“At his passing in 2019, Stanley Tigerman had been one of the city’s most influential architects for almost 60 years. The Chicago native worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and George Fred Keck during the 1950s before nabbing two architecture degrees in as many years from Yale’s School of Architecture and then putting out his own shingle in 1962.
“A new book recently published by his alma mater, ‘Stanley Tigerman: Drawing on the Ineffable,’presents drawings from every phase of his career chosen from among more than 2,000 items donated by the architect to Yale.
“For those of us who knew Stanley — and he seemed to know everybody — he could be an exasperating force of nature. But three things were never in doubt: his devotion to Chicago, his dedication to architecture and his sense of humor that extended to all things architectural and otherwise. The book captures this sensibility well.
“In the years following Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s death in 1969, large offices like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Perkins & Will dominated the Chicago architectural scene. But Tigerman led a small office revolution during this period, spawning a group of young practitioners including Larry Booth, Jim Nagle, Tom Beeby and Stuart Cohen who transformed architectural culture and practice in the city.
“The Anti-Cruelty Society (1982) at LaSalle and Grand was designed to encourage pet adoption by placing as many animals as possible in wide windows surrounding the domestically scaled front entrance. The now-shuttered Hard Rock Café (1985) at Clark and Ontario demonstrates Tigerman’s contrarian streak by wrapping a rock ‘n’ roll-themed burger joint in a classical French orangery. The Lake Street Self Park (1986) at 60 E. Lake St. renders a midblock parking garage as a memorably oversized car grill. Possibly his most substantially constructed building is the Commonwealth Edison Substation (1989) at Dearborn and Ontario, another classically inspired structure that sits next to the earlier Hard Rock Café. His last years of practice were devoted to two major projects that revolved around Tigerman’s long-standing social concerns: the sturdy and utilitarian Pacific Garden Mission (2007) on Canal and 14th and the iconographically freighted Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (2009) in Skokie
“But Tigerman’s built legacy is in peril. Despite his fame and enduring influence, none of his buildings enjoy landmark protection. The Power House in Zion has already been demolished. The Library for the Blind and the Anti-Cruelty Society have been substantially altered. The Hard Rock Café is vacant. And Archeworks, the custom-built home for the socially conscious design school he founded with Eva Maddox, is up for sale.
“There is a need to save and preserve as many of these structures as possible. Chicago architecture has always had just a few leading lights at any given time. In the last years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th, it was Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Daniel Burnham. Mies van der Rohe arrived in the years before World War II and was widely influential through his distinctive glass and steel buildings and through his role as the director of the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Harry Weese and Bertrand Goldberg provided formal direction after Mies van der Rohe. But for the latter decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st, the city’s most influential architect was Tigerman. (Keegan, Chicago Tribune, 3/15/26)
