Chicago Architect Benjamin Marshall's Work Highlighted in New Book
The Italian Renaissance grandeur of the Drake Hotel is his, as is the delightfully pink fantasy of the Edgewater Beach Apartments rising on the north end of Lake Shore Drive. The list goes on, from the Parisian splendor of the residential high-rise at 1550 North State Parkway to the Second Empire panache of the Blackstone Hotel on South Michigan Avenue to the Mediterranean Revival elegance of the South Shore Cultural Center, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.
If you live in Chicago or nearby, you've almost surely encountered (and probably admired) architect Benjamin Marshall's work without knowing who designed it.
As the just-cited litany suggests, Marshall, who died in 1944 at age 70, viewed the architectural past as a sumptuous array of ingredients to concoct recipes for classically-styled buildings that were loaded with the latest conveniences. He was no "less is more" modernist like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Yet as an insightful and beautifully-photographed new book makes clear, he did much in the first three decades of the 20th Century to create modern Chicago.
The book, "Benjamin H. Marshall: Chicago Architect" (Acanthus Press, $45, 168 pp.), fills a longstanding gap on Chicago's architectural bookshelf. Written by former Art Institute architecture curator John Zukowsky and Jean Guarino, a Ph.D. candidate in art and architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, it illuminates the prolific output and colorful life of a designer and real estate developer who combined traits of the real-life theater impresario Flo Ziegfeld and the fictional Roaring Twenties millionaire Jay Gatsby.
Marshall designed five of the eight buildings, including the Drake, on East Lake Shore Drive, Chicago's swankiest street. He was head-turningly handsome, a snappy dresser who drove a Packard convertible. Society's A-list partied at his now-demolished pink, Spanish-style lakefront villa in Wilmette. Its pool, the book tells us, "led to stories about Gatsby-like parties with showgirls whose bathing suits dissolved when wet." (A sentence like that tells you that this is no dry academic tome.)
Divided into three main parts — an overview; chapters devoted to homes, theaters and other building types; and a timeline brightened by interesting nuggets about Marshall's career — the book is illustrated with richly-detailed, skillfully-composed color photographs by Tom Harris of Chicago's Hedrich Blessing studio. It would show nicely on a coffee table, but it's not full of fluff, as so many coffee table books are.
Marshall, we learn, grew up a privileged child who attended an elite private school where he made connections with classmates, like the Drake brothers, who would become future clients. Influenced by both the neo-classical majesty of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the theme-park fantasy of its carnival Midway, he was a rising architectural star — until a 1903 fire at his Iroquois Theatre caused some 600 deaths.
Officially exonerated but criticized for letting the unfinished theater open to the public, Marshall rebuilt his career. He partnered in 1905 with Charles Fox, a veteran of the commercial firm Holabird & Roche who had the formal architectural training Marshall lacked. Fox was the nuts-and-bolts guy. Marshall was the design impresario and rainmaker, bagging jobs as he golfed with captains of industry at elite North Shore country clubs.
Fox died in 1926, two years after the firm broke up, but Marshall kept going, working out of his Wilmette villa and designing such landmarks as the Edgewater Beach Apartments, which was part of a resort hotel that offered the thrill of a "hydro-aeroplane" ride. As it did to so many architects, the Depression destroyed his practice. Marshall filed for bankruptcy in 1934 and then sold his exotic Wilmette mansion to department store magnate Nathan Goldblatt. He eventually moved into, and helped manage, the Drake Hotel, supervising the design of such famous interiors as the Cape Cod Room, where, the timeline tells us, "his own recipes found their way onto the menu."
Though it is neither a full-fledged biography nor heavyweight art historical analysis, the book nonetheless does better than most biographies at integrating the life, art and times of its subject. Discussing the mechanically retractable roofs Marshall placed over the central courts of his some of his buildings, Zukowsky observes that this feature may have been part of the early 20th Century movement to promote fresh air and natural light as an antidote to sickness. The roofs, he writes, "essentially combine the kind of open space that goes back to ancient Roman villas with the convertible top of (Marshall's) favorite Packard Phaeton."
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Another strength is Zukowsky's short examination of why Marshall has been ignored for so long. He speculates that the classicism of other traditionalists, like Howard Van Doren Shaw and David Adler, "may have been perceived as simpler, cleaner, not as fussy, and therefore more acceptable than Marshall's, especially when it came to the latter's extravagant French detailing."
To be sure, the book goes a bit overboard in celebrating its subject. Marshall was not an original ornamentalist, like Louis Sullivan, nor was he a great structural innovator, like Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright. But he was no mere decorator.
As Zukowsky writes, "he helped shape the city of Chicago that we see today, elevating building types such as the boutique hotel, the hotel resort in the city and multifamily dwellings to another level of architectural achievement."
Kudos to Jane and Didier Lepauw, founders of the Benjamin Marshall Society, for bringing this handsome book to fruition. It's more than a look back at an almost-forgotten figure. Marshall's architecture sets a high standard for the traditionalist designers of today.
Twitter @BlairKamin