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Jacques Brownson, the chief architect of Chicago’s Richard J. Daley Center, the steely, broad-shouldered modernist skyscraper that ranks among Chicago’s greatest post-World World II designs, died Sunday at McKee Medical Center in Loveland, Colo. He was 88 years old.
The cause of death was a heart attack, said his wife Doris.
Originally called the Chicago Civic Center, the 648-foot-tall courts building was hailed upon its completion in 1965 as a tour de force of boldly expressed skeletal construction, a building that met—and even exceeded—standards set by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the master modernist under whom Brownson studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Shortly after the building opened, Architectural Forum magazine offered the tongue-in-cheek judgment that the building was “Mies van der Rohe’s best tower to date.”
In 1991, Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp rated the Daley Center one of the Chicago’s 10 most important post World War II works of architecture, putting it on a list that included such icons as the X-braced John Hancock Center, the corncob-shaped towers of Marina City, and Mies’ foremost temple of steel and glass, Crown Hall at IIT.
“That Civic Center building, I think it’s one of the all-time great buildings. You stand there and you look up at those colums and they are really terrific,” Carter Manny Jr., a former partner at Mr. Brownson’s firm, C.F. Murphy Associates, said Tuesday from his home outside San Francisco.
Born in west suburban Aurora in 1923, Mr. Brownson earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from IIT in 1948 and 1954.
For his master’s thesis, he designed and built a flat-roofed, steel-and-glass glass house for himself in west suburban Geneva. The house won national attention and Mies himself would come to visit.
“Often on a Sunday, we could just count on him coming out,” Doris Brownson said Tuesday.
“I’d have to rush out to the store to get something to make martinis,” she recalled, referring to one of Mies’ favorite refreshments.
Mr. Brownson worked at several Chicago architectural firms, including his own, before joining the firm Naess & Murphy, later named C.F. Murphy Associates, in 1959.
While there, he co-designed what was essentially a warm-up for the muscular Daley Center—the Continental National Insurance Building at 55 E. Jackson St., which opened in 1962.
Chicago’s landmarks commission last year approved a preliminary recommendation to make the building an official city landmark. The recommendation still requires approval by the commission and the City Council.
Mr. Brownson and C.F. Murphy Associates were selected to head the Civic Center design effort in 1960.
Two other Chicago firms, Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, collaborated on the skyscraper, which was built to house Cook County courts, hearing rooms and offices for Chicago and Cook County.
It rises in the heart of the Loop, on the block bounded by Washington, Randolph, Dearborn and Clark streets.
To provide long, uninterrupted expanse of interior space that could satisfy changing needs, Mr. Brownson designed a skyscraper with immense, bridge-like spans between cross-shaped, tapering columns. The floor trusses were a staggering 87 feet wide, at the time an unprecedented distance.
In a daring move, the skyscraper was clad in Cor-ten, a steel that rusts in streaks of orange in its early life, then stabilizes to a pleasingly uniform russet color. Cor-ten was used again when the Civic Center’s Picasso sculpture was fabricated in 1966.
Mr. Brownson’s design included the plaza from which the Picasso rises, a great outdoor open space that has hosted everything from Halloween celebrations to political protests.
The Civic Center triumph would prove a hard act to follow, as Mr. Brownson suggested in an interview with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Betty Blum in 1994.
“Somebody said to me—we were standing on the plaza, right after the building was dedicated and occupied—they said, ‘Jacques, it’s going to be pretty hard to do anything after this, isn’t it?’” Mr. Brownson said. “I said, ‘Yes. An opportunity like this only comes once in your lifetime.’”
The Civic Center was renamed the Richard J. Daley Center and Plaza after Daley, the building’s patron, died in 1976.
Despite his high-profile success, the modest Mr. Brownson maintained a low-profile figure, serving as chairman of the architecture department at the University of Michigan from 1966 to 1968.
He returned to Chicago from 1968 to 1972, serving as managing architect for the Public Building Commission, which carries out building projects for the Chicago Public Schools and other units of government.
He then moved to Colorado, where he became director of planning and development for the Auraria Higher Education Center in Denver and served as director of Colorado’s state buildings division from 1976 to 1986.
Other survivors include a daughter, Lorre Olsen; a brother, Donald; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Two sons, Daniel and Joel, died previously, his wife said.
A memorial service is yet to be scheduled.
Some still regret that Mr. Brownson didn’t design more buildings in Chicago.
“We all thought that he should come back to Chicago and do some more good buildings. I don’t know why he didn’t,” said IIT professor Arthur Takeuchi, who worked with Mr. Brownson on the Civic Center. “He didn’t talk too much.”
Source: Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune
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