While roadtripping in the US this summer I seemingly saw the same exhibition twice: first as “Louis Sullivan and Architectural Ornament” at the St. Louis Art Museum and then as “Fragments of Chicago’s Architectural History” at the Chicago Art Institute.
 
Both presentations are casually located in a staircase and a hallway. In Chipperfield’s modern St. Louis building the historical ornaments are shown as an intervention in a series of niches; some objects sit on plinths like instant art works. Little labels provide details on each object and a current image of the building to which it belongs. The disappearance of the ornaments from niche to niche seems like a quiz: to which building by Louis H. Sullivan, his partners or protégés can the next one be attributed? Some are noteworthy originals such as the Chicago stock exchange elevator grilles that museum visitors might recognize from other collections at MoMA or the V&A. Balustrades attributed to Frank Loyd Wright can also be found in the Met in New York and the Philadelphia, Denver and Chazen Museums of Art!
 
In the Art Institute’s grand historical staircase, on the other hand, the exhibition becomes a history lesson of built Chicago. Objects are attached to gray wood panels. Window fragments are hung separately and illuminated from the back. Many of the buildings whose parts are on show here have been demolished. Some have been renovated, some had parts removed. None still exist the way they were designed. And not every object was designed by a superstar architect or is a part of the canon. A church window stems from the principal work by early female architect Marion Mahony Griffin. Four objects from Bronzeville represent one of the most important African American neighborhoods of the early 20th century: the city’s first black owned and financed building, a building designed by Walter T. Bailey, Illinois’ first black architect, and a floor tile from the Mecca apartment building, a symbol of the displacement of black residents in Chicago.
 
While modernism moved on from ornaments, these fragments still form parts of multitudinous stories told across the country that inform how we understand architecture today.
 
la.