Crombie Taylor, Aaron Siskind, and the Adler & Sullivan Project collection, 2008

Per publicity information provided by the Mies van der Rohe Society re the exhibit "Crombie Taylor, Aaron Siskind, and the Adler and Sullivan Project," curated by John Vinci and Jeffrey Plank: "This exhibit documents and illustrates the important contributions in the early 1950s of architect Crombie Taylor, photographer Aaron Siskind, and IIT's Institute of Design (ID) to our understanding of Louis Sullivan, an architect of central importance to the history of American architecture and to the history of Chicago. These contributions affirm the power of the ID's innovative curriculum. "As ID's acting director, Taylor encouraged Siskind to undertake the complete photographic documentation of Sullivan's buildings as an advanced photography class project. Photographs by Siskind and his students set a new direction for the visual investigation of Sullivan's architecture and the 1954 exhibit of the class work attracted national attention. "As the Siskind project reached completion Crombie Taylor began his pioneering restorations of the banquet hall and ladies parlor in the Auditorium Building. Taylor went on to document and recreate polychromatic stencils from Auditorium Building spaces and from the Garrick Theater for a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit. "At the same time that Siskind was photographing Sullivan buildings with such sympathy he was refining the abstract technique for photographing piles of rocks, wall surfaces, and other "found" objects for which he won acclaim in the 1950s. At the same time that Taylor rediscovered the play of low-wattage carbon filament light bulbs on the gold leaf that Sullivan used in the banquet hall stencils he was designing spare, even severe, residences in the later modern style. "How is it that two quintessentially modern artists - Siskind and Taylor - come to document Sullivan with such fidelity? How do Taylor and Siskind - who were artists and teachers, not scholars - come to amass an unparalleled body of comprehensive and rigorous evidence for architectural history? "The answer to these questions lies with the Institute of Design and the roles of Taylor and Siskind as teachers. They believed that much of what Sullivan was doing in architecture was consistent with the Institute of Design philosophy and curriculum as set forth in Moholy-Nagy's Vision in Motion (1946): light, space, motion, color, materials, social function for design, commitment to teach art. "The exhibit will include a recreation of the original Siskind/Sullivan project exhibit, vintage photos of the Sullivan stencil recovery process, Taylor's recreation of Sullivan's 12 polychromatic stencils from the Auditorium Building and Garrick Theater at original scale (2 x 4 to 4 x 6 panels), plus examples of Taylor's very modern architecture from the 1950s and Siskind's very abstract photography from the 1950s." The exhibit was sponsored by The Mies Society and mounted in S. R. Crown Hall (Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago), Summer 2008.