Hanging Out in the Graham Foundation Bathroom
Come find me. There is a bathtub here.
By Zach Mortice
Richard Nickel, the canonical Chicago preservationist and photographer, shot the Madlener House, home of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, on at least three occasions. The first was during its earliest incarnation as the imposing Gold Coast manse of a German liquor magnate. When the family cleared out, they tore up floorboards and scuffed the wainscoting, planting a few seeds of Grey Gardens ferality in their wake. The two other occasions were after its conversion to The Graham Foundation as we know it today: a pre-eminent grant-funding organization and center for architecture programming.
At no point did Nickel photograph the bathroom, a fact I learned in mid-April and have been profoundly disappointed by ever since. It’s not that the space was renovated away or otherwise lost. It’s still there. (I’m somewhat of a regular, and see it all the time.) It’s because it is probably my favorite room in Chicago, or maybe anywhere—a small, residential-scaled bathroom with soap caddies and a bathtub that awkwardly mediates the building’s two lives.
It sits smack in the middle of this august cultural institution, with its dark walnut wood paneling, pure white gallery walls, and Indiana limestone detailing—unmistakably, perhaps, an international hub for architectural discourse. But open the door and suddenly you’re in Some Dude’s Bathroom. The room is a weird little ghost, dressed for the wrong occasion, but still there to help.
Here is an inventory of the items and experiences you can expect to find in the Graham Foundation bathroom:
Seafoam green tile on walls, with black trim, and beige hexagonal tile on the floor. It all seems vaguely Art Deco—it’s giving “misanthropic aunt.”
A bathtub with a shower head (the water is turned off). Typically, I am overwhelmed by a desire to lie down in this bathtub, but I never do. I saw another design writer do this and it has become an intrusive thought.
Two acrylic towel racks.
A window overlooking the courtyard.
Two recessed soap caddies over the sink, and one by the bathtub, which I am not allowed to lie down in.
A full-length mirror. If you take a photo of the front half of the room nearest the door, your reflection is caught in the mirror, and you’re forced to observe yourself at full height photographing a toilet—a cursed image that reminds me that people truly do all sorts of things. You can’t see the bathtub from there.
A toilet plunger that looks dusty enough to have never been used, a comforting thought.
A black lacquered bench by the mirror. It makes the bathroom a good place to hang out. It also offers a great view of the bathtub. When I sit there, I again struggle with the desire to do things I shouldn’t.
A wicker basket with toilet paper.
A half-length mirror that swings open to reveal a cache of cleaning supplies. If I were cleaning the bathtub and doing a really thorough job, really scrubbing it, that would sort of be like lying in the bathtub. I’m not allowed to lie down in the bathtub.
Also, the bathtub is white.
Anyway, there’s an aura of old-world opulence and drama conjured from the idiosyncratic material finishes, and that juxtaposition makes this place seem a world apart; upstairs-downstairs rumor and scandal, stern fathers and brittle mothers, the thousand petty dramas and triumphs that define family life in any era. I don’t think any of these emanations could survive the installation of a single Dyson hand dryer. This sense of dislocation entices me to become a really weird one-note side character in a F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, caught in the building’s own historical narrative. It’s the only place in the world where I bounce from the writerly egoist paranoia of “I need to think of something witty to say to Madelon Vriesendorp RIGHT NOW” to pretending the biggest problem to face this week is replacing my damnably unreliable milliner before the cold weather sets in.
Built for Albert Madlener and his wife Elsa, a German family with roots in the city going back to the 1850s, the Madlener House is a transitional piece of architecture. Its stolid, prize-fighter massing has elements of Neoclassicism and Renaissance Revival, but was clearly influenced by the native Prairie Style. It was designed by Richard E. Schmidt, the brother of Elsa’s brother-in-law, and Hugh M. G. Garden. In its days as an actual house, it was busy and overstuffed with floral wallpaper, crystal bowls, a bear skin rug—garden-variety, swooning-couch Victorian.
Albert died in 1941, Elsa in 1962. The Graham Foundation acquired the residence soon after, and hired Daniel Brenner to convert it into offices and event space. Brenner was very much a Mies Guy, teaching at The Orthogonist School for Cultic Rectangle Worship (Mies’s Illinois Institute of Technology) for 30 years. But he approached this conversion with the sensitivity of a designer that was not nearly so close to the house style of clear-cut urban renewal.
He didn’t have to change much. The kitchen became a library; walls were removed to expand gallery floors. In Nickel’s photos, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, Victorian frippery was stripped back and the Circassian walnut wood paneling from Russia on walls was refinished.
“We wanted no trickery,” John Entenza, the Graham’s director, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1964, with his nose firmly pointed skyward, probably. “The problem was to let alone the things of beauty and to enhance the strength of the house. This meant elimination of the nonessentials and the vulgarities with which Victorian life loaded the best of houses.” He felt it was a better piece of architecture after clearing away all the crap.
When it was done, Brenner was a bit baffled himself: “I don’t quite know what to call the job we did here,” he told Architectural Forum in its April 1965 issue. It wasn’t a direct restoration, nor quite so far afield to be pure adaptive reuse. The fireplaces were still there and even the galleries had vaguely residential proportions. But the Sullivan-style grates on the tomb-heavy front door make it pretty clear that no one has ever watched TV there while distractedly thumbing their phone for three hours.
I think what fascinates me about this bathroom is the sense of remove it offers. I love the Graham Foundation as a design object and institution, but as a place where I’m almost always at work as a critic in some capacity—attending a lecture or reception, covering a show—it’s not a place I’m typically comfortable, per se. I love to be on stage, or anywhere near a stage, but it’s a lot of work. I’m cramming my head and notebook with stuff, trying to synthesize what it’s all supposed to be about, and worrying about how much I don’t yet know. That’s a great time to slip away.
It’s a move I’ve practiced. It doesn’t happen as much now, but when my daughter was younger—when parenting felt more like shoveling coal into a steam engine rather than trying to manage a favorite terrible employee—slipping away into the bathroom of my family home was a signature move of mine, with no motivation beyond the desire to be alone. Often, it would happen after I’d publicly displayed my medium-talent creative and compositional abilities in the heroic service of something greater: meal prep.
In my family, I’m responsible for all food acquisition and preparation, and the period after work ends is the most logistically and cognitively demanding part of my day. One moment, I’m closing my eyes to think, paging through books, alone and listening to my own thoughts—something I crave more than I often care to admit. The next, I am tweaking burners, scalding my wrist, sprinting to disarm fire alarms in our unvented kitchen, directing homework, responsibly metering screen time, and trying to get everything squared away so that some portion of the evening can be left for me.
But back then, often, I didn’t make it. Midway through my bi-weekly presentation of Tacos in the American Style—after workshopping with my partner new systems of parenting that would surely fail; after troubleshooting a string of minor annoyances that could ruin everything if you looked close enough; after decrying the crush of deadlines or fretting the lack of them—I would retreat to the guest bathroom four feet from our kitchen table seeking reprieve. Sometimes I would smear my hands down my face. Often I would stare at the ceiling. Always I would lie on the floor.
This sort of scene, shot in too-close Dutch angles on a handheld camera soundtracked by screeching violins and howling woodwinds, is often presented as a shorthand for “the precarious state of the American middle class/jump-scare aftermath.” But at the Graham Foundation, the elevated design environs make this escapist interlude decidedly less dire. How bad could it be? Madelon Vriesendorp feigned interest in my signature character, the friendly Chicago architecture pedant.
As a professional building-tour-taker, there is something liberating about retreating to the bathroom. It’s where the docents leave you alone, and you can experience a space as if it were yours. It’s the only place you can credibly imagine, by dint of solitude and delusion: this is my house. The boundary between work and domestic life can be a disjunctive place, to be placated by compression in a small room filled with intimate details; trapped between two worlds where no one can find you, but maybe you can find yourself. ⌂