The state of art with the statesman of architecture: Stanley Tigerman on the Chicago Architecture Biennial
“The theme, ‘The State of the Art of Architecture,’ pays homage to a landmark 1977 conference organized by architect Stanley Tigerman at the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
That conference was a polemical firestorm, with high stakes: as modernist strictures were losing hold, and as social upheavals refigured urban life, the design profession struggled to remain internally coherent and culturally relevant. When it’s launched next October, the [Chicago Architecture] Biennial will have to respond to similarly existential concerns.”
Stanley Tigerman was perfectly wise and foul-mouthed in my interview, published in Newcity magazine.
When the first edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial announced its theme, I immediately called Stanley Tigerman, Chicago’s inimitable, implacable, impossible polemicist. It was Tigerman, after all, who loaned the Biennial its language. Decades earlier, he organized a conference of architects and critics entitled “The State of the Art of Architecture.”
For a piece in Newcity magazine, I settled into a long talk with the Tigerman himself. How did he feel about the event? Was the brand-new Biennial already trading in nostalgia? Is the breadth, the vagueness of the theme intentional? Tigerman, in proper form, dismissed most of my questions. He was energized about the Biennial and optimistic about what it can do. Who cares about the title, he said. What matters is the noise the Biennial makes, the connections it generates. After his conference in 1977, he told me, “all that happened was this broad cast of characters continued for the next thirty years to interact with each other–on juries, on panels, with projects, et cetera.”
I thought a lot about that conversation as the fourth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial was launching in 2021, and alluded to it in an introduction to a Newcity issue that I guest edited.
Tigerman also makes a turn in a cover feature I wrote, also for Newcity, about Helmut Jahn’s Thompson Center. In the opening paragraphs of that story, Tigerman gently mocks Jahn’s signature style.