CHICAGO – MARCH 27: Richard Driehaus attends the 2010 Richard H. Driehaus Prize and Henry Hope Reed Award Presentation at the John B. Murphy Auditorium on March 27, 2010 in Chicago, Illinois. (Image by Barry Brecheisen/Getty Photographs)
Richard Driehaus, who died March 9, was a uncommon illustration of a superior elite. Our wealthiest socialites and marshals of “high culture” are characterized by ugliness: ethical, aesthetic, and cultural ugliness—an altogether tasteless bunch, normally more than enough. But the outstanding Chicago-indigenous businessman and philanthropist, likely in opposition to the grain, dedicated himself to proclaiming that splendor nonetheless mattered, earning the moniker “modernist Chicago’s voice of dissent” from the New York Periods.
In the town that gave rise to Frank Lloyd Wright and a second life to Bauhaus expat Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Driehaus aimed to recuperate the attractiveness of 19th-century Chicago from the modernists and bring extra conventional designs of architecture to the forefront. Through his philanthropic generosity, he grew to become just one of the nation’s foremost patrons and outspoken supporters of classical architecture, classic urbanism, and historical preservation—leaving an indelible mark not just on Chicago’s crafted setting, but the worldwide architectural group. Even though elites have practically defined on their own by their rote hollowing out of Main Street and veneration of inhumane glass and metal citadels, Driehaus turned a winner for the preservation of a crafted natural environment that edifies.
Driehaus was born and elevated on Chicago’s Southwest Side, the place he grew up in a typical octagon-front bungalow in the Brainerd neighborhood. His loved ones was reduce center-course, rarely with substantially disposable income. All-around age 10, Driehaus recalled, his mechanical engineer father commissioned an architect to structure a Queen Anne-type residence for the household, made of thorough “stone and brick, with a pointed roof.” The household owned a good deal in the Beverly neighborhood they hoped to make their new home on. But quickly afterwards, Driehaus’s moms and dads came to the crushing realization that they couldn’t afford to pay for to construct it as his father’s occupation was certain up in the faltering coal industry. Later on, when his father made Alzheimer’s, Driehaus’s mother had to go back again to function as a secretary.
The Chicago philanthropist would later place to the Queen Anne that hardly ever was as one catalyst for his preoccupation with the developed natural environment. (Driehaus would also cite it as the motive for his order of a Queen Anne rowhouse in the Gold Coast neighborhood, his residence of several yrs.) But that fascination was constantly there, ingrained in him considering that childhood. “He always had a solid aesthetic perception,” Dorothy Driehaus Mellin, the elder of his two sisters, explained to Chicago magazine. “I applied to aid him on his paper route, and he would communicate about the unique houses—what he favored about this window or that fashion of brickwork.”
Immediately after earning his fortune as an terribly thriving investment fund founder and manager, Driehaus turned his eye toward philanthropy. In 1983, he launched the Richard H. Driehaus Basis, and by the finish of the ten years manufactured his first foray into the foundation’s principal aim, the constructed ecosystem, with a donation to a Chicago firm, Pals of the Parks. Other organizations these as Pals of Lincoln Park, Landmarks Illinois (their Illinois Preservation Awards plan was renamed the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Preservation Awards in 1994), and the National Belief Historic Preservation were being beneficiaries of grants from the foundation by the 1990s. As a result of the foundation, he has long gone on to aid numerous other initiatives in historic preservation, architecture and urbanism, culture, and the arts.
An additional regional award, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Group Style and design was proven in 1997, with the intent to “[encourage] developers and architects not to sacrifice considerate style and design in jobs when faced with price range constraints.” Also, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundational Nationwide Preservation Awards honor the finest in historic preservation and re-imagining of historic buildings for reuse. Recent winners of the award selection from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple (also recently additional to the UNESCO Earth Heritage List) to the Richardson Olmsted Campus in Buffalo, NY. Far more not too long ago, he sponsored the Rafael Manzano Prize for New Common Architecture, dedicated to recovering and advertising and marketing Spanish and Portuguese architectural traditions.
During his everyday living in the spotlight, Driehaus often pointed to his Roman Catholic roots as a information to his philanthropic endeavors (and we may perhaps speculate, to some degree, his aesthetic sensibilities). He first attended St. Margaret of Scotland grammar school on the Southwest Side, where by the nuns left a potent perception on him for the relaxation of his everyday living. He credited the sisters with training him that “you have to go on to discover your entire life, you have to be liable for your personal steps, and you have to give a thing back again to culture.” Later on, he went on to St. Ignatius College or university Prep and DePaul College.
Outside of thousands and thousands in main grants to Catholic charities and organizations, his enthusiasm for historic preservation intersected with his religion on more than a person situation. He spearheaded the renovation effort of Previous St. Patrick’s Church, the historic downtown church that survived the 1871 Chicago fire. Right after just one firm devoted to preserving and sustaining residences of worship went beneath, Driehaus carried that mission forward in 2008 by funding a Chicago business office for a nationwide business with a very similar mission, Companions for Sacred Locations.
Having said that, not all historic preservation was worthy of his title. Driehaus refused to back a mid-2000s preservation struggle to restore the Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth Residence, a mid-century white-and-glass International Model house lauded as an legendary modernist exemplar. “The problem is there is no poetry in fashionable architecture,” Driehaus claimed on the topic at the time, in accordance to Chicago magazine. “There’s money—but no sensation or spirit or soul.”
When most financiers and financial commitment moguls gravitated to sterile metal and glass skyscrapers, Driehaus moved considerably of his economic firm’s places of work into the 1886 Ransom Cable mansion, a Richardsonian Romanesque-type household. Diagonally throughout the intersection is the Samuel M. Nickerson Residence, obtained by Driehaus in 2003. The preservationist comprehensively restored the Nickerson House—one of Chicago’s previous Gilded Age mansions and a person of the most important existing examples in the country—to its former glory and opened it to the community in 2008 as the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, which displays the art and decoration of the Gilded Age and Art Nouveau intervals.
Most notable of all his eponymous awards is the $200,000 Driehaus Architecture Prize, established in partnership with the College of Notre Dame University of Architecture in 2003. The Driehaus Prize, an award honoring a living architect “whose work embodies the highest beliefs of standard and classical architecture in modern society,” was a significant move for the philanthropist onto the worldwide stage. It has since developed in track record to obtain standing as a premier award in architectural circles, even as architectural elites continue on to shun, and typically even hold in contempt, the classical tradition. (A single require only to remember most a short while ago the reaction from the architectural establishment and journalist class to Trump’s now-repealed govt get developing classical architecture as the default for federal properties: denunciations, cries of “authoritarianism,” and invocations of “dictator stylish.”)
The Driehaus Prize was set up as a classicist competitor to the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Whilst the Pritzker Prize has experienced a potent tendency around the a long time to reward modernist architects—from Frank Gehry to Gottfried Böhm (among the other operates, architect of the ghastly, brutalist Mary Queen of Peace church in the Diocese of Cologne, Germany) and Tadao Ando (designer of the formless Church of the Mild)—the Driehaus Prize looked to reward far more ordinarily minded architects.
The Driehaus Prize “started out as a minimal journey when an old friend instructed I stop by the College of Notre Dame,” the Chicago philanthropist recalled, “I was astounded to study that yours was the only college instructing classical architecture in the country.” The work of traditional architects and urbanists ought to be rewarded, uplifted, and celebrated, Driehaus believed, as only then could the winds in the architectural occupation start off to change.
The inaugural recipient of the award was Léon Krier, the renowned architect, advocate of regular urbanism, and designer of Charles, Prince of Wales’s model town, Poundbury. Other laureates have involved Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (2008), the spouse-and-spouse workforce powering the new urbanist Seaside, FL, strategy Quinlan Terry (2005), the English architect powering, among several other works, the Maitland Robinson Library at Downing Higher education, Cambridge and Ong-ard Satrabhandhu (2020), a Thai architect recognised for mixing Jap and Western standard architectural types.
Via this award, Driehaus hoped to give momentum to the motion in search of to return magnificence into the constructed natural environment and shifting the career towards his classical vision:
I experienced been seeking with desire at architecture for some a long time and experienced now concluded that, given the do the job carried out in the final 50 many years, we People deserved superior properties. We appeared to be settling for a homogeneous solution. Buildings were searching like bland shoeboxes. I imagine architecture should be of human scale, representational kind, and unique expression that demonstrates a community’s architectural heritage .… There is a delight, proportion, and harmony in classical architecture that I was not locating in the modern buildings coming up close to me in Chicago.
For Driehaus, the coherence and get of classical architecture—in both of those its historic and neoclassical revival forms—combined with regular urbanism, stood from the chilly and uninviting modernist-aesthetic flattening of the built setting that so firmly gripped the 20th-century (lack of) creativity. “We dwell this sort of fragmented life in this present day entire world,” he explained, commenting on his endeavours to maintain the neighborhood peculiarities and 19th-century material of Chicago. “I suppose the period just speaks to me in an structured and natural way.”
“Too several places today are devoid of the uniqueness that lends alone to memory,” he wrote previous year, “because we have unsuccessful as a modern society to thoughtfully preserve the destinations that we have inherited and to generate new types that resonate emotionally.”
Requiescat in rate, Richard Driehaus (1942-2021).
Joseph Paul Barnas is a author from Chicago, Illinois. His composing has also appeared in College Bookman and Athwart. This New Urbanism series is supported by the Richard H. Driehaus Basis. Follow New Urbs on Twitter for a feed devoted to TAC’s protection of cities, urbanism, and area.
