Review: Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900–1925

Abstract

Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900–1925 Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 19 April 2013–6 August 2013 At a moment when architecture, urban design, and urban planning are focused on the phenomenon of global megacities, which are made possible by global finance and networks and made necessary by rapid urbanization, Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900–1925 offered an important historical perspective (Figure 1). An illustrated exegesis on the ways in which urban design and planning principles, formal architectural devices, and building technologies traveled between Chicago and Europe via Canberra, Australia, the exhibition positioned the winning entry to that city’s Federal Capital Design Competition, by Chicago architects Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin in 1912, as the hinge on which these exchanges turned immediately before and after World War I. Figure 1 Installation of Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900–1925 (Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University). Curated by David Van Zanten, with Ashley Elizabeth Dunn and Leslie Coburn, Drawing the Future was a sequel to the Block Museum’s Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature exhibition in 2005. Both exhibitions drew heavily upon the rich legacy of drawings gifted to Northwestern University by Marion Mahony Griffin. In addition to material from the Art Institute of Chicago and other collections, Drawing the Future also borrowed extensive materials from the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern. The exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues demonstrated the depth of materials and scholarship at Northwestern relating to Chicago’s progressive architectural movement …