“Learning Modern”

Isaacs, Knowledge Box, 1962.

Photo: James Prinz, Courtesy of Getty Images

When architect Peter Roesch was a grad student at IIT more than 50 years ago, professor Mies van der Rohe once examined his studio project for about 15 minutes without saying a word. The silence drove Roesch to panic and notice every mistake he’d made, precisely according to Mies’s plan.

Roesch recounts this anecdote in Modernity Retired (2008–09), a series of video interviews Swedish artist Staffan Schmidt conducted with five Chicago architects old enough to remember what modernism was like “when it was new.” It’s one of the highlights of “Learning Modern,” a fun, sprawling exhibition that occasionally evokes the same “WTF?” Roesch was thinking.

“Learning Modern” is largely a showcase for the students, faculty and alumni of SAIC (which runs Sullivan Galleries) and IIT. It’s part of the two schools’ Living Modern initiative, which commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus: the German design school where Mies and László Moholy-Nagy taught before bringing its educational theories to Chicago.

As you look out the huge windows of Louis Sullivan’s former Carson Pirie Scott building, and observe the green roofs sprouting around Chicago, it’s hard to imagine a more suitable place to explore modern architecture. Yet the show’s best projects—except for Catherine Yass’s vertiginous film Descent (2000)—tend not to address the built environment. Ken Isaacs’s immersive Knowledge Box (1962, pictured) is really about information; it bombards viewers with projections of 1950s photographs from Life magazine, 24 at a time. And Gillion Carrara and Caroline Bellios’s mini retrospective of practical American fashion designer Claire McCardell proves fashion could also fulfill the modernist dream.

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