“You see the eastern critics and historians that assigned Chicago the place of the skeleton frame, thereby, you know, together with Gideon, putting it into a neat little box, and it’s tidy, and that’s what Chicago is and everybody goes to sleep, right? And it gets repackaged and repackaged, and all of the rest of idea content and symbolic content gets left to guess who?”
— Stanley Tigerman, Lecture at Sci-Arc, Los Angeles, 1977
I was three months into a six-month stint in Mexico City when I was asked to reflect upon Chicago architecture, past and present. The prospect gave me butterflies in my stomach –– or was that just Montezuma back to get me? No, indeed it was nerves. I am not a historian nor a critic but a native Chicagoan practicing somewhere between architecture and art. I hadn’t written since graduate school and feared tackling the topic of Chicago architecture altogether, let alone at such a literal distance from it. Chicago was and is a hotbed of architectural innovation, a patchwork of styles and typologies, shaped as much by its built structures as by its cultural institutions. How was I to capture its essence?
To loosen the nerves, I headed to my happy place in Mexico City: Bernie’s Beef Bike — a Chicago-inspired fast-food joint in Juarez. Sitting across from a signed Walter Payton jersey, enjoying an Italian Beef sandwich, I was transported back to my childhood hot dog stand, East of Edens — its name is a pun on the film and its direct eastern adjacency to the Edens expressway which connects Downtown Chicago to the northern suburbs. Similarly, East of Edens had a maximalist approach to interior decoration, with posters and memorabilia covering every surface, part dive, part museum. My favorite was a classic advertisement for Vienna Beef that depicts a colossal hot dog atop Navy Pier, jutting out into Lake Michigan. The hotdog is under construction, so to speak, with steel truss cranes hoisting a skyscraper-sized pickle spear into place, a sports pepper being airlifted in by helicopter, giant barges carrying a second tomato wedge and the remaining neon green relish, and a fire tugboat spraying a stream of yellow mustard into a perfect squiggle across the top. No ketchup (a Chicago value I, for one, never stood for). To its left is Grant Park, before there was Millennium Park, before “the bean” (Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, 2006) and the Pritzker Pavilion (Frank Gehry’s deconstructivist amphitheater). To the bottom left is the Adler Planetarium at the far northeast corner of Northerly Island. (It’s here where you get the first best view of the Chicago skyline, depicted in the poster as well.) The Chicago-style hot dog is just another piece of architecture.
It was the first architectural illustration I fell in love with, a playful vision of the Chicago skyline in miniature, blending scale and humor in a way that paralleled postmodern architecture of the time. It was there at Bernie’s Beef, reflecting upon the city, that I came to the now obvious realization that postmodernism — at least in its kitschy, pop, high-irony form — never truly took off in Chicago. Strange, considering one of the movement’s foremost figures and thought leaders of Chicago, Stanley Tigerman, was deeply entrenched in it. Or so I thought.
I had the privilege of meeting Tigerman in the winter of 2016, just three years before his passing. I was studying architecture at Princeton University in Sylvia Lavin’s class, ARC 577: Building Postmodernism. When I expressed interest in Tigerman’s contribution to the 1976 exhibition “Idea as Model” at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Sylvia suggested I meet with him and arranged an interview for me when I was home in Chicago over winter break. Tigerman’s contribution to the show was a model miniature of his 1978 Animal Crackers House. The house itself, located in a northern suburb of Chicago called Highland Park, was also up for sale, so I scheduled a viewing before my interview with Tigerman.
Animal Crackers House embodies a playful yet profound commentary on the nature of architectural representation, blurring the line between model and full-scale construction. At its core, the house is minimalist: a stepped two-story white box with a deliberately abstract quality, sandwiched between two oversized, cartoonish facades that mimic the iconic Barnum’s Animal Crackers box. The house’s piano-shaped windows echo the model’s exaggerated proportions, lending the real structure a sense of unreality, as though its facade could peel away at any moment. Walking through Animal Crackers House, I was struck by its “paper model” aesthetic. Fundamentally postmodern, its non-expressed structure and cheap building materials heighten this paper-like quality, casting each wall, door, and aperture in an intentionally flat, nearly two-dimensional manner. Where traditionally the building would offer greater visual detail to the model, instead, Tigerman’s choice to strip away conventional architectural details such as windowsills and trim further dissolves distinctions between the model and the house itself. The resulting abstraction, with cutout windows and featureless surfaces, amplifies the uncanniness of the space, immersing the inhabitant in a surreal experience that redefines what it means to occupy architecture.
As a longtime modelmaker, I was amazed to discover that something I aspired to in my own work — this uncanny blurring between buildings and representation — existed as a tangible reality, and for forty-plus years, nonetheless. However, Tigerman had a more practical explanation of the Animal Crackers models:
“Those models of Animal Crackers, I can see why you wonder about them. Where did they come from? The guy was an accountant. I wanted to have fun with him, so he liked animal crackers — the cookies. He liked them, like people like M&M’s, so I looked at the box and said, that’s his house. So there’s the fucking house, with animals crackers in a box, with things that overlap it; the shape was in the animal crackers box. So the house would be animal crackers colors.”
Within this crass utilitarian explanation of his models, you can understand the model as an instrument for bridging the gap between representation and building. When a client might not understand a two-dimensional drawing, the three-dimensional model stepped in. I further asked about the changing role of the model, not simply as a design tool but a tool for dissemination of thoughts and ideas, as the IAUS show implied. Tigerman gave further context to the period:
“In the ’70s there was for a time a recession and architects didn’t have a lot to do. So they used their spheres of influence to talk to gallery dealers and museums to have exhibitions of their work so that their work could evolve and be seen…”
By presenting their work in gallery and museum settings, architects reached new audiences, allowing their ideas to be appreciated as cultural artifacts, bridging architecture with the art world and influencing the public’s perception of architecture as not only practical but also as a significant, idea-driven discipline. This period marked a transformative moment in which architecture became increasingly interdisciplinary, and the gallery became a fertile ground for expanding architectural discourse beyond the limits of construction sites.
I proposed to Tigerman that perhaps this postmodern period marked a shift in the architect-client relationship: architects could operate less as a service provider and more as an “artist” as drawings and models preceded the client. He was outraged, insisting, “There was always a client… it’s just part of the process,” and when pushed for more explanation, “It’s a way of understanding the building, for me and the client. Now, you build computer models, and they are the same, whatever. Whatever era you work in, you either build models, build a full-size mockup, build a computer model, so you can see something in three dimensions… Does that sound like it’s postmodern? No, it’s the site. The site is the site is the site; and the program is the program… At some level postmodernism is a fictive conceit, it begins with historians. People want to place artists and architects that they otherwise don’t comprehend… into some sort of box or niche so they can understand it, so they come up with terms like postmodernism.”
Shortly after, he declared, “I think we are done here,” and I was escorted out of his office. I have long since laughed about getting kicked out of Tigerman’s office. In returning to this story some eight years later, I pondered what it says about Chicago’s cultural attitude toward architecture that the foremost postmodernist from the city, whose work brims with irony, wit, and symbolic references, denied the label.
Perhaps it is because Chicago is a city where architecture has always been intertwined with industrial pragmatism and civic responsibility. Chicago can be understood as a “model city” in multiple definitions of the term. Chicago has been a testing ground for architecture since the Great Fire of 1871, in which something like a third of the city center was razed to the ground. Chicago had a rare opportunity to completely rebuild itself, and, rather than opting for hasty replacements of the same wooden typology, instead innovated with different building materials and modeled new building methods that ultimately led to the birth of the skyscraper.
The Columbian Exposition of 1893 presented an organized Beaux-Arts “White City” designed by Daniel Burnham, which emphasized order, classical beauty, and civic pride. The Exposition’s grand neoclassical structures and programmed public spaces marked Chicago as a city of monumental urban vision, setting standards for urban planning across America. The Century of Progress Exposition of 1933, hosted during the Great Depression, pivoted from classicism to a future-focused modernism. With streamlined Art Deco and modernist buildings, the exposition showcased new materials and innovative building techniques that reflected Chicago’s industrial roots and resilience. More recently, since 2015, the city has hosted the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which builds on this legacy of expositions by positioning Chicago as a global laboratory for contemporary architectural thought and experimentation.
Unlike its predecessors, the Biennial isn’t confined to a single style or narrative but instead fosters a global dialogue about architecture’s potential to address complex social, economic, and environmental issues. Hosted across various Chicago venues, the Biennial has included projects addressing affordable housing, adaptive reuse, environmental resilience, and community-driven design. Through installations, public programs, and interactive exhibits, it demonstrates how architecture in Chicago continues to evolve in response to today’s pressing challenges, while staying rooted in the city’s tradition of visionary urbanism.
Historically and in recent years, young architects in Chicago have found a unique platform in the city’s galleries and independent art spaces, where they can push boundaries, showcase experimental work, and engage directly with public discourse on architecture. Spaces like the Art Institute of Chicago, Graham Foundation, MCA Chicago, and smaller galleries like Wrightwood 659, Volume Gallery, and KIOSK Gallery have embraced architecture not merely as a professional practice but as an art form, inviting a broader audience to explore and critique emerging ideas. These venues offer a supportive yet critical environment for architects who, like Stanley Tigerman before them, are drawn to architecture as a means of questioning norms, exploring identity, and addressing pressing social issues. By exhibiting speculative designs, models, and multimedia installations, these young practitioners — including Kong Von Glinow, Germane Barnes, Norman Kelley, Bair Balliet, Ryan Roark, Studio Becker Xu, Design Office Truit Schwartzman (DOTS), Feature Projects, and New Office Chicago — are able to blur the lines between architecture, art, and activism, reimagining Chicago as a city where architecture once again engages deeply with its community, modeling new ideas that may eventually shape the urban landscape itself.
So, perhaps Tigerman’s resistance to the term postmodern was a product of the idiosyncratic landscape of Chicago architecture, where Architecture has always found relevance navigating between tradition and invention, ethics and aesthetics. He saw Architecture’s role as broader than the surface play of forms — it was a mode of social and ethical engagement. Postmodernism’s eclecticism, while playful and inventive, was often disconnected from the grounded, socially engaged culture of Chicago. And yet, perhaps it was Tigerman’s very resistance that has embedded his influence in the fabric of Chicago’s cultural institutions. He was challenging us to reconsider architecture as an open field — a practice that resists categorization precisely because it refuses to separate form from function, or design from the client. In Chicago, Tigerman’s legacy endures, reminding us that a city’s architecture is never just a style but an evolving model for the future.
