Institute's Nest Egg

By hoarding its gifts, pinching its membership pennies, banking its small profits from admissions and borrowing wisely among its friends, Chicago's Art Institute, unlike most other U. S. museums, has managed to accumulate a $600,000 nest egg for a new building program. Last week the Institute announced plans for the first of three major additions which will eventually make the Institute a huge quadrangle of art between Michigan Avenue and the Outer Drive. No Chicago wiseacre was surprised to learn that the winner of the design competition was the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird & Root.

Holabird & Root designed a severe modern three-story set-back structure fronting the Outer Drive and connected with the existing building by five bridges over the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. Gallery walls will be movable, automobiles will be parked in the basement, escalators will carry visitors to air-conditioned floors. Light beams from sides and corners instead of top lights will illumine a collection of Monet, Davies, Vlaminck, Inness, etc. now stacked unseen in the basement.

Half century ago Holabird & Roche and Burnham & Root were Chicago's two top-flight architectural firms. Today's Holabird & Root is the inheritor of the talents of the older generation. Best known architectural-partnership (formed in 1928) west of the Allegheny Mountains, its main Chicago rival is Graham, Anderson, Probst & White whose new Field Building shows a vertical treatment typical of Holabird & Root.

One year separates the births of John Augur Holabird and John Wellborn Root. their graduation from the Beaux Arts in Paris, their architectural entry into Chicago. In 1919 they were both made partners in Holabird & Roche and young John Root had caught up with old John Holabird. Although their careers have been almost identical, the two Johns are not alike. To Mr. Root, now 47, generally goes credit for brilliant designs and breath-taking solutions; to Mr. Holabird, praise for mastering minutiae, overcoming practical obstacles. More social than his partner, chunky bespectacled Mr. Root enjoys peering at Lake Michigan from the Saddle & Cycle Club, going to parties. He was promoter and part-owner last year of the Century of Progress' most popular concession, the Streets of Paris. Tall, thin, gruff Mr. Holabird is rarely seen in public except at the opera. An expert fly caster, he modestly refuses to exhibit his trophies on the walls of the Holabird & Root office at 333 North Michigan Avenue, a skyscraper they designed. Last week he was practicing his fishing skill at swank Coleman Lake Club in northern Wisconsin.

Holabird & Root buildings reflect the quick brilliance of Root, the patient logic of Holabird. All Chicago knows their towering railroad-straddling Daily News Building, their Palmolive Building topped by the Lindbergh beacon, their Board of Trade Building which spans La Salle Street, their swift, swirling Chrysler Building on the Fair Grounds.

Throughout the Midwest Holabird & Root have also left their lasting mark. In Bismarck, N. Dak. they were associate architects for the towering $2,000,000 State Capitol in which a political puppet show was in progress last week (see p. 14). Aluminum-trimmed v-shaped bay windows, running from base to cornice, give their A. O. Smith Building in Milwaukee the appearance of a huge accordion. Their Forest Products Research Laboratory in Madison, Wis. is a strong horizontal mass broken perpendicularly by razor-like fins of cypress. Almost totally devoid of ornamentation is their compact, vertical Court House in Birmingham, Ala.

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