INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW L. ROCKWELL

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of theChicago Architects Oral History Project

The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural DrawingsDepartment of ArchitectureThe Art Institute of Chicago

Copyright © 1995Revised Edition © 2005

The Art Institute of Chicago

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This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. Allliterary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to theRyerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscriptmay be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute ofChicago.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ivPreface to Revised Edition viOutline of Topics viiOral History 1Selected References 25Curriculum Vitae 26Index of Names and Buildings 27

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PREFACE

Since its inception in 1981, the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicagohas engaged in presenting to the public and the profession diverse aspects of the history andprocess of architecture, with a special concentration on Chicago. The department hasproduced bold, innovative exhibitions, generated important scholarly publications, andsponsored public programming of major importance, while concurrently increasing itscollection of holdings of architectural drawings and documentation. From the beginning, itspurpose has been to raise the level of awareness, understanding, and appreciation of thebuilt environment to an ever-widening audience.

In the same spirit of breaking new ground, an idea emerged from the department’s advisorycommittee in 1983 to conduct an oral history project on Chicago architects. Until that time,oral testimony had not been used frequently as a method of documentation in the field ofarchitecture. Innumerable questions were raised: was the method of gathering informationabout the architect from the architect himself a reliable one? Although a vast amount ofunrecorded information was known to older architects, would they be willing to share it?Would their stories have lasting research value to future scholars, or would they be trivial?Was video-recording a viable option? How much would such a project cost? With a grantfrom the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we began a feasibilitystudy to answer these questions.

Our study focused on older personalities who had first-hand knowledge of the people andevents of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—decades that have had little attention in the literatureof Chicago’s architectural history. For nine months in 1983, I contacted more than onehundred architects in Chicago and suburbs and visited most of them. I learned not only thatthey were ready, willing, and more than able to tell their stories, they were also impatient todo so. Many thought such a program was long overdue.

For each visit, I was armed with a brief biographical sketch of the architect and a tape-recorder with which I recorded our brief exchange. At that time, we considered these visitsto be only a prelude to a more comprehensive, in-depth interview. Regretfully, this visiondid not materialize because some narrators later became incapacitated or died before full

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funding was secured. Slowly, however, we did begin an oral history project and now, morethan twelve years later, our oral history collection has grown into a rich source of researchdata that is unique among oral history programs worldwide. With the completion of theseinterviews our collection of memoirists now numbers more than fifty and the collectioncontinues to grow each year. This oral history text is available for study in the Ryerson andBurnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in a complete electronicversion on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute ofChicago website, www.artic.edu/aic

This interview is one of several dozen short interviews that were recorded in 1983 duringthe feasibility study. Surely each one of these narrators could have spoken in greater depthand at greater length; each one deserves a full-scale oral history. Unfortunately, thirteen ofthese twenty architects have already died, which makes these short interviews especiallyvaluable. These interviews were selected for transcription, despite their brevity, becauseeach narrator brings to light significant and diverse aspects of the practice of architecture inChicago. We were fortunate to receive an additional grant from the Graham Foundation forAdvanced Studies in the Fine Arts to process this group of interviews.

Thanks go to each interviewee and those families that provided releases for the recordingsto be made public documents. Thanks also go to Joan Cameron of TapeWriter for her usualdiligence and care in transcribing; to Robert V. Sharp of the Publications Department andMaureen A. Lasko of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago forthe helpful suggestions that shaped the final form of this document; and, once again, to theGraham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for its continuing support, withspecial thanks to Carter Manny, its former director. Personally, I would like to thank JohnZukowsky, Curator of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, for his courage in takinga chance on me as an interviewer in 1983, when I was a complete novice in the craft ofinterviewing. Since then, I have learned the art and the craft and, more importantly, I havelearned that each architect’s story has its own very interesting and unique configuration,often filled with wonderful surprises. Each one reveals another essential strand in the denseand interlocking web of Chicago’s architectural history.

Betty J. Blum1995

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PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Since 1994, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission ofdata have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness anddemand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collectionhave vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Library'scommitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readilyaccessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is nowavailable on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute ofChicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available forstudy at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication,reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expandedthe biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text hasbeen reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronicconversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie vanRoessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped thebreadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would begreatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oralhistory in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernonand Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & CatherineHaveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the CommunityFoundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and DavidLogan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute ofChicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepestgratitude for facilitating this endeavor.

Betty J. BlumFebruary 2005

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OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Interest in Planning 1Planning O'Hare International Airport, Chicago 2Daniel H. Burnham's Plan of Chicago, 1909 3Planning and Sculpture 5How a Planner Plans 6Planning and Public Participation 7About Some Colleagues 10Planning and the Environment 12Successful and Not-So-Successful Planning 18

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Matthew Laflin Rockwell

Blum: Today is June 29, 1983, and I'm with Matthew Laflin Rockwell in his home inWinnetka.

Rockwell: That's very accurate, but let's just call me Matt Rockwell.

Blum: That was the name that William Keck used when he said, "You really oughtto speak to Matt."

Rockwell: Did he tell you how he knew me?

Blum: No, he didn't. I had the feeling that you and he had been associated in someway, but he didn't explain. Will you, please?

Rockwell: Let's start at the beginning. I took my bachelor's degree in architecture at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. I took it at a time in the recessionwhen there were a number of very brilliant people around, and it was a veryexciting milieu where these great minds were talking about all kinds ofthings. My interest happened to be in city planning, and, after I got mybachelor's in architecture, I took my master's in city planning intending topractice in both fields. At that time, Mies had not yet come to the IllinoisInstitute of Technology—he was about to go there. There weren't too manypeople in the country who could see a role at that time for architects inplanning. Burnham had been the one shining light, but other planners or civilengineers and landscape architects and architects weren't really doing toomuch about this. And they were losing ground to a career which could havebeen, or which would be, fruitful to them and to our culture. They designedwith the creative instincts of the architect but planning was awfullyimportant. It is also imperative that architects do a little more than just

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practice architecture in order to know about planning. So that led me to gointo partnership with a young man who was also an architect, and we starteda small office known as Stanton and Rockwell It was the first architecturaloffice which had any planning commitment. The war came along, and I wasanxious to be a square peg in a square hole and I had done a thesis at collegefor the army dealing with the development of an army camp.

Blum: Was that prophetic, or was it evident that the war on the horizon?

Rockwell: I don't know but some of us had decided at MIT that we ought to get ourcommissions in the army in case there was war. And I did happen to godown and enlist before war broke out so that I had a position which, whenwar broke out, put me in the position of designing army camps, large cities,30,000 men cities, which were used by troops. I did this for three or four yearsin the Midwest; I was the planning officer in charge of structure. That's whereI met Bill Keck. I gathered around me a number of professionals includingAlfred Caldwell, who is a great landscape architect from IIT. He just recentlygot the ALA honor award, and together we built a team that did all theplanning, the advance planning for army camps, army ordnance depots andairfields. That's how I came to be the designing planner for O'Hare Airport.O'Hare was one of our projects, and I was the chief planner in thedevelopment of O'Hare both as to where it was located and also the design ofthe field as it emerged. I've got some displays over here I might show you aswe go along; it might help a little bit. This is a photograph of O'Hare in 1943,which is forty years ago when it was developed as an army assembly plantfor aircraft. That was the purpose of having O'Hare, so that the DouglasAircraft people who were going to produce airplanes here would have a fieldfrom which they could operate. I traveled with a group of Army Air Forceofficers who came out here to locate this, but I was the planner in the teamand we looked at finally three major locations around Chicago: one whichwas down near the Indiana border, one which was on the South Side ofChicago and then this one. And this one was a good location for potentialpeople density but the field was surrounded with very high smoke stacksfrom the landscape nurseries which ringed the field. We had to carefully plot

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this so that, if this had been built and operated during peacetime, the smokestacks from these nurseries wouldn't bother it. As it so happened this didbecome the major airport in Chicago, and all the nurseries disappeared andall this became industrial and semi-industrial around the field. Now, onanother side of the field it became Bensonville and a residential area outthere. But it was the beginning of O'Hare, and the first plans were plansmade by an architect planner.

Blum: Are there any simple rules that can generally be applied to planning?

Rockwell: Yes, the whole thing was a planning project. We could not have located it if Ihadn't had some background in planning, and our approach to the projectwas with the planning expertise in the background, which had beendeveloped by an association here in Chicago known as the Chicago RegionalPlanning Association. This was a marvelous organization because it was ledfor many years by Daniel Burnham, Jr., and it was the first in the UnitedStates. It became the spearhead for New York Regional Planning Association,which became a very well known and well heeled organization. This officedid not have the resources that the New York office did, but the marvelousplans that this group did under a man, whose name is Robert Kingery,provided a great residuum of transportation information from 1925 on. Andthen as a summer student from MIT, I went to this office and worked for asummer so I knew where the material lay. And we went through their vaults,and we got out all this material; we laid it out for Lansing Airport out of theSouth Side and then we added it all up and it was obvious that this was to bethe place for O'Hare. O'Hare was the result of a very careful study. Thisorganization went out not only into transportation, highway, and railwayand all that, but into land use and into population density.

Blum: Was this an implementation or an extension of what Burnham had done in1909?

Rockwell: It was intended to be. Burnham's plan was a marvelous thing, and a lot ofpeople pass up the aspect of the plan that dealt with regional development. If

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you look at the Burnham plan—Burnham in his plan book, on page 40, andyour illustration numbered whatever that number is...

Blum: Well, it's plate number 40 and, for the benefit of those who may read thistranscript later, it's on page 44 in the exhibition catalog, The Plan of Chicago:1909-1979 [Art Institute of Chicago, 1979].

Rockwell: All right. Now, the map on that page shows that Mr. Burnham could think interms which stretched in detail from Michigan City on the east all the wayaround and up to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on the north. He anticipated, at a timewhen the automobile was barely used, a tri-state highway coming aroundChicago, a little bit further out than the one that was actually built. The onethat was built was actually east of Aurora, but you see he has an inner-expressway here, too. But here is an architect thinking in planning terms, thebroadest possible planning terms. You also have a map in the catalog [page30, plate 35] which shows that he took the whole Great Lakes area and did asketch plan for highways around the Great Lakes area which I hadn't seenbefore.

Blum: Well, you know, it's interesting that you're pointing to this drawing because,apparently, this drawing is unlocated.

Rockwell: It's such a shame. This is a beautiful thing, too. But, in any case, the regionalplan did grow out of the 1909 plan many years later. The Chicago RegionalPlanning Association wasn't born until 1925. It stumbled along with verysmall contributions, usually from the utilities like the telephone company,people who dealt with growth. Commonwealth Edison would put up dollarsfor this, and when I went to MIT in 1939,1 think, it had a staff of four or fivepeople trying to cope with this whole metropolitan area. And I came to it thatsummer because I knew at the time that I not only wanted an architecturaldegree and practice that way, but also a practice of planner.

Blum: How did you arrive at that combination?

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Rockwell: Because I've always seen that planning in its purest sense is a structure itself.When you're dealing with a regional plan or a city plan, you're dealing withthree dimensions even though you're only drawing on one. And somearchitects would say, well, what about the vertical dimension. And I see avertical dimension in the city. I don't mean just the height of a skyscraper, butI see that the structure itself is an architectural structure. I want to illustratethat with something I have here. This is called a string sculpture—you'veseen them before—and it's a very small one—I can't afford anythinglarger—but this was done by a New York sculptress named Fuller—SueFuller. It's a structure of strings tied together in equilibrium, which, in manydifferent forms, can be three-dimensional and can really be quite captivatingas to the sculpture itself. This happens to be almost one plane. But when Iwas doing the plan for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, whenwe were trying to do this plan for Chicago in 1963, I'd been reading a bookabout Rodin's life, a French sculptor. You will recall that he was very poorand he couldn't really afford very much and his first clay was mounted on avery weak armature. He got down on the cobblestones and tried to move it toanother place, but it fell apart. So it started me thinking in terms of doing aregional plan with all of the detail, the millions and millions of little detailsthat I have to work together—that the best thing to do would be to try to dowhat architects learn to do. For years we have tried to do a sketch plan ormaybe an armature plan. See that little figure over there, that's a lead figurearranged by me on top of an old pen-holder. I had a young architect in myoffice do that for me. It's Rodin's Thinker. Well, it's a lead armature, too, yousee, and that was an inspiration to me to go further into understanding howwe can do a sketch plan for a large metropolitan area, the only one that's beendone, to my knowledge, and it was unique to our Chicago area. I went to theArt Institute, wandered around there one afternoon and came to two or threemodern sculptures which I felt could form the basis for our thinking here inChicago. One of them was Roszak's Whaler of Nantucket, which is in one of thegalleries, and it reminded me in its purest form of the armature which mustlie behind the city of Cleveland. It's a flat anvil-shaped thing that could be thebase of Lake Erie. The base itself works down underneath the anvil towardthe bottom in the way in which Cleveland shapes itself around Erie. Calder

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had a marvelous thing that looked like a star, I think it was. I had justreturned from Washington, and I thought Calder's piece representedWashington as an armature. I wandered around until I came across NaumGabo. He was a Pole who started string sculpture from whom Sue Fullerlearned much of her work. Gabo does marvelous creations of threedimensions. I looked at one of his pieces and I said, now if we can do a sketchplan on the same basis as Gabo did for this composition, Linear Construction,Number 2, if we can do that for Chicago, we will have solved the problem thatChicago needs as a plan toward which to grow. And we worked on it fortwo-and-a-half years. I got a small crew of architects together and trainedthem, and we worked together and we did finally turn out—in 1969, Ithink—the first major regional plan for Chicago toward which theNortheastern Illinois Planning Commission is working today and has beenfor the past twenty-two years now. That's how I happened to get into O'Hare.We walked into it backwards because O'Hare is where it was, because I hadan experience with the Chicago Regional Planning Association, which hadgrown out of the Burnham group. And how did Burnham get into thepicture? Well, Burnham led me as an architect into a study of architectureand planning which ultimately led through all the cultural processes,sculpture and so on. That led into the basis now for regional planning andcity planning, too—but not so much city planning, although some city planscan be drawn on the basis of a mutual plan but led us at least to a veryunique solution, I think, in Chicago.

Blum: Your process is fascinating, the way you have related sculpture to planning.

Rockwell: Well, you see, back of every city there are certain basic forms and shapes andfeatures. The Chicago River has a very major influence. I have been studyingthree European cities fairly recently to understand why—to give a fewcollege classes—why cities like Paris, London and Rome are beautiful. Howdo you analyze this? If you break down the major features which make thesecities beautiful, you'll find the three shapes are roughly similar and they areall great cities because they have a river which forms the core and aroundwhich design elements have been created. Now Paris, the general drift of the

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Seine River is east to west and not north. The Tiber flows north to south inRome.

Blum: You have a unique vision to see the entire city with the river running throughit and the direction and an actual two-dimension, and you say three-dimension, but a two-dimensional vision of that city.

Rockwell: Well, when you were last in Paris, I'm sure you felt the presence of the river.You were conscious of it as a design-related feature. So you see, that's theessence; that's the beginning of planning. When you take a book like EdBacon's book on the design of cities—I use that in my classes almost all thetime—the way in which he describes the city elements, you then begin to seewhy it's a three-dimensional concept.

Blum: You have really pointed out the special vision a planner must have and howyou conceptualize.

Rockwell: One of the secrets to the Chicago problem is the vast number of governments.The curse of the Chicago region is that every man who has begun to looksuccessful in his business has wanted to be a king. The only way he can be aking is to be president of the park district or the school board or the villageboard. And we have 10,000 of these men around Chicago. And the reasonthat keeps us apart, that keeps us from having a real nucleated region is thedesire of these local officials to be preeminent in their own right, not to be toofettered; they don't want to be too much a part of an organization. So wehave the greatest number of governmental units in the United States righthere in Chicago's backyard.

Blum: Are there any umbrella organizations?

Rockwell: One of the things is that we must recognize here is that in a string sculptureyou tie together thousands of organizations. I used to say to my class the bluecords might be sanitary districts, the red might be school boards, the yellowmight be village boards and you can get all of these into an equilibrium if you

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try and if you plan. I think we're making some progress toward it here inChicago, but that's a long story.

Blum: It sounds like it is highly specialized. I can see the connection betweendesigning a building and planning it on its own piece of ground. Why aren'tmore architects in planning?

Rockwell: And you can see why the architect has a major interest here, although he'sgiven up the field, frankly, because there is not enough money in it. Whenyou ask me why aren't architects interested in planning today, I can simplytell you that Burnham might get $50,000 for doing a Burnham plan,whenever he did that—I forget exactly what he got paid. Chicago was free.He got paid for San Francisco. But $50,000 for a city plan was nothing incomparison to the commission of a lifetime of buildings, and he could onlydo one plan for Chicago. So all over the country I have found that architectsavoid planning unless it can produce a commission. There is one large firm inChicago, which shall be unnamed, which does planning work, terribleplanning work. They do it for free because they have the assurance of a verylarge commission at the end. So that's part of the problem. I've been workingfor fifteen or sixteen years with Frannie Stanton. I've been doing residentialbuildings on the North Shore; we've done some commercial work. And I haddone, slowly, tone after tone after tone. I've never done a big city, but, as asmall architect, I could go into Deerfield and get the job of replanningDeerfield.

Blum: Do you mean the village center?

Rockwell: The whole village: the center, park district, park plan, village plan, the wholeworks.

Blum: When were these towns experiencing their most rapid growth?

Rockwell: The 1940s and 1950s when there was federal money for them. I did dozens ofthem, and we were the only office at that time doing them. That's probably

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why, when they went looking for a new director of the NIPC, NortheasternIllinois Planning Commission, that I was considered, and was able to get thatjob and to do the job which an architect would not have been considered for.

Blum: Would you explain what the dimensions or parameters are of NIPC and whatits responsibilities are?

Rockwell: All right. There are in the Chicago region 269 villages, and they occupy allthe space between the Wisconsin border and the Indiana border, which isabout 4,000 square miles. It's not the largest region in the country bygeography, but it is the second largest in population when you include theIndiana side. There has been some argument back and forth whether or notLos Angeles is a little larger, but if you take the Indiana portion and thenyou're tied into it. Some time ago when I was afraid that some of these planswere going to be destroyed, I talked to John Zukowsky about this to ask if theArt Institute would like to have them. I'm afraid many of them weredestroyed. I had saved two or three of them because my fellowship in theAmerican Institute of Architects was based upon the design of a plan forChicago, and the two or three plans that I've saved here were from thatsubmission. This plan that you're looking at is a rough drawing, hardly thecharacter of the Jules Guérin work for the Burnham Plan, but the kind ofplanning document that's used today in a great many locations where wedon't begin to have the dollars for planning presentations that we had in theBurnham days. So we won't turn up very many planning documents of theartwork caliber of these. But you can see here that you're dealing with amajor highway, that red line going through the area of about fifteensuburban communities, a couple of forest preserves, some industry, somevery rough land. This is out in the vicinity of Arlington Heights andBarrington; that's Busse Woods, that large green thing down at the bottom,right here down near the yellow green. That in itself is an architecturalenvironmental feature of great importance. Talk about three-dimensions, thatgoes down to the strata in which water is captured from runoff and is storedthere and provides a source of water for the communities nearby. The upperportion, the land that captures the water, has been developed for park space.

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And then the third general feature is the development of water, the waterresource, in the preserve itself, where you have boating and all of that. Now,in my opinion, only an architect is able to take all of these strings and tiethem together. That's why the development of the original plan was soexciting. I had a group of young architects who have become well-knownfigures today in Chicago who were willing to work like dogs and put thisthing together. And, I've said, in my opinion, social scientists were necessaryfor the background—geographers were also, economists and so on. But onlythe architect had the ability to assemble and produce the emerging structurethat came out of this.

Blum: Is that because of that remarkable far-reaching vision, or whatever it is,planners seem to have?

Rockwell: It is a vision that we all experience in the architectural field, I think, but ofcourse, I'm partial. And a lot of my planning colleagues wouldn't agree withme. On the other hand, I don't think very much of some of the plans they do.

Blum: Would you name some of the people with whom you worked?

Rockwell: Stephen Lincoln, the chief architect for Urban Investment, was my chiefarchitect.

Blum: Who were the other young architects you spoke about?

Rockwell: Well, Steve was a young architect at that time. Ernie Porps was a graduatestudent just coming out of the University of Illinois, a very gifted guy who isnow out in Denver. He went to the Art Institute and studied painting aftergetting his architectural degree and is now teaching dancing at the Universityof Colorado in Boulder. And Roger Seitz, a chief planner at SOM was anotherone, and there are probably a couple of others that I don't remember. But,they worked very hard, and we did a number of unique things. Do you wantto hear about this kind of thing?

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Blum: Yes, yes.

Rockwell: Well, it was important that we not just show the plan downtown because theplan was for seven million people out in the sticks, in the boonies. And thequestion of how to get it out there was solved when I read in a Louisvillenewspaper one day that the arts and crafts, the Kentucky arts and craftsenterprise, was carried on through railroad cars that went back into the hillsaround Kentucky. And so I went to the North Western Railroad and asked toborrow a couple of cars. They used to run a train here called the 400; the 400ran between Milwaukee and Chicago. And they were wonderful cars thatwere being broken down about that time and being sold in South America, Iguess, for South American barons.

Blum: About what year was this?

Rockwell: I think 1968, 1969, 1970—somewhere in there. And the North Western wasvery congenial. They tore out all of the seats and told us we could have twocars all one summer and that they would ferry the cars from community tocommunity with their own locomotives, park them on the siding in the townfor say a week's showing. We took them up on it, and these architects mademap boards which were erected. In one car we had—we didn't just make oneplan; we made five, made eleven first and then boiled down the eleven tofive. We felt the people should have a choice of the type of plan that theywere going to have, assuming each one was created. We took the train out onthe tracks; we cut the ribbon. We had folding chairs in one car, and the mayorof each community went into the car where the chairs were and we describedall of this. And then after the opening we left the car there for a week, and weshowed people around and they voted on the plan that they saw.

Blum: Did they actually have a vote at the poll or was this your private ballot?

Rockwell: This was our own private ballot. We had 8,000. You see we hadn't picked outthe plan yet—we took back their votes, and we found the plan that they likedthe best was the plan that we adopted.

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Blum: That's interesting for you to have involved the public.

Rockwell: Part of the problem of planning today is involving the general public. Eventhose people you can get to the Art Institute, the thousand who get there, arenot terribly representative of ordinary people who don't have the time tocome out and do these things.

Blum: That was a wonderful way of bringing it out, as you say, into the community.What was it about the plan that people selected—why do you think theyselected the plan that they generally found more favorable? What was itabout the plan, as you were able to analyze it?

Rockwell: In today's planning area, they like the environmental feature. This drawing isan environmental analysis. But, first of all, they wanted ease of parking; theywanted ease of traffic and transportation; they wanted better shoppingfacilities and better industrial areas. They wanted all these things that havesince become environmentally important to us. People were beginning to usea word then—that was the word "environment," which they had neverthought of using before, in the 1950s. They could barely write it; they couldbarely spell it. But, as you can tell from these drawings, these were importantconsiderations. And this happens to be a shopping center, a nucleatedshopping center, built in a park at the intersection of two major, three major,highways with amenities around it of housing, parking, and boating and allthe rest, much of which has been done in some places of the region. I couldtake you to a local county forest preserve that would make you think youwere in Yellowstone Park, right out here on the West Side. People indowntown Chicago don't know about this; they don't realize that thesethings have been done and that there are marvelous places to go to, but therearen't many of them yet. There is only one that I can tell you about. Todevelop this consciousness further, we even tried, after feeling that 8,000people weren't enough; a couple of years later we went on television, and wehad the first public hearing on television for approving and endorsing andquestioning plans of the region. This was all transportation. A master plan

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consists of land use, transportation, open space and utilities. There you beginto get your depth; you begin to get three dimensions. It comes in a differentway than three dimensions do in a building, yet it is still a structure. Putthese elements together, and you have a structure. That's the important thingabout planning that makes it adaptable to an architect, to an architect'sthinking, if you can pay him enough to keep him in the field.

Blum: You know, if you say this is a recent awareness for the public, were youaware of this when you were being trained in school?

Rockwell: I've been a lifelong Chicagoan, you see, and I've been brought up in theBurnham tradition, so when I went to architecture it was a natural thing forme to say I want to be a planner.

Blum: Were there a many Chicago students, or people out of that tradition, thatwere as aware of planning as you?

Rockwell: I don't think so. I told you about Harry Weese, who was at MIT. Ieoh MingPei sat in the row behind me. Bunshaft, who did the Lever House, was in theclass just ahead of me. Hartmann, who ran the Skidmore, Owings and Merrilloffice here for years was in Harry's class with me. We all talked architectureand planning. I was the only one who had a particular interest in planning assuch. I was the only one who went on and took my master's. But I think wewere all thinking about it. I don't think that anyone was practicing planningat that time. There had been a few people—one of the people you should talkto, if you haven't already, is Larry Perkins's father. Dwight Perkins was thecreator of the Cook County Forest Preserve District or the major movementbehind it.

Blum: I have talked to Larry, but I think we got very much involved in somethingequally fascinating and that was Crow Island School. I suppose that was justa natural topic for Larry and we didn't really talk much about planning otherthan simply mentioning it.

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Rockwell: Maybe you'd be interested in seeing a book that I edited in Washington onplanning. I'd worked at Stanton and Rockwell up until the time when John F.Kennedy came into office. I was terribly interested in seeing the federalestablishment come closer to planning, and I knew that there was in theoffing a department on urban development, which later became HUD. So Iaccepted an invitation to go down to the American Institute of Architectsmain office in D.C. at a time when a man from Chicago, an architect fromChicago, was the president of the AIA, Philip Will, Jr.—he was LarryPerkins's partner. Will and I had many talks together about planning, and Isaid look, architects really don't know an awful lot about planning; why don'twe put out a book on it. He said fine, let's see if we can get the dollars. Heworked with me to get the dollars, and I went and found a young architect inWashington who we hired at the AIA. He could sketch and he could think,and we put together the first textbook on urban planning, which is called TheArchitecture of Towns and Cities. And if you look at that, you will see thepotential for architects in the whole urban scheme of things. Now there areindividual buildings, sure, which an architect might design, but there is awhole plethora of great landscapes, which shouldn't be done just by alandscape architect or by an economist. At any rate, look at that. Phil Willand I put together this thing, and, while I was there working on it, theposition of NIPC became vacant and I was then asked to come and fill thatposition, which I did in 1963.

Blum: Some time ago you spoke about three European cities, and it occurred to methat in a democracy such as we call ourselves that to dictate a plan over alarge area, a large space, is not very feasible if it is already built.

Rockwell: You put your finger right on the greatest weakness of planning and you canget around the shortcoming of not dictating a plan, but leading people. Thewhole railroad experience I told you about, the whole television experience Itold you about was an effort to bring people into the planning process and, asyou do that and you make planning a tool of theirs, then you can do yourown planning. An architect does this with his buildings.

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Blum: Isn't that very manipulative?

Rockwell: It's called public acceptance, not public relations. The term we talk abouttoday is public participation, and it's no different than the architect whoworks with his client. He sits down—when I was doing homes aroundWinnetka and other places, I spent evening after evening public-participatingmy clients. Around this area was a hotbed of colonialism, and we were thefirst architects, Stanton and Rockwell, who did any modern architectureanywhere in this area except for the Kecks.

Blum: Now, this was in the 1940s.

Rockwell: 1946. It was right after the war 1946 to 1961, and it was difficult going. Weweren't the greatest, but we did a few houses we liked.

Blum: Not much has been written about the client-architect relationship. Now,you're suggesting that the architect designs the plan, be it a building or amaster plan for a larger area, and then sells his client on the merit of his plan.He asks for a little feedback but not too much to change the plan. Bottom line,the client must accept it or reject it. You were saying you accept one of thesemethods. Which one?

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Rockwell: All right. Now, you're very accurate in your discernment of the process.That's the way it was done, and that's the way we learned to do it. In the1950s we began to see that there is something else that had to be done, andone of the things that we did at NIPC—NIPC was a hotbed of firsts—we didone thing after the other that hadn't been done anywhere else in the countrybecause we were architects, because we had the creative splash of architects.A lot of the agencies around the country, run by engineers and citymanagers, didn't think too much of us, except later on. But the one thing wedesigned was a wholly new attitude toward public participation. And welearned that, before we did plans, we had to find out people's points of view.

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One of the lectures I give at Northeastern University with people who are nottechnicians of any sort, just liberal arts students, is on public participation.How do you find out what people really want before they know it? At theUniversity of Wisconsin, they have come up with some industrial surveysthat have been revolutionary, which were revolutionary in the 1960s, towarddesigning a wholly new way of finding out what people want. If you're a shyperson and if you want to go to the village to a public meeting and expressyourself, you're not apt to do it because you're shy. But your plans, yourideas may be the most important there. And Wisconsin realized this, so theydeveloped ideas which our people went up to Madison to learn and cameback and said this is the way we do it. We go out to the Barrington town hall,and we set up fifteen tables of six or seven people each and we have peoplelead discussions at these tables. The shy person is brought out as a memberof that table and his or her idea is talked back and forth until it emerges andreaches a level where the whole group can vote on it. Now, we did this allover the region in very many different ways. It can be done both at a publicmeeting, as it was done in Barrington, or it can be done on paper in theDelphi process, which is a mail process, and that in itself is terribly importantto the planning process. There will be more and more in the future. And all ofour later plans were done this way; our earlier plans were done in thetraditional manner.

Blum: Are you saying that you first went to the people to get some ideas?

Rockwell: We did the first time.

Blum: Then you took a lot of these ideas back?

Rockwell: Because that's the way we were trained in school. That's the way the originalplan was drawn. But we revised it, and we revise it every few years.

Blum: Do you mean the method?

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Rockwell: We revise the method and the plan, the whole public participation aspect.The television process is public participation at its best. We changed thetransportation plan in forty different respects because of going on the airbefore the plan was crystallized. The first time we did the plan, we tookcrystallized plans out; we gave them a choice of these five. The second timearound we did it differently, and the third time around we're doing it evendifferently—we, I'm not there any longer. I'm doing some other things now.I'm painting and sculpting and stuff like that. But the method has beenestablished, and everyone is learning this. People in highways are learning it.

Blum: So to pursue my question about the process between a strong client and acreative architect, I still don't know who decides what.

Rockwell: There has been a change in the client relationship in pure architecture. It's notthe same change as we've had in planning, as I've told you, but in purearchitecture we've also had a change. We now have the developer telling thearchitect he wants to take this corner and develop it this way. And thearchitect, unfortunately—I would say there are more architects who arecaptives of the developers today than the developers are the recipients ofgood architecture.

Blum: Do you think that's true of the architects in Chicago and elsewhere who areknown as superstars?

Rockwell: Yes. Very true of them. More true of them than it is of the lesser stars. I canthink of a half dozen smaller offices who won't take, probably aren't taking,these large ones because the superstars have become the captives already ofthe developers. Take a case in point. Walk down Wacker Drive. A developerdetermines that there is a nexus of activity in the vicinity of the NorthWestern Station. He knows perfectly well that that station is a borderline caseof preservation. It is not a great station, but it is not a bad station, either.There are good reasons for saving it, but there's not really that much supportto save it out there. And, furthermore, he can sweep Chicago off its feet witha really great design for that corner, and they can keep the trains operating.

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Now that architect could be less concerned about preserving that station; heis in business not to preserve stations but to do high-rises. That's how hemakes his bucks. That's how he keeps 500 architects on his payroll. Now, youcan hardly blame that man. After all he wants to make a name for himself. Hecan produce a waterfall there, or whatever he wants, that is eye catching.And that's what he does. Perkins and Will goes down on the other side ofWacker Drive, and they are given an opportunity twenty years ago to make asplash for Wacker Drive. How do they make it? They don't make it byputting a building four square there. They sell U.S. Gypsum with cocking at45 degrees on the building site. And that's what catches the eye, whether itmakes a hell of a street out of the remainder of Wacker Drive. It's the onlybuilding on that street which is cocked at 45. And is that good urban design?Another book on planning is by Edmund Bacon, A Design of Cities, and whenyou look through it, you will understand what is the design of cities. Look atthe aqua way structure in and around Venice. Look at the design credos ofRome and of Paris, a favorite city.

Blum: Paris is my favorite city, but I didn't say it was.

Rockwell: I understand why it is. Look at how the river curves in Paris. I've got mapafter map of Paris down in my office. Look at the design feature. Here's adesign feature of London.

Blum: Does that follow the natural topography?

Rockwell: Some of it, but not much. Here's Rome, the natural topography of Rome.Have you been in Rome? How many of these hills could you recognize?None, right? It's because they've leveled off the edges. But the Coliseum wasbuilt in a swamp. Did you know that?

Blum: No. But I also have the feeling that the reason European cities were theselittle rabbit-warren kind of things, and difficult to drive through today, werebecause they developed not only in accord with the lay of the land but also

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over a period of time where nothing was really leveled, demolished and agrid overlaid on that ground.

Rockwell: I used to think that way, too. I used to hope that I could prove that a citywould be better because it built itself on natural topography. I haven't beenable to find very many examples of it. Washington was one city that tried todo this. Washington was a swamp also. A good many of these three towns Itold you about were all built on swamps. Swamps must make good sites andhere's the Washington swamp, flat as it can be here. It was dictated bytopography only in the sense that it stopped the line of development when itgot to the hills. You see how the streets come right up here to the hills. Eachof these is a hill. Have you ever seen La Defense in Paris? The next time yougo to Paris, go out and see where they put all the skyscrapers. It's at the endof the Champs Elysees as you come out there. La Defense was a port duringthe Franco-Prussian Wars, and the Parisians had enough sense to say the hellwith any more high-rises downtown; let's build them all on the edge of town.And La Defense is where United Biscuit is, and all the other Americancorporations.

Blum: Chicago is very understandable because it is on a grid but we had thefortune, or misfortune, to have had the Chicago fire. Now, would Chicago,with or without that fire, have developed in this way from a planner's pointof view?

Rockwell: Every city that has had a great catastrophe, all the way from Rotterdamback—Rotterdam was destroyed by the Germans. Rotterdam, London,Chicago—all those have rebuilt themselves on their old lines of developmentbecause we've been too lazy to take the time to work out new ways of givinga person an equivalent amount of real estate for what he had before the fireso that he would feel satisfied. He wanted that little corner there. He'd grownup right there in this little corner; he wanted that even though it wasdestroyed. Now, when Haussmann did this in Paris, that man who gave upthe land was paid. The Dutch tried to find a solution to it called the lexAtinai, where if you redesign the city everyone in the original area was given

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a proportion of one's property. But it takes time. Christopher Wren came upwith a brand new plan for London after the fire. The king—I forget who,King William maybe—wouldn't buy it because they had to rebuild Londonthe next day. They didn't have time. And Wren had to get busy on fifty-twochurches. That's what he built. Can you believe that the man built fifty-twochurches in the year after the fire? Maybe it took him a little longer. Anyhow,the next time you go to Paris, think about these features. This is the Louvre;this is the Place de la Concorde; this is L'Etoile; La Defense is out here. Here'sthe Seine River. The Eiffel Tower is right here, the Luxembourg is here. Hereis where Napoleon is buried. Each of these had a relationship to one another,and that was the essence of Haussmann's plan.

Blum: But Haussmann was doing it in a political climate that allowed him to cut abig thoroughfare, and, if there was a little shack there, it just came down. Butis that likely to happen in New York or Chicago?

Rockwell: Robert Moses did it in New York. Robert Moses lasted thirty-three years.Haussmann lasted seventeen. In the book on Robert Moses by Robert Caro,he explains about the design of the parkways, the state park system, theroads in New York when people got the first automobiles. Read how RobertMoses did it in New York. Anyhow, architects should know more aboutbuilding highways, for example. One area where architects could prevailmore than they do would be in highway design. And a few years ago, a lot ofpeople made a big noise about the way highways were built. So the housingauthority put together a team: Kevin Roche, I was on it, Larry Halprin a greatlandscape architect, and a bunch of us. And we went all over the country tolook at highway structures, and we said, listen, our highways have got to bebetter attuned to our developments than they are. Do you remember inChicago when the ladies barricaded themselves in front of the trees inJackson Park? All right. One of the great architectural accomplishments inNew York was Brooklyn Heights, or Prospect Heights in Brooklyn.Wonderful park, and look at what's underneath it, a three-tier major cityhighway looking out over the river.

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Blum: So are you suggesting there was no need to destroy the trees and just buildup or down. Is that what you're saying?

Rockwell: Yes. I'm saying that whole fiasco lacked architectural involvement. We'vehad a plan once in a while. We had it for Oak Street with ChristopherChamales. I don't know if he is still practicing. Phil Will, too. He is great, andhe knows more than any average architect knows about planning. But he hasnever practiced it.

Blum: You used the word "preservation." What role does preservation play in urbanplanning?

Rockwell: The great bulk of planners today are nice guys, very thoughtful guys, but thewhole complexion of the field has changed in the last twenty, thirty years.From a design-oriented field it has turned to a socially oriented field, whichis not to say it's wrong. It's very good that they are socially oriented, but wearen't doing creative design-oriented planning any longer, very little of it.

Blum: Do you see the two in conflict?

Rockwell: Only because the design people have abandoned the field. This was the boneof my contention; this is what Phil Will and I went to Washington to try tocorrect. I don't think the average architect has picked up the importance ofplanning. I think he still sees it as an accessory use to something bigger, hisnext commission. And I am not a bit bitter about this at all. It's perfectlylogical. There are a few planning firms that still try to subsist on the basis ofthe dollar commission that they get for a planning project, but there aren'tvery many planners who have the sensitivity, the architectural sensitivity, topreserve or to want to preserve certain sections of the city. The architectsthemselves have gotten much more sensitive to the preservation need, andthey've done a great job on it. But I'm not sure that it's only the architects whoare doing it. I sit on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks advisorycommittee. The chairman is a mathematician who knows more aboutpreservation that any average person would, and almost as much as an

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architect because he's a buff. There is an economics professor from ITT in thegroup who knows more about Chicago churches. There is only one architectbeside myself, and most people think I'm a planner so they don't start talkingabout the architects. And if John Vinci isn't there, why, they don't say more.But, in any case, I don't think they realize it. No. I've seen city after city torndown in areas which should have been preserved. Take St. Louis as a case,and I think that it's been too bad. The only city where I think that there's beena noticeable attempt to save and preserve areas was Ed Bacon's city,Philadelphia. And Ed was also trained as an architect. There aren't mencoming along like this.

Blum: Do you think they were unique and are still unique because the dollar is notthere to compensate them for their talent?

Rockwell: I don't see a great growth in the interest in urban design that there should be.There is now a brave little woman at the State University of New York who istrying to start, on a shoestring, an institute of urban design. Urban designshould be in the American Institute of Architects. When I was in Washington,that's what we called our division. We didn't get the support for it, and don'ttoday. The committee goes around the country—it just met here inChicago—they don't know beans about it. They are just nice architects whosehobby is urban design. It's got to be more than a hobby; it's got to be a realforce. There are few urban designers in the country who are doing good jobs.There is one in Baltimore, one architect in Philadelphia; there is none inChicago. There is no architectural firm specializing in urban design inChicago. But the market hasn't been developed in the Midwest. There is onein San Francisco, I think.

Blum: Are you an urban designer?

Rockwell: Partly, partly.

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Blum: Is this an ongoing and renewable kind of need, or is it that you planBarrington and, if it's a good plan with foresight, it remains in force—such asthe Burnham Plan. We're still working, in part, on the Burnham Plan.

Rockwell: Yes. I talked to the planner for Geneva the other day who is a civilengineer—offices in Evanston; he's been the city planner for Geneva, he said,for eighteen years, I think. So, many of the ideas that he has proposed forGeneva are being built slowly.

Blum: And why is there a need for another firm to come in and redesign it if theyare already working on a very forward looking plan that they probablycouldn't afford to put in force all at once?

Rockwell: Well, the question is, is the plan that he gave them the design-oriented plan itshould have been, or should be. I don't know. He's been working there foreighteen years, and, toward the end of his conversation, he said, you knowwhat we're trying to straighten out now, all out—have you ever been to theLittle Traveler? It's in Geneva and it's a marvelous little restaurant, antiqueshop, store for buying—it was the first boutique in the whole Chicago region,and it is so far above any of the others you can't believe it. He said, you knowthat area around Little Traveler; he said, it's all blacktopped—they were outof parking. And the ordinance in the city allowed them to pave all theparkways for parking. He said, we're trying to beat that down. And I thoughtto myself, goddam it, Bob, you've been there for eighteen years; why didn'tyou do something about it before they started. That's part of the town plan.That's part of the whole approach to planning. That's part of the urban-design approach. I said, well, what are you doing? He said, we might givesome awards. I'm volunteering some time right now in NIPC, and I thoughtmaybe we'd give some awards down here. He said, well, we're doing somework down by the river. Sure, the river is a sexy place to do design work, sothat's where they're doing it. What about the backyard of Geneva? What's hedoing about that? What's he doing about all these other things? In otherwords, no one is really making the rounds. And I'm not being that critical,I'm saying...

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Blum: Are you saying there should be a watchdog committee?

Rockwell: Yes. More than that. There should be a whole spirit of urban design practicedall over the region.

Blum: Well, I think that requires a whole new awareness that only a few people likeyou seem to have at this time. Mr. Rockwell, thank you.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

Ballard, William H. and Matthew L. Rockwell. A Survey in Respect to the Decentralization ofthe Boston Central Business District, Chicago: Urban Land Institute (October 1940).

Heuer, Robert. "NIPC Speaks on Growth and Decline, Trends, Taxes and LandManagement." Illinois Issues 19 (June 1992).

Kearney, Daniel P. and Matthew L. Rockwell. Housing A Community Handbook. IllinoisHousing Development Authority, 1973.

"Matthew Rockwell: Architect and City Planner." Architecture: the AIA Journal 78 (April1989):41. (obituary)

Rockwell, Matthew L. "The Critical Land Shortage." Illinois Parks and Recreation 28(January/February 1973).

Rockwell, Matthew L. Freeway in the City: Principles of Planning and Design, Lighting Source,Inc., 1968.

_____. What is Regional Planning?, Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area PlanningCommission, 1977.

Rockwell, Matthew L., editor. Architecture of Towns and Cities, 1964.

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MATTHEW LAFLIN ROCKWELL

Born: 20 November 1915, Chicago, IllinoisDied: 7 December 1988, Winnetka, Illinois

Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.Arch., 1938Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.City Planning, 1940

MilitaryService: United States Army Corps of Engineers, 1941-1946

ProfessionalExperience: Stanton & Rockwell, 1946-1961

Institute of Architects, Director of Public Affairs and Urban Programs, 1961-1963

Executive Director, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, 1963-1979Rockwell Associates, 1979-1988

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1968Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School Medal, 1940

SelectedProjects: General Binding Company, Northbrook, Illinois

Hadley School for the Blind, Winnetka, IllinoisJames H. Ferry Residence, Glencoe, IllinoisUnited States Post Office, Winnetka, IllinoisWalter E. Straub Residence, Winnetka, Illinois

EducationalActivities: Illinois Institute of Technology, Visiting Lecturer, 1953-1955

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ResearcherUniversity of Virginia, Lecturer

Service: American Institute of Architects, Board of Directors, 1966-1969American Institute of Architects, Director, 1960-1961American Institute of City Planners, Member, 1945Architectural Board of Review, Winnetka, Illinois, Member, 1959-1961Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Advisory BoardU.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Consultant, 1968-1969Zoning Commission, Winnetka, Illinois, Member, 1958-1961

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INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

American Institute of Architects 14

Bacon, Edmund (Ed) 5, 18, 22Bunshaft, Gordon 13Burnham Daniel H. 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 22Burnham Daniel H., Jr. 3

Calder, Alexander (Sandy) 5-6Caldwell, Alfred 2Chamales, Christopher 21Chicago Regional Planning Association 3, 4, 6Coliseum, Rome, Italy 18

Fuller, Sue 5, 6

Gabo, Naum 6

Hartmann, William (Bill) 13Haussmann, Georges-Eugene, Baron 19, 20

Keck, George Fred 1, 2, 15

Kingery, Jody 3

Lincoln, Walter Stephen 10

Moses, Robert 20

Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) 5, 6, 9, 23

O'Hare International Airport, Chicago, Illinois 2-3, 6

Pei, Ieoh Ming 13Perkins and Will 18Perkins, Dwight 13Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 13-14Porps, Ernie 10

Rodin, Auguste 5

Seitz, Roger 10Stanton and Rockwell 2, 8, 14, 15Stanton, Francis Rew (Frannie) 8

Weese, Harry 13Will, Philip 14, 21Wren, Christopher 20