![]() “This is the one book on Chicago architecture that everyone should have.”—Chicago Tribune More excerpts: Elsewhere on the web: Official website for the Harold Washington Library Center ![]() |
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Harold Washington Library Center
[25] Harold Washington Library Center (1991) 400 South State Street Architects: Hammond, Beeby & Babka The huge publicity preceding the 1991 opening of the new main Chicago Public Library mostly stemmed from two sources: a long-lasting argument over where the new structure should be erected (indeed, should it be a new building at all or a rehabilitated old one?) and the formal competition for a final design, a contest that unfolded once the South Loop site was selected. Moreover, the winning entry generated considerable controversy in its own right. Design architect Thomas Beeby conceived a building of the sort one rightly calls an edifice, which mostly looks as if the modernist revolution of the last century had never happened. Clad with granite on the lower levels and brick above, the library is monumental in more than scale, harking back to the Beaux Arts manner of the late nineteenth century not only in its powerful axial symmetry but in the heavy representational decoration that adorns its exterior. It is clearly indebted to the ancient Western tradition of grandiloquent civic structures.
In his use of ornament, Beeby has expressed his intention to revive the look of history in a building that, true to the postmodernist aesthetic, also displays its attachment to contemporaneity. The huge acroteria at the top edge of the structure feature several representations of the owl, a bird that stands for wisdom and learning. More specifically, Beeby’s iconography relates to the Midwest and to Chicago. The head of Ceres, Roman goddess of grain, appears in wall medallions together with ears of corn, the pairing symbolic of prairie agriculture. The ninth-floor cornice railing marks the uniform height of buildings proposed in the famous 1909 Plan of Chicago of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett. And the meaning of "Windy City Man" high on the facade is obvious.
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