David Schneider

At the end of this month, the Illinois Institute of Technology will formally introduce to the public Chicago's newest--and arguably most daring--architectural work, the IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center, the first completed design in the U.S. by famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, which funded the design competition, recognized the landmark nature of the project and additionally supported an extensive photographic record of its construction by architectural photographer John Stamets. An exhibition of his work, "The McCormick Tribune Campus Center--As Built," opens on Monday, September 22 at North Core, S.R. Crown Hall, 3360 S. State, and continues until October 10. The opening of an exhibition of his work coincides with a lecture he will present, "Koolhaas/Gehry/Calatrava: Under Construction," on Monday, September 22, at 6pm at the Perlstein Hall Auditorium, 10 West 33rd Street.

As a Seattle photojournalist in the 1970s, Stamets always wanted to be working on some "art project" as well, a long-term photo documentary, like the notable "Portrait of a Market: Photographs of Seattle's Pike Place Market" published in

1987. Then came Seattle's construction boom of the late eighties--historic buildings were being demolished to make way for new skyscrapers erected on the same ground, what Stamets defines as the "continuum of the urban-scrape." Since 1933, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) had been archiving the country's architectural history in photographs. Stamets decided to take this a step further, chronicling landmark construction projects for "future architectural historians," including dramatic series on Seattle's Experience Music Project, Pacific Place and the Starwood Hotel. "A building under construction is a new building every day," he says, and "the necessity" of accurately recording its changes, of explaining the building's evolving structure, "creates the aesthetic within it."

Koolhaas' completed building is a riot of bold geometries fighting each other for dominance, inspired by a considerable technical challenge--the site straddles both sides of the CTA's Green Line. And the solution, a freestanding sound-insulation tube around the El tracks, seems to force its weight down into the Campus Center, like a metallic whale, pressuring it into a hive of activity, while the exterior form of the building is squeezed outward, in its angular, building-like way. Curiously, though, this interests Stamets far less than the actual facts of its construction. He's like a boy who stands, rapt with fascination, at the chainlink fence of a construction site, marveling at the pit of chaos from which order ensues. Except he gets to be in the middle of it, a perspective few of us are allowed. "I feed on these sites," Stamets says. "This is what I eat. When the building is under construction, the building is in motion. It's like architectural football."

What's different about Stamets is that rather than concentrating on the titanic physical labor, with pygmy workers maneuvering megalosauric machinery, his focus rests exclusively on the developing structure, documenting the evolution of ephemeral space into a stasis of completion. "I don't have any other agenda beyond `it ought to be photographed now, under construction,' because you'll never see it like this again, when you can see the bones and the muscle of the building, when you're inside the building, sort of like being in the womb." As a photojournalist teaching the craft at the University of Washington School of Architecture, he admits he's an "outsider" to architecture, "learning it by osmosis." Perhaps this is why some of his most compelling work is created within the structures, as in these early photos of the Koolhaas building in 2001 and early 2002, with the building rising directly from the earth.

His studies of the construction of Frank O. Gehry's new Millennium Park bandshell are reminiscent of his beginnings as an architectural photographer in Seattle. "I looked at buildings not so much as architecture but as mountains forming in the city, like the slow-motion formation of mountains," in a "continuum of the `urban-scape,' or `urban-scrape,' as I like to call it." In this evocative photo, with Gehry's signature stainless-steel cladding half-adorning the steel skeleton, Stamets neatly frames Gehry's polymorphous design within the context of Chicago's established architecture--the Harbor Point Tower and the park's concrete balustrade forming a network of lyrical curves and parabolas--emphasizing both the bandshell's complimentary, and its revolutionary character.

But the creation of art isn't Stamets' primary aim. "I never take a picture just because I think it's a nice pattern," he says. "It has to show something, it has to explain something about the building." The exciting light streaks of the El which illuminate this night shot, in the early phases of the Campus Center construction, are as much a product of serendipity as of purpose. All the perspectives are arrayed to emphasize the first work accomplished on Koolhaas's signature tube. "That was really exciting for me," Stamets says, "because that was the first form work that was going to form the concrete of the tube." Stamets was on his way back to Seattle, and the work wasn't scheduled to begin until the following week. Apparently his enthusiasm was contagious--after a few discussions with the foreman, the work was accomplished that weekend, in time for Stamets' shutter-finger. "That to me was very significant," Stamets says, "because that was the first physical evidence of where the tube was going to be."

A former Yale student under the noted documentary photographer Walker Evans--"a grand old dilettante"--as well as the rigorous disciplinarian John Hill, Stamets seems to have combined both approaches to render photos that, in their simplicity, command attention. A single support post becomes a paradoxically captivating subject, as it relates to the entire building's framework, and an empty room exudes the life of its construction. In one of his "ugly duckling photos"--what he calls views of a project three or four months before the finished project, when the structure's in place but the sheen is yet to arrive--a room of stairs captures "purely the building at the end of the day, after everybody's gone, what the structure itself can reveal to us."

(2003-09-17)

Also by David Schneider

Coming up dry
"I want you to think about your last sexual experience," says the lithe Asian dancer, swirled in gauze and wire and magnetic tape...
(2003-09-10)

Sensuous Chicago: Taste
I was famished for excitement in a relationship gone stale, and consequently whipped up this bad hash of an idea that an `amuse bouche' would curry her favor
(2003-08-05)

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