Flashback 2008: Walter Netsch "He broke out of the box"

     

Walter Netsch's University Hall at UIC's Circle Campus is consistently cited among
the ugliest buildings in Chicago. In 2018, TimeOut Chicago called it "a larger-than-life
Triscuit cracker" and a "rogue domino." (Photo courtesy WikiCommons)

     Tonight's Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline Cruise is not the first time I've turned to architecture critic Lee Bey to provide insight and perspective. I checked on Walter Netsch's obituary because I plan to talk about brutalism, of which he was the master — if that is the right word; "victim" might be more apt — and was surprised to see Lee doing yeoman's work  lending a hand here as well. I'm surprised I've not shared it before, it being perhaps the most negative obituary I've ever written, except of course for Morgan Finley, that "monument to corruption." 

     Walter Netsch, a controversial Chicago architect whose work was both praised and reviled, as well as a former Chicago Park District board president, died at his home Sunday. He was 88.
     Mr. Netsch specialized in academic structures and designed several significant buildings on Chicago area campuses. He created the tri-towered concrete library at Northwestern University and much of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
     An early building that established his national reputation was the soaring U.S. Air Force Academy Chapel at Colorado Springs, which was initially criticized but eventually became an admired tourist attraction.
     His UIC campus, on the other hand, was described as "physically repellent" by university officials who ordered a face-lift when they discovered that prospective students were shunning UIC after visiting the campus because they found its buildings intolerably ugly.
     Prominent Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman once said of Mr. Netsch: ''His buildings create wonderment, in the best and worst sense of the word.''
     In 1986, Mr. Netsch was appointed Park District board president by Mayor Harold Washington. He left the board in 1988 after a stormy tenure, but he is credited with helping to distribute district projects more equitably, focusing attention on poorer areas that had been neglected previously.
     As influential as he was, Mr. Netsch's ideas were often ignored, perhaps justly so. He once suggested closing the two center lanes of Lake Shore Drive and converting them into flower beds.
     Mr. Netsch spent 30 years with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the giant Chicago-based architecture firm. A heart condition in 1979 forced him to retire, and he was plagued by medical problems in his later years.
     He was married for 45 years to former Illinois Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, who ran for governor in 1994. The two met when the then-Dawn Clark asked to borrow Netsch's art-crammed Lake Shore Drive penthouse apartment for a meeting of independent Democrats in the late 1950s.
     They wed in 1963 without telling friends beforehand. Judge Julius J. Hoffman performed the ceremony in his chambers. Mrs. Netsch had been a law clerk for Hoffman, who would later go on to gain national notoriety by presiding over the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial.
     Mr. Netsch was supportive of his wife's political ambitions, kicking in nearly $1 million of his fortune -- including the sale of an original Frank Lloyd Wright window for $265,000 -- to help finance her failed gubernatorial campaign.
     Walter A. Netsch Jr. was born Feb. 23, 1920, on 62nd Street on the city's South Side. His father was a meat-packing executive from New Hampshire. His mother was a blue blood from a Yankee family that had owned the first car in New Hampshire, and throughout his life the tall, thin Mr. Netsch displayed a certain patrician air.
     Growing up on the South Side, Mr. Netsch said he felt like an outsider. He was unathletic, artistic, frail and highly intelligent. He went to the opera and took drawing classes. He made cardboard houses for his sister.
     "I was a little scrawny kid, so you flaunt what you have," he once said. "But to show intellectual ability -- at that age that's usually considered an aggressive act."
     He studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he was stationed on the Aleutian Islands.
     After an apprenticeship with a Kenilworth firm, he went to work for SOM, where he maintained his outsider ways, pursuing his own rigorous esthetic system -- called Field Theory -- a concept of design that employs the repetitive use of geometric shapes according to specific mathematical principles to create complicated crystalline structures. Like Mr. Netsch himself, these buildings were bold, highly abstract and full of contrasts.
     "He saw that UIC could bridge the Eisenhower Expressway, and designed a north side of the campus, [and a] proposed performing art center that was a cluster of hexagram shapes," said Lee Bey, executive director of the Chicago Central Area Committee, and formerly Mayor Daley's deputy chief of staff for architecture and urban design. "[Netsch did] really good architecture that presages the kind of anti-box forms we see today."
     Examples of Mr. Netsch's work include the mazelike Behavioral Science Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the Miami University Art Museum, and the architect's own Chicago home on North Hudson, whose design inspired the home in the film "Torn Between Two Lovers."
     Bey also said that Mr. Netsch had the vision behind the elegant Inland Steel Building at 30 W. Monroe.
     "Bruce Graham gets the credit because he finished it," said Bey. "As contemporary as it looks now, Walter's earlier version was even lighter, even glassier, even finer."
     Not all critics take such a complimentary view. New York architect Robert A. Stern dismissed some of Mr. Netsch's work as "a landscape of the moon" and "twisted and brutal."
     Even his most famous building had its share of controversy. When unveiled in 1962, the U.S. Air Force Chapel was so hated that Congress held hearings on the matter.
     Mr. Netsch's work at UIC was even more harshly condemned. One critic dubbed it "impersonal concrete brutalism," and part of it suffered that worst fate an architect can face: it was torn down in Mr. Netsch's lifetime.
     In Mr. Netsch's defense, money concerns forced the university to scale back on his plans.
     "The one thing to keep in mind with UIC is it really wasn't built exactly to his design," said Bey. "There was a landscape plan and a lighting plan in his original design, designed to humanize the campus, but they were never completed due to budget problems, so it came off being a cheaper, paler version of what he designed."
     Mr. Netsch never took responsibility for the unpopular campus, pointing a finger at poor maintenance and bad publicity.
     "I did not make a mistake," he said of his original plans. "I will not take the blame." When the architect redoing the campus asked Mr. Netsch to consult with him over the redesign, he refused.
     Mr. Netsch viewed opposition to his work as short-sighted philistinism and felt that his buildings would be vindicated by history.
     "I feel I've introduced something that will be more accepted tomorrow than it is today," he once said.
     His widow said Mr. Netsch was "designing conceptually what cities should look like in the year 2020."
     "He broke out of the box," Dawn Clark Netsch said. "He has left a lot of what was inside of him for others to look at and contemplate, and hopefully also to look at new ways of looking at not only the environment but the world."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2008