in the city from September 1969 until February 1970. The name stuck even after they were joined by Helmut Jahn 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 Andrea Palladio ( ; ; 30 November 1508 – 19 August 1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect active in the Venetian Republic. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily Vitruvius, is widely considered to be one of th ...

and the facade even sported a Serliana. The group was further enlarged by the inclusion of

Gerald Horn Gerald is a male Germanic given name meaning "rule of the spear" from the prefix ''ger-'' ("spear") and suffix ''-wald'' ("rule"). Variants include the English given name Jerrold, the feminine nickname Jeri and the Welsh language Gerallt and Irish ...

, Kenneth Schroeder and

Cynthia Weese Cynthia is a feminine given name of Greek origin: , , "from Mount Cynthus" on Delos island. The name has been in use in the Anglosphere since the 1600s. There are various spellings for this name, and it can be abbreviated to Cindy, Cyndi, Cyndy, ...

.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