Architect of most famous Chicago buildings

Two phrases stood out for me from the Jounral's obit: Born in Colombia of Scottish and Peruvian descent, Mr. Graham grew up in Puerto Rico and served in the Navy during World War II. I was born in Colombia, too, so that resonates.

"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

Michael Foot

Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images - Former Labour Party leader Michael Foot in 1974.

Obituaries of this Englishman appear, of course, not only in the UK press, but also on this side of the Pond. So far, the only media outlet to cover it is the Wall Street Journal, which published the AP story on its website.

The Times of London: Erudite Socialist who sparkled as a journalist and thundered as a political orator but fizzled damply as a leader of the Labour Party. The Independent: Michael Foot: Leftwing fighter who led Labour to poll collapse. The Telegraph: Labour leader of extraordinary energy, ability and vision who none the less struggled to unite his party and overcome his image of frailty. Telegraph also has a video tribute.
Michael Foot: life in video. The New York Times's obit finally appeared today, though it is dated yesterday. It has a wonderful picture of Foot with a quite-young Tony Blair. On Thursday 4 March a video tribute to Foot from current PM Brown appeared. Look at this one for a quick glimpse of Brown with long hair.

Press Association, via Associated Press - Michael Foot in 1982 with Tony Blair, who went on to become prime minister of Britain. Mr. Foot led Labour in the early '80s.

At the very beginning the two obituaries state their cases: the Guardian refers to him as Principled leader who held Labour together in the early 1980s, and a writer devoted to the cause of freedom. The AP starts: Michael Foot, a bookish intellectual and antinuclear campaigner who led Britain's Labour Party to a disastrous defeat in 1983, died Wednesday morning, officials said. He was 96. Mr. Foot personified the socialist tendency in the Labour Party, which Tony Blair successfully erased when he won power at the head of a business-friendly, interventionist "New Labour." Yet Mr. Foot remained a respected, even revered, figure.

That was at noon. Now, at 5.30pm, the headline has changed: Former Labour leader Michael Foot dies. Labour party leader between 1980 and 1983 dies aged 96. Nonetheless ...

Michael Foot, the most improbable literary romantic to lead a major British party since Benjamin Disraeli, has died at the age of 96 after a turbulent political career that left him a much-loved but also deeply controversial figure. A brilliant orator, steeped in Swift, Byron, Shelley and the great political struggles of the 17th century, Foot was first an incorrigible rebel who helped foster the left-right Bevanite split that damaged Labour throughout the 50s. A champion of British unilateral nuclear disarmament, one of the left's great postwar causes, he gradually moved towards office in the economic crisis of 1974. Foot led Labour from 1980 to 1983, presiding over the party during the formation of the breakaway SDP. He resigned after Labour fell to a stunning defeat in the 1983 election, the voters having rejected a manifesto later called the "longest suicide note in history".

In the AP obit: Industrial unrest spread in Britain in the late 1970s, and Mr. Callaghan resigned from the Labour party in 1980 -- one year after Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party came to power. As Labour lurched to the left, Mr. Foot was elected as a compromise candidate. By the 1983 election, Labour's left-wing militants had gained strength and shaped what would become a disastrous manifesto, memorably described by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history."


In a statement, Gordon Brown said: "Michael Foot was a man of deep principle and passionate idealism and one of the most eloquent speakers Britain has ever heard. "He was an indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs and whether people agreed with him or not they admired his character and his steadfastness." Tony Benn, his cabinet colleague and occasional nemesis, added: "He was one of the great figures of the Labour movement."

The AP obit has this, first praise from PM Gordon Brown:  "He was an indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs and whether people agreed with him or not they admired his character and his steadfastness," Mr. Brown said in a statement. U.K. opposition Conservative Party leader Mr. David Cameron also paid tribute, describing Mr. Foot as "the last link to a more heroic age in politics."

A shambling figure, Mr. Foot was an honors graduate in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. He first made his mark as the anonymous co-author of "Guilty Men," published in 1940, which attacked the Conservative Party's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. In 1945, he was elected to parliament, representing the seat of Plymouth Devonport.

Shambling: walking with a slow dragging motion without lifting your feet

Foot's gallant reputation and prestige kept the left and the unions on side during his time as Jim Callaghan's deputy PM in difficult years from 1976 to 1979. He was also accused of irresponsibility and – ironically in view of his past – of appeasement of the unions by resurgent Conservatives and some Labour MPs. For others his idealism, which included a life-long devotion to Plymouth Argyle FC, was highly attractive. Despite the defeat of many of his most cherished causes, he had a rich and deeply fulfilled life, which he shared, until her death in 1999, with his beloved wife, the filmmaker Jill Craigie.


In the crisis that followed the defeat of the Callaghan government and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, Foot led the Labour party from 1980 to 1983, presiding over it during the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP), which used his election over Denis Healey as the excuse for their defection. He stepped down in favour of his protege Neil Kinnock after Labour slumped to a stunning 145-seat defeat in the 1983 election in the wake of a manifesto that a Labour colleague called "the longest suicide note in history". It fell to Kinnock to rebuild his party and put it on the road to three election wins under Tony Blair. Foot, who refused all honours including a peerage, must often have been unhappy with Blair's leadership, but in old age loyalty to his party was a paramount consideration.

AP has this: Lady Thatcher, who defeated Mr. Foot in the 1983 election, said in her memoirs that Mr. Foot's policies offered "an umbrella beneath which sinister revolutionaries, intent on destroying the institutions of the state and the values of society, were able to shelter." Still, she described him as a gentleman, "a highly principled and cultivated man, invariably courteous in our dealings. In debate and on the (campaign) platform he has a kind of genius."

NYT has this paragraph about his victory as Labour leader in 1980: It was a particularly inauspicious moment for the party. James Callaghan, his predecessor, had been soundly defeated in the 1979 general election by Lady Thatcher after the notorious “winter of discontent.” Widespread strikes, interrupted public services and rising inflation and unemployment had inspired the succinct and effective Conservative message, emblazoned on its campaign posters: “Labour Isn’t Working.”

And:  On being elected, Mr. Foot announced his intention to unite Labour “on the matters of supreme importance to us — economic policy, domestic policy — and to attack the outrages and infamies which this government is inflicting on our people.” He then quoted his mentor, the left-wing Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s National Health Service: “Never underestimate the passion for unity in the party, and never forget that it is the decent instinct of people who want to do something.” Unity never arrived. The party’s left wing engineered a change in the governing rules to give the trade unions and local party organizations a determining voice in choosing the party’s leader. In response, moderate Labourites led by Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and William Rodgers — the Gang of Four — split from the party to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Two dozen Labour members of Parliament followed.

I've read two books by Roy Jenkins: biographies of Churchill and Gladstone.

The NYT obituary continues with an example of Foot's oratorical prowress:  In the 1983 general election, he campaigned on a Labour platform that included unilateral disarmament, higher taxes, a more interventionist industrial policy, nationalization of the banks and abolition of the House of Lords. “We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress,” he declared in a campaign speech. “No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.” 

It was not always so. The frail child of a West Country Liberal dynasty, Foot was always a rebel, who hitched his star early to the charismatic Welsh ex-miner, Aneurin Bevan, whose admiring biographer he became. Their radical socialist views did not prevent either of them becoming allies of Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press tycoon, owner of the then-mighty Daily Express, who shared their sense of mischief.

A distinguished writer and journalist with a passion for literature as well as politics, Foot gained his first great claim to fame as the author of Guilty Men, the celebrated polemic against the prewar appeasers in 1940. Beaverbrook entered Churchill's cabinet, Bevan attacked Churchill, and Foot briefly edited Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard – though the leftwing weekly Tribune was his life's love. Tribune helped set the tone for Labour's victory in 1945 when Foot, alone in his Liberal family, unexpectedly won Plymouth Devonport for Labour and became a Westminster gadfly. It was a role he maintained from outside after losing Devonport in 1955 and resumed after succeeding Bevan in Ebbw Vale after his hero's death in 1960.

Foot and Bevan fell out over Bevan's renunciation of unilateralism. But Foot followed his mighty heart for much of his career. His firm support of Indian independence led him to back his friend Indira Gandhi when she declared a state of emergency in the 70s. In the 60s he joined forces with Enoch Powell, with whom he shared the title of best parliamentary orator, to block Labour efforts to reform the Lords – though he wanted it abolished, Powell wanted it left untouched.


Such quixotic behaviour prompted his old Oxford friend Barbara Castle to complain that he had "grown soft on a diet of soft options". But when Labour unexpectedly took power again in the global energy crisis – and domestic crisis between Ted Heath's government and the miners – Foot accepted the tough job of employment secretary under Harold Wilson. Under Jim Callaghan, as Labour lost its majority after 1977, he was leader of the Commons and deputy PM, fighting night after night to keep the government afloat. Among his many gallant defeats of that period was the campaign in which seven cabinet ministers, including Foot, were allowed to fight for a "no" vote when Wilson offered voters a referendum on Britain's still-new EU membership in 1975. The yes camp – which included Margaret Thatcher – won by a ratio of 2:1.


He and Benn were not peas in the same pod and Foot felt personally betrayed when Benn insisted on contesting Healey's role as deputy Labour leader in 1981 – a divisive contest that Healey narrowly won when young leftwingers like Kinnock refused to back Benn.

Peas in the same pod; interesting variation of our two peas in a pod.

After his leadership Foot stayed in the Commons backing Kinnock against Militant entryism for which his earlier tolerance had been criticised, until 1992 when his protege lost the general election to John Major. But his passion for books, as for Plymouth Argyle, never dimmed as the infirmities of old age took their toll. In the bloody 90s when Yugoslavia was torn by civil war Michael and Jill Foot went there and made a film on behalf of their beloved Dubrovnik. No puritan, Foot was fond of drink and laughter as well as ancient historical ports. It was a fitting last hurrah.

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Librarian at the House of Commons

Another interesting obit from London's Daily Telegraph.

Roseanne O'Reilly, who died on February 6 aged 84, was a librarian at the House of Commons for 40 years and the first executive woman servant of the Palace of Westminster.

Newly elected members would be astonished to find her at the centre desk of the Reference Room, with all references to their pre-parliamentary speeches in the press already copied and filed ready for use. Experienced members knew that the most obscure references in Hansard could be identified in seconds, even before the computer era, thanks to her encyclopedic knowledge of the labyrinthine filing systems.

[I've added a hyperlink to Hansard: the traditional name for the printed transcripts of parliamentary debates in the Westminster system of government.]

Ever ready to take up inquiries which went far beyond her official remit, she coped with demands over the years from hundreds of MPs who often were impatient and nearly always in a hurry. On one occasion an irascible Liverpool MP put his head around the door and shouted for the text of The Magnificat. Then a Liberal MP demanded the words of The Raggle Taggle Gypsies before a Scottish socialist interrupted them to demand the ages of Joseph and Mary at the time of the Nativity in order to learn whether the Holy Family would have been entitled to supplementary benefit. All were attended to with unflappable calm.

[Magnificat: — also known as the Song of Mary — is a canticle frequently sung (or spoken) liturgically in Christian church services. Raggle Taggle Gypsies is a Scottish traditional folk ballad.]

Mary Roseanne O'Reilly was born into an old Roman Catholic family in Surrey on New Year's Day 1926. Her father was a colonel in the Indian Army and her uncle flag officer of the battlecruiser Invincible, which sank at the Battle of Jutland; other relations had entered the service of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 18th century and been elevated to the nobility.

After schooling by Sacred Heart nuns at Hove, Roseanne O'Reilly joined the Wrens and was posted to Bletchley Park. But she referred to her job only 50 years later when a book on wartime code breaking was published with a photograph showing her standing, back to the camera, in front of a vast Heath Robinson apparatus described simply as "the computer".

On her demobilisation, her godfather, Hilary St George Saunders, the Commons Librarian, offered her a post in the Library at £2 10s a week. The appointment caused a mild sensation. Roseanne O'Reilly was much amused after a few weeks when a member put his head around the door and then backed out in horror, exclaiming: "Good God, they're not putting a girl in here, are they?"

Gradually her confidence grew – though nobody spoke to her for the first year. She was appointed MBE in 1971, and by the time she retired in 1986, there were no fewer than 87 women working in the Library (as well as 41 men).

There were glowing tributes to her in Hansard from both sides of the House. After devoting some time to family affairs, a chance meeting with Betty Boothroyd led to Roseanne O'Reilly being recalled to assist her in her duties as the first female Speaker.

For eight years Roseanne O'Reilly put at Madam Speaker's disposal all her considerable organisational and diplomatic skills. With the election of a new Speaker, she retired a second time. When her colleagues in the Library gave her a farewell lunch, she noted that she had seen 12 prime ministers and nine Speakers since joining the House in Clement Attlee's time. "Such fun", she said, "Lovely place. I haven't been bored once."