The Preservation of Richard Nickel

“The expression a great architect achieves has continuing value, just like any work of art. Because architecture is three-dimensional and functional it can be saved, logically, by saving the whole building.” –Richard Nickel

“He wanted to convince people,” says Cahan, “that tearing down a great building is like going into the Art Institute and spray painting the art. That was his goal, of taking beautiful pictures and telling people to wake up. The sad thing is, once these buildings come down, generations and generations are the losers.”

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Before it killed him, Nickel watched the Stock Exchange go down as Adler and Sullivan’s Meyer Building had gone down in 1968 and their Garrick Theater seven years before that. Wreckers mocked him as he picked through these buildings’ debris, taking pictures and rescuing what he could of Sullivan’s grilles and medallions. “Marvelous being in a work of art under rape,” Nickel bitterly wrote a friend two months before he died. “How often do you experience the bones, veins, skin of a work of art, even if it be in dissection?”

Nickel had come out of the Korean war and enrolled at Chicago’s Institute of Design. “It’s funny,” says Cahan, “his whole life was determined by a college assignment.” The assignment was for Nickel’s class to photograph buildings created by Sullivan, the designer, and Adler, the engineer. It’s funny to Cahan because his own book began as a college project, an assignment that took over his life for 15 years.

Cahan observed that his book appears as Chicago wages one of the most critical preservation debates since the Stock Exchange went down. The John Buck Company proposes to tear down the building containing the Arts Club of Chicago and its Mies van der Rohe staircase.

You probably don’t know the name. Larney’s a professional arbitrator and mediator, and he’s running for Congress against Sidney Yates. Few of Yates’s opponents are ever high profile, and Larney’s been virtually over the horizon. Which is why he was open to a proposal offered by some members of NABET–acting individually as concerned citizens, they emphasize, not illegally as representatives of a union.

Larney felt a need to stress to us that labor unrest at NBC is not truly central to his candidacy.