May 7, 2019
marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of architect Howard Van
Doren Shaw. One of the best-known
architects in his day, Shaw’s distinctive blending of traditional elements with
his own personal style, led to his reputation in the architectural community as
the most radical of the conservatives, and the most conservative of the
radicals.
Glessner
House, in partnership with Friends of Historic Second Church, will honor Shaw
by hosting a half-day symposium on May 11, 2019, with five scholars exploring
various aspects of Shaw’s career. The
symposium will take place in the sanctuary of Second Presbyterian Church,
Shaw’s masterpiece of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the only one of his
designs to be designated a National Historic Landmark. For more information on the symposium, or to
purchase tickets, click here. In this article,
we look back at Shaw’s life and several commissions he received in the South
Loop which exhibit the breadth of his abilities.
Howard Van
Doren Shaw was born on May 7, 1869 to Theodore and Sarah (Van Doren) Shaw. Theodore was a successful dry goods merchant
and a descendant of an early Quaker settler who came to America with William
Penn. Sarah was a talented painter and a
descendant of a prominent Dutch family that included the first mayor of
Brooklyn, New York. Shortly after Shaw’s
death, fellow architect Alfred Granger noted that Shaw had inherited his
father’s “strength of character and quiet firmness” while receiving “his
artistic taste, his love for color and fantasy” from his mother.
Shaw’s
parents married in 1865 and established their home at 66 Calumet Avenue (later
2124 S. Calumet). By the time Howard was
a young boy, the house sat in the midst of the most exclusive residential
district in the city. He received a
privileged upbringing, attended the exclusive Harvard School for Boys at 2101
S. Indiana Ave., and became a member of Second Presbyterian Church, which his
parents had attended since the time of their marriage. Shaw earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from
Yale in 1890 and that fall, entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where he completed the rigorous two-year architecture program in just one
year.
He returned
to Chicago in 1891 and quickly obtained an apprenticeship in the prominent firm
of Jenney & Mundie, an outstanding training ground that had produced
architects including Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan. The office was located in the Home Insurance
Building, Jenney’s most prominent building, widely regarded as the first true
skyscraper. In the summer of 1892, Shaw
headed off to Europe for an extended journey studying and sketching architecture. While in Spain, he met and traveled with
James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and
Second Presbyterian Church in Chicago.
Shaw house, 2124 S. Calumet Avenue
Returning to
Chicago in early 1893, he rejoined the firm of Jenney & Mundie, and in
April, married Frances Wells, the daughter of a pioneer Chicago boot merchant. By early 1894, Shaw established his own
practice, setting up his office on the top floor of his family home on Calumet
Avenue. He hired a draftsman, Robert G.
Work, and quickly established a reputation for designing distinctive residences
in a variety of architectural styles.
In 1897,
Shaw received his first large commission through his Yale classmate Thomas E.
Donnelley. The building at 731 S.
Plymouth Court housed the Lakeside Press, later R. R. Donnelley &
Sons. The vaulted fireproof structure
with reinforced concrete floors showed Shaw’s ability to design a building that
was both beautiful and highly functional.
That same
year, he received his first commission from Second Presbyterian Church, to
design the Crerar Sunday School Chapel at 5831 S. Indiana Ave. The building, designed and built at the same
time as Shaw’s summer house, Ragdale, in Lake Forest, features a similar façade
with twin gables sheathed in a smooth stucco finish. The Chapel and Ragdale both exhibit Shaw’s
early mastery of interpreting the English Arts & Crafts style.
The first of
three houses Shaw designed in the neighborhood stood at 1900 S. Calumet Ave.
and was commissioned by Charles Starkweather in 1899. Although based on classic Georgian design,
interesting features such as the Palladian window cut into the pediment over
the main entrance show Shaw’s interest in, and mastery of, introducing his
personal touch into each commission he received.
In March
1900, Second Presbyterian Church suffered a devastating fire which destroyed
the sanctuary but left the outer walls intact.
Shaw was commissioned to rebuild the sanctuary, the design of which was
inspired by his love of the English Arts & Crafts. He and his wife traveled to England that
summer for inspiration, and the completed designs were presented to, and
approved by, the church board of Trustees that fall. He engaged several talented Chicago
craftsmen, including muralist Frederic Clay Bartlett, lighting designer Willy H.
Lau, and the leaded glass firm of Giannini & Hilgart, to execute his vision
for the space. Shaw carefully
incorporated several motifs including grapevines, pomegranates, and angels to
create a unified appearance throughout the sanctuary, from the lighting
fixtures and windows, to the carved wood ornament and cast plaster panels. The result, completed in late 1901, is a
gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, that was an essential tenet of the Arts
& Crafts movement.
As work on the
church was nearing completion, Shaw received a commission from his
father-in-law, Moses D. Wells, for a commercial office and warehouse building
at 1249 S. Wabash Avenue, known as the Eiger Building. The façade of the five-story structure was almost
entirely glass, with huge groupings of windows set back between thin vertical
brick piers that clearly express the structural frame of the building. The windows on the top floor, smaller in
scale, are set within a long horizontal frame, giving the façade a carefully
balanced composition which, combined with the simple but distinctive ornament,
made the building stand apart from similar nearby structures.
In 1902, he
designed the Henneberry Press building one block to the north at 1139-1143 S.
Wabash Avenue for a printing company.
The eight-story structure, again exhibiting huge amounts of glass on the
façade, displays a clearly articulated base, middle, and top. Shallow pediments at the base and cornice give
a sense of verticality and lightness to the composition.
Shaw
designed two additional houses in 1903.
The first was built for John B. Drake, Jr. and stood at 2106 S. Calumet
Ave., just a couple of doors north of his family home. For the Drake house, Shaw turned to the Tudor
style creating a pleasing asymmetrical brick façade, anchored by a central
recessed entryway and wrap-around porch.
The second
house designed that year was more controversial. Built for his Yale classmate Ralph Martin
Shaw (no relation) at 2632 S. Prairie Ave., the narrow brick rowhouse was
stylistically different from its neighbors, but more importantly, addressed the
need for housing an automobile. The
ground floor was centered by the entrance to the “motor room” or garage that
featured a large turntable set into the floor so that the auto could be turned
around when it was time to exit. The
ground level was visually cut off from the rest of the house by a projecting
limestone lintel above which was set a large grouping of three windows,
denoting the main living spaces on the second level. Although praised by architects, Shaw’s
handwritten note next to a photo of the house in his scrapbook read “very
avant-garde and criticized.”
Shaw’s later
commissions in the neighborhood reflect its rapid transformation from
residential to commercial in the first decades of the 20th
century. In 1907, he designed a printing
plant for the publishers, Ginn & Co., on the 2300 block of South Prairie
Avenue. Built of reinforced concrete in
the Classical Revival style, the most notable feature was a series of
three-story brick columns which lent a grand effect to the façade. The building was the center of two
preservation battles at the turn of the 21st century; the
reconstructed façade survives at 2203 S. Martin Luther King Dr.
In 1911,
Shaw received another commission from the Donnelley company, which had outgrown
its Lakeside Press building on Plymouth Court.
That year, the company acquired all of the lots on the east side of the
2100 block of Calumet Ave., directly across the street from the house in which
Shaw’s widowed mother was still living. Considered
one of the finest examples of “Industrial Gothic,” the building’s design
reflects Shaw’s directive to design the structure “so that it will not be
beautiful only today, but one hundred years from now. We want to build it so people will say that
it is art, intelligence and beauty rather than a flashy display of money.”
Brick and limestone piers are clearly
articulated as buttresses with recessed spandrels and large expanses of glass
in between. Ornament includes rich stone
carving and terra cotta plaques depicting historic printers’ marks. It was built in four phases, the last completed
after Shaw’s death, but true to his original design.
Shaw’s final
commission in the neighborhood was for the Nyberg Automobile Works at 2435-37
S. Michigan Avenue, reflecting the growth of “Motor Row” along that
street. Completed in 1912, the building
featured huge plate glass windows at ground level to showcase the automobiles,
with a variety of Shaw ornament enlivening the façade above.
Although
Shaw never designed another building in the neighborhood, he remained active
throughout the Chicago area and beyond, designing everything from houses to industrial
buildings, and from the planned company town of Marktown in East Chicago,
Indiana to the first modern shopping mall, Market Square, in Lake Forest. Shaw died on May 6, 1926, one day before his
57th birthday while being treated for pernicious anemia in Baltimore. He was awarded the prestigious gold medal
from the American Institute of Architects the day before his death. Shaw was only the fifth American to receive
the medal, which is awarded by the national AIA Board of Directors “in
recognition of a significant body of work of lasting influence on the theory
and practice of architecture.”
His wife later
wrote, “It was said about William Morris, ‘You can not lose a man like that by
his own death, only by your own.’ I know
his family feels this to be true of Howard Shaw.” The architectural community felt the same –
he was highly regarded by his peers for his distinctive style and was still
actively engaged in his architectural practice at the time of his final
illness. He was buried at Graceland
Cemetery, the family plot centered by a marker of his own design, surmounted by
a copper orb displaying the words of the 23rd Psalm.
