Carter H. Manny Jr. (1918–2017)

Abstract

Carter Hugh Manny was not an architectural historian, critic, or curator, but in his long career as a prominent Chicago architect, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and active participant in Chicago's architectural world, he had an impact on the direction of architectural history that reached far beyond Chicago. His outsize influence on our field was due in great part to the fact that he was also a gentleman of the old school, a man of considerable tact and charm, with a sense of duty and a personal modesty that allowed him to take a careful, measured, and wide embrace of architectural history. Carter H. Manny Jr. (photo courtesy of the Graham Foundation). Carter was born in 1918 to a middle-class family in Michigan City, Indiana, a town at the southern tip of Lake Michigan about fifty miles east of Chicago. His family had deep ties in Michigan City, and Carter, like his businessman father, continued to call that city home throughout his career in Chicago. He attended public schools in Michigan City, graduating from high school in 1937. When he entered Harvard that fall, he started with courses useful for a business career, but a survey course in fine arts taught by Wilhelm Kohler changed his mind, and he turned to architecture. At the time, the Harvard School of Design was headed by Walter Gropius, whom Carter got to know well because of the small student body, but there were still many faculty members who had come up through the Beaux-Arts system. By the end of his undergraduate days, Carter had become a convinced modernist whose heroes were European avant-gardists like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, yet he was also interested in the work of many other architects, especially Frank …