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Writing + Research

Long-form Architectural Critique

Study of Writers Theatre, Studio Gang Architects, Glencoe, Illinois

In Focus

Research Diary

What new or established ideologies does the use of cedar prop up, erase, or produce? Through photos, interviews, essays, articles, and site visits, I will attempt to unpack the role of cedar in Writers Theatre and present it as a keen architect of the society it emerges from.

Photos/renderings/blueprints: How do the building’s materials function together? How do the cedar trestles operate? How is the project presented as a model of sustainable design (viewpoint, editing, lighting)? How does it refer to the most famous styles of residential architecture in the area - Prairie, Keck, Arts & Crafts (materiality, height, patterning, and process)?

Videos: In one video, founder and principle architect Jeanne Gang says, “It made sense to make a building using wood”. The interviews and production scenes center environmental sustainability and expert handicraft. What ideologies are Studio Gang relying on (environmentalism, individualism, paternalism)? In another video, the language they use for the building is largely about closeness, warmth, staying true to the original organization, and “intimacy” (the most-used descriptor of the project). What facet of the project’s projected ideology is this set of descriptors reflective of/encouraging to?

Visits: I grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, but have not lived there in 15 years. In researching this review essay, I have been taking walks around this vaguely familiar neighborhood meandering the theatre grounds, viewing it from as many angles as I can, seeing how it interacts with its immediate environment (the shops on one side, the parks I played in so often flanking two more, and a private home on the fourth). These visits help me understand the theatre’s interaction with Glencoe, generate meaningful context, and reveal how the project works to enforce and produce the desires/values of the town.

Videos

Booklist

Wright, Herbert. “All the Wood’s a Stage.” Blueprint no. 345 (2016): 146-59.

Why wood?

This article in Blueprint is about the use of timber in Writers Theatre, and the use of wood in contemporary architecture more broadly. It is about the challenges of using wood, the benefits of it, and why Gang selected a material that the United States uses infrequently in trendy buildings. I’m unpacking the use of timber specifically in suburban Chicago. To do this, I want to see what Studio Gang sees as the appealing aspects of timber, perhaps revealing the trends and movements that they as a studio want to be associated with, or that Glencoe aligns with. Interestingly, this article attributes the rise in wood use in contemporary architecture to European and Asian trends, which may well be the places that Gang wanted to hitch on to when she chose timber. As well, Gang refers to wood as an ancient material, which it no doubt is, and that it has an appealing “rustic” feeling – this assessment is important to my exploration into the American fixation with the handmade. Yet these reasons don’t consider the long-established use of wood in Chicago’s suburbs. I find this all the more fascinating. Wright says, “it tells the whole of the USA that timber is back,” as if we’d lost it. Had we? 

Brooks, H. Allen. “Chicago Architecture: Its Debt to the Arts and Crafts.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 312–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/988704.

What is the legacy of the Arts & Crafts movement in the Midwest?

Brook’s essay approaches this topic in a way I find helpful. He looks at the original British movement, and the motivations for that, to its shift and emergence in the United States, and the different motivations for that translation. He discusses many of the underlying desires of the American Arts & Crafts branch, who exactly rallied for its success, and where it found supporters. He asserts that it is less a category of style than a set of ideas. I can use this analysis to examine my own historical moment more than 100 years later. If we are still using the vocabulary and approach of the movement, we are still implicated in its legacy.

McGuirk, Justin. “Craft Fetishism: From objects to things.” Disegno (2012). http://justinmcguirk.com/craft-fetishism-objects-things

What of our obsession with the handmade?

Is this all directly beholden to John Ruskin – and what are the implications of a moral attachment to craftsmanship? McGuirk approaches the issue of the handmade versus industrial object in a similar way to how I want to approach craftsmanship in architecture. He breaches various fields – fashion, media, food, personal hygiene – in his dive into the DIY aesthetic, connecting them to a broader fetishization with the handmade. The rejection of the globalized product in favor of the local, independent thing connects in part to Western desire for independence.

Herring, Scott. "REGIONAL MODERNISM: A REINTRODUCTION." Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 1 (2009): 1-10. www.jstor.org/stable/26286964.

What does Writers Theatre profess about the 21st attitude toward regional design?

This article explores the issues of regionalism/anti-internationalism/American exceptionalism in design. On the one hand, regional modernism is present in the project––inventing new use for an old material, emphasizing local handiwork, using timber as structure––but the international influence is also present, and that, too, has much precedent in Midwestern design. Scott Herring’s article lays out some of the history of regional modernism and its internationalist counterpart. There is the issue of Glencoe distinguishing itself materially from the metropolis (Chicago) nearby, and of its desire to connect with global design trends like eco-design, existing simultaneously.

Marsh, Margaret S. Suburban Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp 67-89.

 What does the project site in a high-income suburb bring to the ideological mix?

Dr. Margaret Marsh’s books gets at a set of ideologies related to suburbanization. In the early 1900s, the desires to re-center an expansionist emphasis on landscape and nature, and to stress domesticity as a democratic ideal, actualized. The “new suburban domestic ideal” (Marsh, 83) emphasized the family unit and its conservative social values, diverting urban individualism and shoring up nativism.

Bronaugh, White. “North American Forests in the Age of Man.” American Forests. April 12, 2012. https://www.americanforests.org/magazine/article/north-american-forests-in-the-age-of-man/.

 What does the American history of logging mean for Writers Theatre?

This article is a critical look at the history of man and forest on the land we call America. It delves into settler colonial exploitation of native land, and how that approach held on through the Industrial Revolution, to present day It has led to massive deforestation and environmental degradation. The American logging industry is one of the biggest in the world. I can use this history to build context around the use of wood in contemporary architecture, and how it is born from the past.

Simpson, J.P., and Edmund L.C. Swan. “Improvements in the Lumber Industry.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 193, no. 1 (September 1937): 110–19. doi:10.1177/000271623719300112.

And the labor history of that industry?

This essay is a critical look at labor in the American logging industry. I want to involve the social history of the industry along with the environmental and economic, since that is also part of the historical context that I intend to build around Writers Theatre. After all, Studio Gang hired craftspeople and builders to construct the innovative timber trusses, and those workers make up a big part of the story of this theatre. I’ve had trouble accessing this journal article fully but can see the full first page. I’d like to use this source specifically to explore the labor history of the American Lumber industry, and I’m on the hunt for another similar one that could be just as helpful, since I likely cannot use this exact one.

Building Context:
Cedar in the Suburban Midwest

A Review Essay of Writers Theatre (2016) in
Glencoe, Illinois by Studio Gang Architects

Can a material be an expression of cultural values? Can the use of wood in architecture reveal more about the location of the project than simply the type of tree that grows nearby? After diving into the history of artisan woodwork in the Midwest, I am most convinced that it in fact can. Writers Theatre, a playhouse opened in 2016 by Studio Gang in a small, upper class Chicago suburb and the case study of this essay, reveals how architecture can re-inscribe long-established values and cultivate the identity of its location. I will explore the use of cedar in the construction of Writers Theatre in the hopes of coming to some understanding of how the building operates sociologically as a producer of the culture that commissioned it.

To narrow in on key aspects that I believe provide ample room to stretch this investigation, and to state it more specifically, in this essay, I will consider, and hope to convince you of, how the particular use of cedar as a building material in Writers Theatre aligns with the history of logging and handcraft in Midwestern architecture. By aligning with these two key historical threads, this theater thereby claims culturally desirable and long-established American social values like environmental sustainability, economic success, honesty, individuality, independence, and domesticity. These values mask the processes through which they are attained––the underlying methods playing out towards a particular version of success––like paternalism, ecological degradation, exceptionalism, expansionism, labor exploitation, isolationism, monopoly capitalism, and racism. If architecture is the possibility of shifting desire, and I mostly believe that it is, then Writers Theatre is a compelling case study for the entrenched desires of the American heartland.

Writers Theatre consists of various materially and spatially distinct structures––a lobby, concession stand, library, rehearsal space, and green room, among others––clustered around a central 250-seat theater, which is crowned by a 360-degree nest-like, cedar-enclosed walkway (figure 1 and figure 2). The complex is settled between two green plots in downtown Glencoe, one block north of the main commercial streets of this manicured, majority-white suburb. To the west of the theater is a children’s playground named Friends’ Park, to the east is a green field bifurcated by a pedestrian walkway, to the north is a one-way street along a low-profile shopping strip, and to the south is a private home blocked from view by a tall hedge (figure 3).

A series of one-story spaces, like the rehearsal room and box office, lie alongside two-story spaces, like the double-height lobby that also functions as a theatre with 360 degree windows and a set of glass door panels that slide open to nearly half the length of the lobby on one side (figure 4). Presumably, during the three months of the year that it’s pleasant enough outside to leave the doors open, receptions and perhaps performances would spread out to the lawn outside. The glass expanse on the first story of the lobby sits below and is held up by a series of Vierendeel trusses, which take up the entire perimeter of the second story of the lobby.[1]

Most critical to the thesis of this essay is the upper-level, semi-outdoor walkway known as ‘the canopy walk.’ It is the centerpiece of the design, and one that helped propel the theater to acclaim. According to the Washington Post, Writers Theatre, in the tiny town of Glencoe, Illinois, is “one of the six best regional theaters in the whole USA.”[2] The walkway is certainly a compelling visual moment, and the most dominating when viewing the theatre from the outside. It extends from the horizontal perimeter beams between the first and second stories and is held up by a network of crisscrossed Port Orford cedar tension battens. The network of battens forms a sort of giant bird’s nest that sits approximately at the level of the surrounding tree canopies (figure 5). Walking along this platform around the theatre, a visitor is meant to feel connected to the landscape immediately outside––on which old oak trees dot the manicured lawn––but not tall enough to see much of the landscape beyond the theater’s plot. This is a peculiar move. I don’t deny it would be an exciting experience, and might truly feel convincing, but I wonder how many people actually use the walkway on any given day, or if it’s not inaccessible due to weather for most of the year. If that is the case––if it’s more for show than for use––what does it mean?

In one promotional video, produced by Studio Gang and made mostly of interviews with founder and principal architect Jeanne Gang her collaborators, Gang says, “It made sense to make a building using wood. Wood is a renewable material, so it’s very low-impact on the environment”.[3] The interviews and production scenes center environmental sustainability and expert handicraft. As another example, the building is advertised as “bird friendly,”[4] which, according to the American Bird Conservatory, is largely about the use of glass and artificial lighting, which doesn’t trick birds from flying face first into buildings and dying. “Bird friendly” buildings are simply buildings that are less likely to kill birds. Further, and maybe most importantly, a building cannot be deemed bird-safe until it has been operable for years and undergoes testing along the way.[5] “Bird-friendly” is a predictive measure and also is relative to other buildings – it is not a label for buildings that never kill birds.

The overwhelming claim to environmental sustainability in this project is inflated. It’s true that wood is generally a low-impact building material as it’s less immediately or obviously impactful to the environment than, say, nonrenewable materials like metal. The Consortium for Research on Renewable Materials (CORRIM) found that when life cycle energy requirements are measured, wood outperforms steel by 17% and concrete by 16%.[6] But wood has its own major ecological drawbacks, and its ecological impact is dependent on how the wood is sourced and transported. For example, if lumber is sourced from an old growth forest, which took many thousands of years to grow, carbon is released from the older trees into the atmosphere, though it’s unclear just how much, and the giants that sustain the biodiversity and health of the area are threatened if not removed. If wood is sourced from new growth forests, more trees must be logged to get the same volume of lumber and the harvesting must be closely monitored. Also, the carbon sequestered by the new growths may not offset the carbon released.

Forests are not only important as a material resource for building homes and boats and providing fuel. Countless animals, insects, and microbes use trees for shelter and sustenance. 50% of the fruit humans eat comes from trees. Trees give us clean water, clean air, and the biodiversity that keeps the earth inhabitable and climate relatively mild. Nothing close to our way of life is possible without trees. The most stinging advice I’ve read about cutting trees comes from Richard Powers, author of The Overstory, a book that brought me so much astonishment, discomfort, and joy that I now tear up when I look at the cover. He writes, “when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous at what you cut down.”[7] Every year, one percent of the world’s forest is cleared by industry.[8] Climate change, too, is taking a major toll with longer and stronger wildfires, drought, and pollinator migration. If we stopped logging now, it would take one thousand years for the woodland systems to return.[9] Thankfully, there has been promising improvement in much of the world. Between 1990 and 2015, North America has seen improvements in all categories set by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that determine sustainable forest management, aside from the category of ‘Proportion of Forest Area Located in Legally Established Protected Areas,’ in which the continent has seen little to no change.[10] Is Writers Theatre doing the cedars justice? I don’t think that is an answerable question. We decided long ago that whatever we need for our own comfort and pleasure is worth any cost to the environment. I’m reaching out to determine whether eco-friendly design is truly a marker of a more reciprocal relationship between industry and environment, and it can feel like grasping at sand.

The pièce de résistance of Writers Theatre, the canopy walk, is made of Port Orford cedar. This wood was specifically selected for its strength and durability. It is uniquely weather-resistant, having been used historically to build boats. It’s sustainable in that, for wood, it will last longer in the extreme weather conditions of the Midwest. As mentioned, wood can certainly be a relatively low-impact material. What strikes me as incongruous is that Port Orford cedar comes from Oregon and Northwestern California. This material was trucked across the country from the Pacific Northwest. That’s an energy use that would be avoided by using more regional materials, but perhaps the energy cost of trucking is less than the cost of faster deterioration with a local, but less durable wood. Logging is a contentious and complex industry. There is little consensus on ethical logging practices and, historically, as I’ll explore further later on in this essay, American logging has been deeply destructive to the forests of this country. Port Orford cedar is required by law to be replanted after logging, but there is still so much ambiguity around what type of oversight or responsibility takes place for the successful regrowth of the new plantings and for the health of the ecosystem around that land.

Researchers out of the Department of Architecture and School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington recently published a report on the sustainability of cross laminated timber (CLT). The study found that the Catalyst building in Spokane, Washington, a five-story office building which uses CLT as its primary material, offset almost all of the project’s upfront embodied carbon. This is much higher than most other office buildings in America. This is promising for the future of environmentally sustainable building, but it is unclear whether Writers Theatre is participating in the strictly managed forest practices needed to make this material genuinely sustainable.[11]

For all the talk about the cedar battens and Vierendeel trusses, wood is only one of many types of materials used. Perhaps the most environmentally neutral material used are the recycled bricks on the facade, which were salvaged from the previous Writers Theatre building, demolished for this project. The bricks cover some interior walls of the main theatre and play a visual and acoustic function.[12] Steel, concrete, brick, stone and glass make up much of the building. I don’t think every architect using wood has a unique moral stake in using wood in particular, if only because that’s an unrealistic standard in a culture that values profit and consumption over all else, but maybe they have a responsibility to account accurately for the materials used, particularly in globally-recognized projects. This is the type of project that sets the tone for future projects out of other firms. The step towards presenting wood as a multifaceted, durable, and precious material is a good one, but I wonder what a transparent accounting of all of the materials would look like. The language of sustainability around this project is a big part of what makes it sustainable. And more broadly, talk of ecological consciousness makes way for excusable environmental apathy. The appearance of awareness draws less inspection. Writers Theatre is not responsible for deforestation or global carbon emissions, but their choices, more so than an average individual consumer, do have an impact on market demand, and they steer standards and styles.

The emphasis on wood as a material has precedent in American history, particularly in the Midwest, as the geographic cornerstone of the early logging industry. The American logging industry is still one of the largest in the world and it dominated the global export market for centuries. Before human industry deluged the wood supply, much of the American landscape was once forest. In the Northeast, Patuxet Indians had been clearing and harvesting wood for thousands of years. The land they had cultivated was selected specifically by European colonists for settlement, who founded Jamestown, Plymouth, Boston, Salem, Medford, and royal outposts.[13] The wooden cabins built up on this land became a symbol of colonial expansion. As early as the 17th century, Jamestown was heavily deforested by voracious overlogging. Wood decoration, like cedar furniture, became a marker of colonial industry and pride. Not long after the founding of the American republic, the heft of the lumber industry sat in the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, and particularly in Michigan. Over the years, as the Midwest’s forests also fell to over-logging, the lumber industry continued to spread west. The Great Depression hit the industry hard, with gross income plummeting from $3.3 trillion in 1920 to $800 million in 1934.[14] Reforestation efforts began in the middle of the 1900s, but the forests of North America have been predominantly razed.[15]

The history of the lumber industry––the use of wood in construction from the early colonies like Jamestown and Plymouth, to mass deforestation, to economic turmoil, to the current enormous lumber market––is a plot on the American industrial landscape as a whole. This is to say, wood has implications. Wood can hold within it the history of its use, and how we use it now builds upon that history. The American lumber industry still boasts the second largest wood product export load in the world, behind Canada.[16] It houses people, employs people, and creates fuel and transportation. The US forest products industry employs nearly a million people nationally.[17] The lumber industry is in part a great tool for human material prospering. But with its productivity comes a cost – and not just environmental: the logging business is one of the most dangerous for workers, with a 2012 industry death rate 21 times higher than average.[18]

Writers Theatre also specifically leverages the skilled labor of expert craftspeople––who specially constructed each and every beam to unique specifications, mostly on-site––for its own value and appeal. Here, I think it’s helpful to bring in the unique labor history of Chicago to establish the implications of citing handcraft as an asset. If architects position themselves as social engineers, what, then, are the laborers – the loggers, concreters, masons, welders, and glass cutters? In the wake of the Chicago fire of 1871, Chicago was building itself anew – a significant opportunity to brand Chicago as a city of American ideals and cultural clout. This required massive amounts of resource investment and, most significantly to this essay, human labor. Buttressed by increased need for a productive labor force and labor unions, begun in 1866 with the National Labor Union, laborers made great strides in the following decades in attaining more standardized work conditions, like the legendary eight-hour workday. The path to these accomplishments, outlining standards that still regiment much of the workforce today, for better or worse, was paved with great unrest and struggle. Fundamental democratic values were on trial, like freedom of speech, assembly, press, and fair trial. Quelling the labor force was crucial to successfully rebuilding. This meant acquiescing slightly – giving people an important and newly reconditioned role in the restructuring of the cultural identity of the city through physical infrastructure. It isn’t hard to understand how the laborers themselves, not just the infrastructure they built, could come to represent democratic values as well. It isn’t a stretch to understand the sovereign handworker to be a symbol of independence, determination, and freedom.[19]

Louis Sullivan, a late 19th - early 20th century architect and inspiration for the Prairie School,[20] is credited with the sleek skyscraper as a model of not only modern architecture. His ideal was also to position architecture as the embodiment of democracy. Sullivan writes, “[T]he spirit of democracy is a function seeking expression in organized social form...Therefore, arrange your architecture for democracy, not for feudalism. Gird up your heart!”[21] His commitment to and passion for the new style of skyscraper, with “steel frame, the floating foundation, improved fire-proofing methods and communications technology, and, not least, the elevator,” was more about materializing a culture than it was about technological advancements.[22] He was intent on creating architecture that, in itself, was capable of freeing citizens from feudal, old-world control, and taking charge of their own circumstances. Sullivan’s ambitions, regardless of whether or not contemporary evaluations look at skyscrapers as favorable additions to the architectural landscape, presuppose that architecture can in fact be a proxy for, or embody, an ideological concept like democracy.

This is exactly the history that is critical to building context for Writers Studio, which spotlights the handwrought canopy walk’s cedar battens as the pride and motif of the theater. The laborers themselves, video-taped hammering away at the sturdy wooden matrix and posted to Studio Gang’s website, are being integrated into the narrative of the theatre. The message is: this isn’t just a theater for the elite or the wealthy – it’s also for the average person, the laborer. The person who builds the theatre is also a patron. That Glencoe is far from a working-class suburb (it’s median income in 2017 was over $200,000 per household[23]) is not important. The discourse of democratization of theater is enough to formulate Glencoe as a veritable all-American soup.

The Port Orford cedar itself is also a crucial aspect to the narrative of hand-crafted excellence. Its grain is particularly straight, allowing for easily cut, perfectly straight posts. In an interview, Peter Heppel, the engineer behind the state-of-the-art wood trusses supporting the wood-lattice walkway, says, “the search is for a solution, which is complete and elegant, and self-consistent. And something which is honest to the materials, to the way of building, and to the use.” The way that wood is used in Writers Theatre is genuinely interesting. The wood-lattice railing around the walkway is set in tension, taking advantage of the “tensile strength,” as Heppel explains. It’s done in a way that allows the edge of the walkway to interlock with the railing without nuts or bolts–it’s all just wood and glue. Gang refers to this interlocking method as a “cat’s paw” and it’s one that Trillium Dell, a local wood construction business that Studio Gang commissioned, developed specifically for this project. That is to say, the visible wood walkway and the trestles surrounding the lobby clearstory are handmade, locally manufactured, and customized; they’re one-of-a-kind (figure 6).[24]

Why go for a specially developed, complex and time-intensive framework, and also hire a local business to put it all together? In America, and perhaps around much of the world, the handmade is valued well over the machine made. This valuation is bound with moral assessment – there is something superior, not just aesthetically or functionally, about a handwrought object. Gang says in an interview with Blueprint, “I like working with wood. It embodies carbon, it looks rustic.”[25] Rustic, then, a word that surely does not define the material reality of Glencoe, Illinois, is imposed as a legitimate descriptor of this project, and a great example of the fetishization of the rough, crude, uncultured character assigned to the working class American, meant to be conjured in this project. This project is described as authentic, and so it is. The value placed on handcraft is reflected in discourse, and leveraged in advertising, valuation, and demand. In our constant search for intimate connection, we are led to believe that love can be found in our clay pots and tapestry rugs.[26] Just look at the fashion industry – the fast-fashion brand Zara, notoriously abusive to laborers,[27] now has a “handmade” line[28]. Handmade goods refer to ritual, pride, economic autonomy, small business, and poetry – it positions objects as honest artworks rather than soulless things, and it’s very persuasive.[29]

Where did this veneration for handiwork come from? We owe this reasoning to John Ruskin, a British cultural theorist writing at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Ruskin witnessed the rise of industrialism, which, according to its proponents, held the key to widespread improvements to quality of life. He simultaneously observed the increasingly poor conditions of the lower class and developed a philosophy of protest to mass industrialization. He became an influential opponent to mechanization, asserting that a good life was achieved by hard work, simple subsistence, and physical connection between a person and their livelihood. In The Stones of Venice, Volume II Chapter 6, Ruskin writes:

It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves… It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.”[30]

Men, he argued, find meaning in a constant material connection to their own subsistence, not in mimicry of hardware or of increased leisure time. Machines produced immoral products separated from the hand of their users. We see here a crucial point in Ruskin’s philosophy: aesthetic truth can only come from moral truth. More simply, aesthetics reflects values. Ruskin explored social conditions as a reflection of cultural production. And to him, only an upstanding society can produce worthy aesthetics. Therefore, worthy aesthetics can only reveal an upstanding society. As well, by conflating local goods and production with moral urgency, handwrought things show us the way towards good production.

Ruskin’s ideas emerged in the United States, at the turn of the 20th century, in a slightly different form than they did in England. The American Arts & Crafts movement, first taking root in Chicago and belonging to the Chicago Architecture Club, whose members famously included Robert Spencer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Dwight Perkins, came some decades after Ruskin’s writing and the peak of the British wave, and it changed course in some significant ways. Whereas the English movement emphasized socio-economic concerns, America’s was led by white-collar workers disconnected from the blue-collar-led labor movements rallying for improved working conditions simultaneously. Whereas the English movement decried the immoral rise of the machine over the morals of man during the industrial revolution, American proponents encouraged the use of machinery to produce more and faster products and asserted that through specific and local materials, material honesty, and simple design, the morality of the people could only be rightly communicated. Whereas the British were competing for cultural relevance among the various powers of late 19th century Europe, its counterpart across the pond focused on generating a uniquely American style and promoting American ideological goals, not wanting to simply pick up the original sentiment as if America were still a British colonial outpost. Finally, whereas the British movement was a popular style, academic pedagogy, and nationally embraced, the American branch was embraced only by a minority of scholars, and only after decades of promotion. Through this line of events, we can see that the rejection of the globalized product in favor of the local, independent product connects in part to the American desire for independence from mother England.[31]

This history––historical advocacy for the handmade, distaste for mechanization, championing of laborers, and the specifically Midwestern take on Arts & Crafts––is reflected today in our desire and preference for handcraft. By using wood that is hand selected, refined, and assembled by skilled craftspeople, Writers Theatre echoes the appeal to the handmade and its sovereign proprietors, and uses this legacy to frame its own identity. That Writers Theatre utilizes the same material tactics as the Chicago Architecture Club did in the early 1900s suggests the desires of the American public back then still echo into the 21st century. If we are still using the vocabulary and approach of a movement of the past, we are still implicated in its legacy.[32] While design can reveal the desires of its contemporaries, it works the other way, too: aesthetics can produce and define the society from which it emerges. Buildings that use handwrought materials, reveal the maker in the details, and use local materials in turn generate certain conditions. A building that uses local, handmade materials must be built by a culture that values local production. The culture of the town that commissioned this project can only be one which values the local. In this way, Writer’s Theatre doesn’t just reveal the desires of the town from which it springs but produces the desires of that town as well. Writers Theatre embodies regionalism, anti-internationalism, and American exceptionalism in its design. Recalling a distinctly American design, the Chicago Arts & Crafts style, Writers Theatre reinscribes the value of insularity that accompanies the desire for national independence and regional significance.

There is also the issue of Glencoe distinguishing itself materially from the metropolis (Chicago) nearby. Timber is not new to residential Midwestern architecture––not in the slightest––but it is uncommon for contemporary, commercial Midwestern architecture. Compared to the other famous Chicago theaters, Writers Theatre does indeed stand out materially. Take, as a set of examples from the last 30 years, Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park made most notably of a steel trellis and stainless steel bandshell, and Morris Architects Planners’ Steppenwolf Theatre Company made of concrete and dark brick. These theaters responded to the industrial identity of the city and used materials that have dominated the modern commercial market for a long time.

Why would Glencoe want to distinguish itself from Chicago? What values would a manicured suburb hold that would be divergent or perhaps more intensified than those of the heterogenous and impious city nearby? I’m inclined to refer to the history of suburbanization to analyze this relationship. In the early 1900s, the desire to re-center an expansionist emphasis on landscape and nature, and to stress domesticity as a democratic ideal, actualized. Post-World War II “white flight”[33] (from about 1950 to 1970) and suburbanization snowballed, generating a narrative of the “new suburban domestic ideal,”[34]. This residential spread emphasized the family unit and its conservative social values. It diverted urban individualism in favor of insular solidarity and shored up nativism. It also shored up socio-economic disparities among races, safeguarding the prosperity of newly isolated communities of wealthy white nuclear (heterosexual) families.

            On the one hand, regional modernism and the isolationist ideology that comes along with it is present in the project. Inventing new use for an old material and emphasizing local handiwork are strategies to this effect. But international influence is also present. Timber is not an ordinary material for contemporary architecture in Chicago (wood has generally been avoided since the fire of 1871 ripped through the wood-frame dominated working-class and low-income neighborhoods of the city), and not in the United States generally, but it is part of contemporary material trends in other countries, particularly in Europe and Asia[35]. Tokyo-based architect Shiguru Ban has made timber an emblem of his prodigious practice.[36] Other significant timber-based projects include Metropol Parasol by J. Mayer Architects in Seville, Spain, Kajstaden Tall Timber Building in Sweden by Møller Architects, and The Philippines’ Mactan Cebu International Airport (MCIA) Terminal 2 by Integrated Design Associates (IDA). CLT production and use is steadily increasing in the United States, but Writers Theatre came at a time when the trend had not yet found a solid hold. Herbert Wright at Blueprint writes of Writers Theatre, “it tells the whole of the USA that timber is back.”[37]

The use of cedar in Studio Gang’s Writers Theatre represents far more than an interesting stop on the way from Milwaukee to Chicago. The environmental impact of timber as building material, the American logging industry, commercial obsession with handcrafted goods, the history of Chicago-area architectural styles, and global trends in building materials all form a world of context that helps us understand how this theater operates anthropologically and sociologically. These subjects represent and carry within them long-established yet generalized American values, like prosperity, authenticity, originality, sovereignty, and economic success, honesty, individuality, independence, worldliness, and “Christian” values. As history has shown, these values are leveraged to justify darker aspects of national enterprise. By revealing the relationships between Writers Theatre and these issues, we uncover how the theater itself comes to represent these values, thereby acting as a keen architect of the town that commissioned it. I, too, like handcrafted goods, individual artistry, environmentally conscious design, and wide streets with detached homes. These descriptors are not in and of themselves detrimental, but they do come with history. As Studio Gang continues to operate, they’ll continue to redefine how these histories are accessed. As long as we believe architecture can change our circumstances, architects will define good design for us all.

[1] Thomas De Monchaux, “Writers Theatre, Glencoe, Ill.: Studio Gang Architect,” Architect (Washington DC) 105, no. 4 (2016): 76.

[2] Herbert Wright, “All the wood’s a stage,” Blueprint (London) 345 (2016): 146-150. https://doi.org/10.2307/988704.

[3] “Writers Theatre,” Studio Gang, published 2016, Vimeo, 5:29, https://vimeo.com/166414624.

[4] “Writers Theatre,” Studio Gang, accessed March 1, 2020, https://studiogang.com/project/writers-theatre.

[5] The American Bird Conservatory states, “Ultimately, defining “bird-friendly” is a subjective task. Is bird- friendliness a continuum, and if so, where does friendly become unfriendly?...It is impossible to know exactly how many birds a particular building will kill before it is built, and so, realistically, we cannot declare a building to be bird-friendly before it has been carefully monitored for several years.

[6] Bruce Lippke and Jim Wilson, CORRIM Fact Sheet (USA: CORRIM, 2004), https://corrim.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/CORRIM_Factsheet_August_2004.pdf, CORRIM.

[7] Richard Powers, Overstory: A Novel (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 453.

[8] Richard Powers, 305

[9] Richard Powers, 288.

[10] The State of the World’s Forests 2018 (Rome: FAO, 2018), http://www.fao.org/state-of-forests/en/, FAO.

[11] Kate Simonen et. al, Life Cycle Assessment of Katerra’s Cross-Laminated Timber (Washington: University of Washington, 2019), https://assets2.katerra.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/25111837/Katerra-LCA-Final-Report-2020-update.pdf, Katerra.

[12] Katherine Logan, “Hear! Hear!” Architectural Record 205, no. 12 (2017): 100.

[13] Timothy Silver, “Learning to Live with Nature,” The Journal of Southern History 73 (2007): 539-552.

[14] J.P. Simpson, “Improvements in the Lumber Industry,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 193, no. 1 (1937): 110–19. doi.org:10.1177/000271623719300112.

[15] James Little, The Timber Supply Question (Montreal: Lovell, 1876), 14.

[16] Oishimaya Sen Nag, “World Leaders in Wood Products exports,” World Atlas, last modified April 25, 2017. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/world-leaders-in-wood-product-exports.html.

[17] “Employment in the United States forest products industry as of 2018,” Statista, published August, 2018, https://www.statista.com/statistics/252838/employment-of-the-us-forest-products-industry-2012/.

[18] “NIOSH: Logging Safety.” Center for Disease Control, last updated July 13, 2012, https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/logging/default.html.

[19] Perry R Duis, "THE SHAPING OF CHICAGO," In AIA Guide to Chicago, ed. Sinkevitch Alice and Petersen Laurie McGovern (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 4-9. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt7zw5rk.7.

[20] Mary Woolever, “Prairie School Works in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 135. www.jstor.org/stable/4102821.

[21] James R Abbott, “Louis Sullivan, Architectural Modernism, and the Creation of Democratic Space,” The American Sociologist 3, no. 1 (2000): 62. www.jstor.org/stable/27698942.

[22] James R Abbott, 69.

[23] “Glencoe, IL,” Data USA, accessed May 10, 2020, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/glencoe-il/.

[24] “Writers Theatre.” Studio Gang.

[25] Herbert Wright, 148.

[26] Christoph Fuchs, Martin Schreier, and Stijn M.J. Van Osselaer, "The Handmade Effect: What's Love Got to Do with It?" Journal of Marketing 79, no. 2 (2015): 98-110. www.jstor.org/stable/43784400.

[27] Elena Shih, “Worker organising can counter abuse in the Global South,” Al Jazeera, published January 8, 2020.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/worker-organising-counter-labour-abuse-global-south-191226120529286.html.

[28] Olivia Fleming, “Are Handmade Clothes Really Better Than Machine Made Clothes?” Harpers

Bazaar,  published May 6, 2016. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a15510/are-handmade-clothes-really-better-than-machine-made-clothes/.

[29] Justin McGuirk, “Craft Fetishism: From objects to things,” Disegno (2012). http://justinmcguirk.com/craft-fetishism-objects-things.

[30] Ruskin, John, “SECOND, OR GOTHIC, PERIOD,” In The Stones of Venice, Volume II (New York: National Library Association, 1851): 151-164.

[31] Justin McGuirk, “Craft Fetishism: From objects to things.”

[32] H. Allen Brooks, “Chicago Architecture: Its Debt to the Arts and Crafts,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 312–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/988704. 

[33] Boustan, Leah Platt. “Was Postwar Suburbanization ‘White Flight’? Evidence from the Black Migration.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, 2010, pp. 417–443. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40506285. Accessed 18 May 2020.

[34] Marsh, Margaret S, “Homemakers: Male and Female,” In Suburban Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 83.

[35] Scott Herring, "REGIONAL MODERNISM: A REINTRODUCTION," Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 1 (2009): 1-10. www.jstor.org/stable/26286964.

[36] Connor Walker, “Material Masters: Shiguru Ban’s Work with Wood,” ArchDaily, published December 2, 2014.

https://www.archdaily.com/573818/material-masters-shigeru-ban-s-work-with-wood/.

[37] Herbert Wright, “All the wood’s a stage.”

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