"If that plane would have hit the Sears Tower, the plane would have fallen, not the tower," he said. Mr. Graham speaking on the 9/11 plane attack on the WTC in New York.
Apostle of Architecture's Power Left Mark on Chicago Skyline
By STEPHEN MILLER
Bruce Graham was the architect behind Chicago's Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world when it was opened in 1974 and still the tallest building in the U.S. Mr. Graham, who died Saturday at age 84, was senior design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was involved with projects including Canary Wharf in London and King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill - Bruce Graham with a model of the John Hancock Center in the 1960s.
But Chicago was where Mr. Graham left his greatest mark, not only in the Sears Tower, but in the city's second-tallest building, the John Hancock Center, two buildings that together bracket the city's skyline—much of which he also helped design. He also played an important role in developing a downtown master plan for Chicago.
Following in the footsteps of such giants of Chicago architecture as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Mr. Graham was an outspoken advocate of the power of architecture to communicate messages of optimism and power.
Born in Colombia of Scottish and Peruvian descent, Mr. Graham grew up in Puerto Rico and served in the Navy during World War II. After graduating with a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948, he moved to Chicago and sought out Mies, a pioneering modernist architect.
Mies advised him to take an internship with Holabird & Root, an old-line firm that had erected a number of the city's most impressive structures, including Soldier Field and the Chicago Board of Trade Building. In 1951, Mr. Graham was hired by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).
Mr. Graham and Mies struck up a friendship. In a 2002 interview for the SOM Journal, Mr. Graham said that he once asked Mies why he didn't move into 860 Lake Shore Drive, a landmark glass-and-steel apartment complex Mies had designed. "[Mies] said, 'There's no place to put the furniture. I was born in a little village in Germany. I can dream and imagine this new world, but I can't live in it,' " Mr. Graham said in the interview.
In his biggest projects, Mr. Graham took Mies's plain glass and steel and added to them elements that revealed their underlying structure. The Hancock Plaza building, which opened in 1970, was among his first to utilize so-called "tube" construction, an external steel frame instead of an internal cage of steel. Prominent X-shaped braces made the building instantly recognizable. The Hancock Center, which rose to 100 stories, was to be among Mr. Graham's proudest creations. "Ask any Americans in Chicago what building they like most in the city," he told Progressive Architecture in 1991. "The Hancock Building."
Mr. Graham was sometimes described as arrogant—architect Frank Gehry, a sometime collaborator, recently told the Associated Press he was "gruff and cantankerous." Said architect Stanley Tigerman, a friend, collaborator and occasional sparring partner of Mr. Graham's, "He was a wonderfully good architect. He was the only one in Chicago of his generation that supported successive generations of architects."
But, added Mr. Tigerman, "He was a very tough guy."
Mr. Graham's use of tube construction reached its apotheosis in the Sears Tower (recently renamed the Willis tower), which consisted of conjoined tubes of varying heights.
Mr. Graham, a smoker, first demonstrated the concept to his engineering partner at SOM, Fazlur Khan, by gripping a bundle of cigarettes, with the ones at the center sticking up higher.
Of the nine tubes at the base of the building, only two ascended to the 1,451-foot high top of the structure, which opened in 1974.
Mr. Graham insisted that not only did the unusual bundled tube structure make for a lighter building that used less steel, but that it was also stronger.
In a 2004 interview with the Port St. Lucie News, near where he had retired in Hobe Sound, Fla., Mr. Graham said that the 9/11 bombers would have been less successful hitting the tallest building in Chicago.
"If that plane would have hit the Sears Tower, the plane would have fallen, not the tower," he said.
REMEMBRANCES - WSJ - MARCH 10, 2010
Bruce Graham dies; architect of most famous Chicago buildings
By Blair Kamin
Wednesday, March 10, 2010; B07
Bruce Graham, 84, the hard-driving architect of the Willis Tower, once the world's tallest building, and the John Hancock Center, the X-braced giant that became a symbol of Chicago's industrial might, died March 6 at his home in Hobe Sound, Fla. He had Alzheimer's disease.
At the peak of his influence, from the 1960s through the 1980s, Mr. Graham was the top man at Chicago's biggest architectural firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), and had the ear of business leaders and politicians.
From that power base, he shaped a legacy that suggests the epitaph on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, who is buried in his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral in London: "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."
Besides the Willis (originally Sears) Tower and the Hancock Center, which bracket Chicago's skyline like enormous black parentheses, Mr. Graham played a major role in designing such landmark structures as the Inland Steel Building and the 1986 expansion of McCormick Place.
Mr. Graham's best designs added a Chicago-style muscularity to the lean, crisp modernist look brought to perfection by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Reviewing Sears Tower in 1974, the late Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp called the skyscraper "a building whose exterior profiles are a bold, vital and exciting departure from orthodox mediocrity."
Mr. Graham's detractors termed him a businessman rather than an artist. Yet few disputed that Mr. Graham was the most powerful Chicago architect of his generation or that he was a leader, along with SOM structural engineer Fazlur Khan, in shaping once-unthinkable super-tall structures.
The 1,451-foot, 110-story Sears Tower reigned as the world's tallest building from 1973, when construction workers raised a beam autographed by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, to 1996, when it lost its title to the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Chicago tower, renamed last year for a British insurance brokerage, remains the nation's tallest building.
Born on Dec. 1, 1925, in Colombia, Mr. Graham was the son of a Canadian-born international banker and Peruvian mother. He grew up in Puerto Rico. Spanish was his first language.
Mr. Graham came to the United States in the 1940s as a student, served in the U.S. Navy and got his bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. He then journeyed to Chicago, the hometown of his first wife, and sought out Mies, who advised him to work for Chicago architects Holabird, Root and Burgee.
Mr. Graham did his apprenticeship at Holabird, then left for the up-and-coming firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he conducted a long-running feud with architect Walter Netsch.
"Bruce Graham is very tough," Netsch told the Tribune in 1981. "Seldom do you find a good guy who is a great architect." The rivals both had a hand in one of SOM's finest projects, the Inland Steel Building, built in 1957.
The building's open expanses of office space were made possible by the placement of structural columns on its perimeter and the consolidation of elevators and other services in an adjoining service tower. A leader in using silvery stainless steel as a cladding material, Inland Steel was an aesthetic triumph.
Mr. Graham's greatest achievement came in the 1970 with the completion of the mixed-use Hancock Center. The high-rise housed stores, parking, offices, apartments (now condominiums), an observatory, and a bar and restaurant under its 1,127-foot-tall roof.
Unlike earlier skyscrapers, in which an internal cage of steel carried most of the load, the Hancock's exterior columns, beams and X-shaped braces formed a rigid tube that did most of the heavy lifting. The arrangement was economical, and the X-braces offered an instantly recognizable skyline image, silencing detractors who had likened the Hancock to an oil derrick.
Sears Tower offered an even taller variation on the tube theme, consisting of nine interlocked tubes. The tower was built for Chicago-based retailer Sears, Roebuck and Co., which originally had wanted a building of just 60 stories.
Once as Mr. Graham, a smoker, related the story of the Sears Tower's origins, while lunching with Khan, he grabbed a handful of cigarettes, cupped some in his hands and placed a smaller group on top, demonstrating what came to be called the "bundled tube" concept.
The 75-foot square tubes rose together until two dropped off at the 50th floor, two more stopped at the 66th, and three more at the 90th, leaving only two to rise to the summit.
As time passed, Sears' luster dimmed. Its ground-level plaza was rarely used. Many Sears employees found their new home antiseptic. The Sears Merchandise Group left the tower in 1992.
Nearly three years after hijacked jets toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, Mr. Graham demonstrated that he had lost none of his self-assurance. "If that plane would have hit the Sears Tower," he told a reporter, "the plane would have fallen, not the tower."
-- Chicago Tribune
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