Arches

Arches National Park, in north of Moab, Utah, was was an important feature of my earlier life. I first visited it in 1962 (when it was only a National Monument), it was the goal of a road trip in the mid '70s (during which I confused Joseph Wood Krutch and Edward Abbey), in the early '80s I camped there one New Year's Eve, and in the early '90s I took my then girlfriend there. I probably haven't been there in thirty years, but what my memories lack in detail is offset by their vividness. As Ed Abbey said, "This is the most beautiful place in the world. There are many such places." 

As beautiful as these natural arches are, those are not the arches I want to talk about here. I mean architectural arches. Any solid structure that encloses space and prevents things like rain falling from the sky, or heat rising up into the sky requires something special: history investigates when and where these innovations appeared. Lean-tos are prehistoric. Ancient Egyptians created some magnificent structures using the post and lintel, as did the ancient Greeks. Romans traditionally get credit for inventing the arch, and they clearly used them in a big way and extended the arch into the dome. I may have heard some evidence suggesting earlier development, but no one exploited the arch like the Romans. In this essay, I'll talk first about the magic of arches, then some of the arches or things that look like arches around Chicago. 

 

A arch is an amazing piece of physics, with matching tension, compression and friction and transforming raw physical objects into magic. Our minds are so impressed by this magic that we give symbolic power to arches and even images of arches. Roman use of arches endowed them with authority exploited by neo-classical and beaux arts architecture. Beyond conveying authority, they also signal a boundary in space or a transition in time. So potent a symbol are arches that the structures communicate that magic even when it is really supported by some hidden structure lintel or truss. (My slight acquaintance with Latin suggests this should be called liminality, but in architecture "liminality" seems to mean something else.)

 

Arches, if they are not lintels in disguise, require a firm foundation. The Romans were able to achieve a solid foundation because of the geology of where they built, and how they built. Medieval Europeans weren't as lucky or detail-oriented as the Romans, so when they tried to build round arches, the arches shifted and cracked, typically at the apex of the arch. I imagine that this damage looked pretty bad. This lead the builders of the middle ages to adopt the "Gothic" or pointed arch, which doesn't require as firm a foundation as round arches, and even when they do crack or shift, their appearance isn't as degraded. Pointed arches are relatively rare in Chicago.

 

If there is an iconic arch in Chicago's history, an arch that is the prototype for many in Chicago, it is the Golden Door on the Transportation Building at the World's Colombian Exposition of 1893. Designed by Louis Sullivan and richly colored, unlike nearly every other architectural feature of the "White City." Those visitors to the exposition that came by train -- I suspect most of them -- passed through the Golden Door, since the train station was in the Transportation Building: so their first and last impressions of the exposition were of this arch. This provided a passage way between the idealized and highly controlled world of the fairgrounds and the commercial and chaotic world of Chicago.    

 

When designing buildings, particularly around Chicago, architects often use this as inspiration.  This wasn't Sullivan's first use of the form: it appeared as the proscenium in both the Garrick and Auditorium Theatres. He would later use it on the Chicago Stock Exchange.  But the Golden Door was iconic.

 

The architect Louis Kahn used to tell his students: 

If you are ever stuck for inspiration, ask your materials for advice. "You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'"

(Kahn was fortunate in being able to select materials before deciding on the form of a structure. I can't imagine that many contemporary architects enjoy that luxury.) But the magic of the arch continues to have a strong pull, so designers will disguise lintels and trusses to look like arches. Sometimes the disguise is substantial and successful, sometimes the working structure (i.e., the "truth") can be detected.

One such example is the entryway to the Citigroup Center or Accenture Tower at 500 W. Madison in downtown Chicago which fronts the Oglivie Transportation Center (formerly known as the Chicago   North Western Train Station, designed by Murphy/Jahn and built in 1987.

 

This station links many commuters from the suburbs to their workplaces in the commercial hub of Chicago's Loop, so it is fitting that it acts as a point of transition from one world to another.  But there are at least two obvious clues that it isn't a true arch.

First, a true arch would stand on (or 'spring from') something substantial. This is just suspended in mid-air. Secondly, through the glass we can see the truss that actually forms the working structure behind the supposed arch. As the AIA Guide to Chicago notes, Helmut Jahn designed a "dazzling multilevel space where the steel structure is articulated, exposed, and celebrated." (The preference in Chicago is to expose or express structure. Perhaps other places are different.)

One of the earliest spiritual arches in Chicago was erected for the funeral ceremonies of Abraham Lincoln when his body came through Chicago on its way to his burial in Springfield. The picture, in the collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society, shows 36 women in white surrounding the casket as it passed thru the arch at the intersection of Michigan Avenue an 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road).

 

Lincoln's assassination must have provoked the nation into much reflection. I imagine that passing thru the arch symbolically represented Lincoln's assumption into heaven, accompanied by white-robed angels.

Another historic arch significant to Chicago was the Blue Star Arch, erected in 1918 across Monroe Street at Michigan Avenue for a gathering on Labor Day. The First World War was still ongoing, but the enormousness of the war with its mechanized mass death was perhaps beginning to come to the American consciousness, as was the shock of the transition to the 20th century. (Perhaps even the influenza pandemic -- the "Spanish flu" -- played a role in the transition to the new world.) The violence of that war I don't pretend to understand, and the transition that it forced on how people looked at themselves may not be comprehensible. A symbol of that transition was clearly called for: something like an arch

The most famous "arch" in the world is not merely not an arch, but not even a structure. It is a sign and a logo.

 
 

When I was planning out this blog post, I wanted to find a good picture of McDonald's, but when I thought about its universality, I came to think that it is this universality that is what makes it important. It also makes it modern, and nearly anonymous. But McDonald's is Chicago, and it's architectural. 

 

Historically, McDonald's use of the arch as logo predates any of its adopting a marketing positioning, but I have to speculate that the arch continues to be used because McDonald's wants to offer its customers some kind of unique experience or transition; as its slogan promised, "You deserve a break today."

Nieman-Marcus on N. Michigan Avenue has something that resembles an arch. In postmodern fashion, it at best alludes to arches, but it also satirizes them.

 

This feature welcomes outsiders, and directs them into a retail emporium with what looks like a grand triumphal arch. But there's something about it that looks all wrong. In a real arch, the most important stone is the one at top dead center, and is known as the keystone. At the keystone, all of the compressive forces on one side are matched with the compressive forces from the other side. Designers of arches throughout history have enlarged the keystone and marked it out as a point of particular strength. But at Nieman-Marcus what should be a point of strength in a real arch is reduced to a slot, a gap, a void: the keystone is negated. How very postmodern!

Arches -- structural arches -- were frequently used in Chicago's 19th century architecture. The were ideal for grand entrances. Here's one on the Rookery:

Here's another on an apartment building Racine at Taylor.

There are two arches on the facade of Glessner House. The first is better known: it used to form the logo of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and it's on a more traveled street.  While it is rather grand, it is actually the servant's entrance. It was from looking at this that I first got an inkling of what architects did. or at least that structures could be items of conscious design.

 

There is also an arch over the front door.

 

 Both of these arches seem to offer a transition from the outside to the inside. But they don't welcome all comers, as do most of the portals above. They seem to say that the world inside those arches, available by invitation only, was different from the outdoor world. 

The physics of an arch balances the forces from one side against those of the other, in essentially two dimensions. If you take the arch idea into three dimensions you could end up with all kinds of structures.

 

The polymath Robert Wilson did essentially that. Wilson is perhaps best known as a theoretical physicist - he worked on the Manhattan Project after getting his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1940. Later he would go on to found the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia IL which was one the world largest particle accelerator.  But he was also a cowboy, a sculptor and an architect -- it is his doing that Fermilab both is the home of an important herd of American Bison and has an active arts program. Wilson died in January of 2000.

 

Fermilab, in the western suburbs of Chicago, still exhibits some of his artwork. Near the western entrance to Fermilab is his sculpture Broken Symmetry, which has three halves of arches nearly meeting in the middle. "Broken Symmetry" also alludes to issues in theoretical physics. It balances the horizontal thrust of one member against the other two. It also functions as a boundary marker or as a welcome, and a marker indicating where different values are at work, and designating special places and times.

 

The artist and architect Frank Gehry adopted the same kind of multiple segments of arches, lying in opposition, in his trellis over the Great Lawn of the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. While the trellis may not come across as a complex of arches, structurally of course it is, like any good arch it is connected solidly to the ground, and psychologically it is an arch too: welcoming,  delineating a special place and special time, leading to a special (and nearly transcendent) experience.  " ... the most beautiful places in the world. There are many such."

 

The photo of Broken Symmetry is courtesy of the American Physical Society. The photos of Sullivan's Golden Door, the Lincoln Funeral Arch, and the Blue Star Arch are from archival sources. The McDonald's logo is from the Website 1000logos.net. All other photos are by the author.