"It Seemed Like a Good Idea": Progressive Ideals, Civic Values, and the Architecture of Chicago's High-Rise Public Housing, 1950-1962

For half a century, the State Street Corridor high-rises were the face of Chicago's public housing; deteriorating towers that represented the city's failure to humanely house its lower-income residents and modern architects' hubris in applying abstract ideals to complex urban and social needs. As D. Bradford Hunt has shown, these failings could not be ascribed to any one cause; racial politics, economics, and geography all forced solutions that were problematic. After successful low- and mid-rise projects throughout the 1940s, the Chicago Housing Authority was forced into larger, taller buildings and they turned to the city's architects for solutions. There was modest success in experimental high-rise solutions: Loebl, Schlossman, & Bennett's Dearborn Homes (1950) provided on-floor play spaces, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Ogden Courts (1953) offered outdoor gallery corridors, and Keck and Keck's Prairie Avenue Courts (1952) used solar geometry to link daylit living rooms to exterior spaces. Yet even these projects suffered from onerous budgets and crowded sites. Progressive design ideas were soon pressed out of high-rise projects, resulting in the warehouse-like slabs of the Cabrini Extension (A. Epstein and Sons, 1958) and Robert Taylor Homes (Shaw, Metz, and Dolio, 1962). This paper looks at political, fiscal, and racial pressures on these designs, showing how the aspirations of the city's planners, politicians, and architects addressed these tightening influences, and how the doomed slab and tower types of the late 1950s and 1960s resulted.